James Prescott Sutherland of Santa Barbara died of heart failure in the presence of his four sons on December 14, 2019. Jim, as he liked to be called, was 84. A patriot, he often said that being born in the United States was akin to winning the lottery. It was perhaps fitting, then, that Jim, accompanied by a friend, was “road tripping” across the country he loved when he checked himself into an Indianapolis hospital where, after a brief illness, he passed away.
A former mayor of Appleton, Wisconsin, his childhood home, Jim moved with his family to the Santa Barbara area in 1983 to work in Westmont College’s admissions department. Jim, a professing Christian, was drawn to the “eternal dimension” of Westmont’s spiritual mission — bodily life on Earth, he liked to say, would last “but the blink of an eye.” Another pull was Santa Barbara itself. Jim had “fought like a tiger,” as he put it, to save Appleton’s historic and walkable downtown, and Santa Barbara had pulled off the same feat.
Jim’s downtown favorites included events at the Arlington and Granada theaters, seafood on Stearns Wharf, and outdoor concerts and films in the courthouse’s Sunken Gardens. But he also made good use of surrounding areas, be it by showing up to his sons’ beach parties or biking with friends and family to Goleta Pier. On such rides, the most distinctive bike was Jim’s — a 1952 Schwinn Excelsior cruiser, its original blue paint a faded gray. Jim rode it from boyhood into old age.
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