Walter Einenkel
Marty Burbank is a lawyer. He’s a Navy veteran who works a lot with veterans. He’s done pretty well for himself. He enjoys sailing. A lot. He and his wife were getting ready to buy a boat. They met, got engaged and were married on a boat, and clearly nothing was more important to them than honoring that mutual love.
Soon after, he and his wife Seon Chun-Burbank drove to the Rio Vista Elementary School, in Anaheim, and announced their plans to kindergarten teacher Tessa Ashton.“He cried and I cried,” Ashton said this week. “And the kids got really concerned because they’ve never seen me cry!”Burbank had offered to pay the college tuition of all 26 children – the Class of 2032 – at a cost of about $1 million.
A couple of months ago, Marty and his wife attended their Eastside Christian Church in Anaheim and this idea began to formulate. Burbank was already donating notebooks and foodstuffs to the Rio Vista Elementary school. On his many visits to the school one thing always stayed with him—the images of collegiate flags posted up in the multipurpose room.
“They don’t come from families where anybody has had an opportunity to go to college,” he said. “And college is not something that the parents talk to the kids about.”
Burbank’s wife Seon Chun-Burbank knows full well how important the support of others can be:
Chun-Burbank, an early-childhood education chair at Vanguard University, grew up in South Korea. She said her parents couldn’t afford to pay her college tuition, but with her aunt’s financial support she became a first-generation college graduate.“I like the movie ‘Pay It Forward,’” Chun-Burbank said. “I got a lot of help and now I’m helping others. And I hope they can do that too.”
Marty Burbank has been sailing since he was three and his father took him on a boat. That is an important thing to Mr. Burbank and, well-off or not, it is a meaningful thing to sacrifice something one loves so much in order to help others.
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