(Tribune News Service) — When San Diego Superior Court Judge David Gill was first sworn in, Richard Nixon was the president and America was still in Vietnam. Elvis was still touring, and Ronald Reagan was California’s governor.

Reagan was the one who appointed Gill to the bench. That was March 1974.

Over the next 50 years, Gill would oversee hundreds of criminal trials — including San Diego County’s longest, at 217 days — and make thousands of legal rulings. And he would gain a reputation as a thoughtful judge, one who listened and carefully considered.

Among judges currently on the bench, Gill is the longest-serving in the state of California. He’s also San Diego’s longest-serving judge ever.

This year, Gill is hanging up his robe for good. His last day at work was earlier this month, but his official retirement is Dec. 13, on his 90th birthday. He leaves behind a long legal legacy.

He could have retired decades ago. Why stay? “I was having too much fun,” Gill said last week in the San Diego condo he shares with wife, Marcia.

“Working is not keeping me from doing anything else I want to do,” said Gill. “I don’t have any all-consuming hobbies. I’m not going to sail my sailboat from here to Acapulco. I’m not going to go climb Mount Kilimanjaro.”

‘He’s one of my heroes’

When Gill commits, he commits. Fifty years on the bench, 50 years volunteering with the Boy Scouts, 35 years in the Army Reserves. Gill doesn’t just join, he goes all in. Take his undergrad degree from Stanford. Three majors — history, political science and economics. And as a musician, he didn’t just play one type of saxophone. He played three (although he prefers the tenor sax).

Part of what drew him to the legal profession was his love for discussing issues — not debating much as just offering up contrarian positions. “I enjoyed sort of confronting people who make a real, bold statement,” he said. “I tended to be the one to say, ‘Well, wait a minute. Have you considered this? Isn’t there another side to that coin?’”

Gill has sent several defendants to death row, including Billy Ray Waldron, convicted of three 1979 murders and a separate rape. He was stuck with another judge’s decision allowing Waldon to represent himself. “That was probably my most challenging and interesting case.”

He was also the judge in the criminal trial of Dale Akiki, a former Spring Valley church day care volunteer who was wrongly accused in a bizarre case involving allegations of ritual child abuse. The 1993 trial lasted 217 days, the longest criminal trial in San Diego history. It took the jury just seven hours to deliberate. Akiki was acquitted.

His recent work included presiding over hearings to determine where sexually violent predators will be allowed to live in the community.

Superior Court Judge Michael Smyth, who was the presiding judge in San Diego last year, praised Gill’s analytical skills and said he would sometimes turn to Gill for insight. “He’s seen it all, and he has a very quick mind.”

“We’re all sort of in awe of him,” Smyth said. “I’m really happy for him deciding to retire, but also melancholy about it, because he has been such a reliable presence and force on the court for so long.”

Former San Diego U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer has been friends with Gill for about 40 years, and he describes the judge as a soft-spoken man, a serious thinker with a dry wit and quick smile.

“He’s one of my heroes,” Brewer said, “and he has been for years.”

Those who have had jury duty at the downtown San Diego courthouse may remember Gill. For a couple of decades, he was the primary judge to address the pool of potential jurors during orientation. The way Brewer remembers it — he sat through Gill’s presentation six times as a potential juror — people started off bored, maybe reading a newspaper or staring off. Then Gill spoke, explaining the importance of the jury’s role and rallying their patriotism. Suddenly even those who had initially hoped to slink off and shirk their civic duty were eager to serve.

The San Diego County Bar Association tapped Gill as Jurist of the Year in 2012. The California Council of the American Inns of Court honored him with an award for civility and ethics. And last fall, he was honored with a Pillar of the Legal Community award during the Red Boudreau Dinner, an annual event in the local litigation community. The pillar award, designed to recognize local judges, is new.

“It was very easy to decide who should be the first honoree,” said Brian Rawers, chair of the Red Boudreau Dinner committee. He pointed to Gill’s long legal career and his just-as-long history of community work.

Deep San Diego roots

Gill was born in Indiana but grew up in San Diego. He went to local elementary and middle schools, then graduated from San Diego High School in 1952, the same school his mother had graduated from years earlier. He was an only child, and his father died when Gill was about 3 years old. Gill does not have any children.

He earned his law degree at Stanford University and joined the Army Reserves in 1955. He was on active duty in the Army Judge Advocate General’s office in the Pentagon from 1960 to 1963, the same year he was admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court. He stayed in the reserves until 1990, retiring as a colonel.

“I wouldn’t trade my military service for anything,” Gill said. He laughed and slipped in, “I can still fit into my uniform.”

After his Pentagon work, Gill returned to San Diego in 1963, where he served as a deputy city attorney, then deputy district attorney for a few years before jumping into private practice as a criminal defense attorney. When the state bar looked to establish specializations in legal work, he jumped to join a committee that would set requirements. He landed one of the very first numbers as a specialist in criminal defense, too. His legal specialization number was — and he gets a kick out of this — 007. “I was a great James Bond.”

The judge has long been a big enough deal in San Diego to garner mentions in local newspaper columns for decades. One 1979 piece noted his promotion from the municipal bench to superior court — and teased that he might need to change his personalized license plate. At that time, his plate read “90 Days” — a nod to the maximum sentences the lower court judges could give back then.

Another column that same year snuck in a mention of his engagement to Joann Bloomquist, who was Gill’s first wife. She died in 1987. He would later meet and marry Marcia. They’ve been married for 30 years.

‘Running out of ways’ to honor him

Gill’s exhaustive list of memberships, awards and honorifics covers much of a full page, typed and single-spaced.

He’s been a part-time law school professor, joined several legal organizations and sat on several boards of directors — among them Goodwill Industries, Salvation Army, and a lifetime spot with Army Services YMCA.

His eyes twinkle most when he talks about his work with the Boy Scouts, now known as Scouting America. For five decades, Gill has pulled together panels of bigwigs — surgeons, attorneys, engineers and the like — to decide whether to grant Eagle Scout status to hopeful young candidates. He’s handled thousands of such hearings, and has done it for so long he’s now reviewing Eagle Scout applications from the children of Eagle Scout candidates he had promoted years ago.

Sean Roy is the Scout Executive and CEO of the San Diego-Imperial Council for Scouting America, and he said his group is simply “running out of ways” to honor Gill, who Roy said gives “his time, talent and treasure” to scouting.

“And he did it all behind the scenes,” Roy said. “He is just a gem.”

Gill’s wife said her husband was a Cub Scout as a little boy, but that focus ended when his mother brought home a clarinet. It started a lifelong love of music, and he’s played in several local bands, including a big band made up entirely of lawyers.

Gill may be hanging up his robe but he’s still planning to continue his volunteer work.

Smyth summed up Gill like this: “He’s just a friendly gentleman who is a great judge. And there’s just literally nothing not to like about him.”

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