When Rebele and his college sweetheart Patricia, whom he first met as a youngster in middle school, moved to Aptos in 1979 after a career in the news business, they immediately became active volunteers and financial contributors to numerous local causes. They were instrumental in creating the Rebele Family Shelter, now run by local nonprofit Housing Matters, established the Rebele Chair in Art History at UC Santa Cruz in 1996 and supported Santa Cruz Shakespeare, the Santa Cruz Symphony and Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

As “Reb” told a UC Santa Cruz interviewer after he and Patricia were honored for the school’s Founders Day in 2009, “To whom much has been given, much shall be required.”

That personal motto led to, among other things, the Rebele Family Shelter. The facility in Santa Cruz, built in large part due to the fundraising and political persistence of the Rebeles and their cohorts, has served thousands of families since it opened in 2005. The shelter can house as many as 28 separate households, averaging about 90 people at a time, according to Housing Matters Executive Director Phil Kramer. Rebele also served on the Housing Matters board of directors until his retirement from the position in either 2015 or 2016, said Kramer.

Kramer said Rebele was among the first people he got to know locally while beginning his work in the homeless services field more than a decade ago. They bonded due to shared interests in both service to the unhoused and the need for a free press. Rebele, said Kramer, was a humble man who took to heart the idea of being “your brother’s keeper” and had a “really big heart.”

“He was really smart and he was detail-oriented and had a desire to really learn as much as he could about the subject of homelessness and how to solve it and he was very attentive to many aspects of Housing Matters,” Kramer said. “I remember one of my first board meetings with him and Reb pulling out his pencil and going through the financial statement. He cared deeply and it showed in maybe his focus and attentiveness to the reality of running a really struggling nonprofit at the time.”

Former Santa Cruz Mayor and Housing Matters board member Katherine Beiers said she had especially gotten to known Rebele through his involvement in getting the Rebele Family Shelter built in 2005.

“He was a man of all talents and culture and compassion,” Beiers said. “He was a great man.”

But the written word was Rebele’s first professional passion. A San Francisco native, Rebele graduated from Stanford University in 1951 with a journalism degree and eventually earned an MBA at Harvard after a four-year stint in the U.S. Navy. He went on to cut his teeth as a reporter for some time, but ended up running several newspapers in Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Wisconsin and California including the Paradise Post, which he co-owned for 25 years.

In the late 1980s, he was named president of the California Newspaper Publishers Association and, after moving to Santa Cruz, served as member of the Sentinel Editorial Board in 2009.

Supervisor Bruce McPherson, a former editor at the Sentinel, never worked directly with Rebele, but said the two would often connect to talk shop about the business generally. He called Rebele “the definition of a class act” and someone that was “not afraid to take a chance.”

Rebele’s history as a newsman also helped fuel his unrelenting, lifelong advocacy for press freedom and first amendment rights. For more than 30 years, he served as a board member at the First Amendment Coalition — a freedom of speech watchdog group — including a term as its president.

The coalition’s Executive Director David Snyder called Rebele “a personal hero” who had an “overwhelmingly positive influence on everything he touched.”

“He believed fervently that the public has a right to understand what it’s government is doing in their name,” said Snyder. “I can’t think of an interaction with Reb where I didn’t come away feeling passionate and confident and fully supported in the work that we do.”

In addition to major donations for the coalition, the Rebele's created the Rebele Digital and Print Journalism Internship Program at Stanford University in 1986 and gave $1 million to establish UCSC’s Institute of the Arts and Sciences.

But Rebele’s son, Chris, a real estate broker in the Santa Cruz area, told the Sentinel that his dad always felt that while personal donations were good, building a culture of giving was far more important.

“That was a very strong feeling he had: the community members who can afford to give back really must give back to the community because there are so many people born without opportunity,” he said. “It’s not just a local or state thing; it’s really the world.”

And in that mission, even as he aged, Chris said his father never slowed down.

“I joked with my friends once in a while that ‘yeah, my dad is retired, but what he does in a week takes me a month to get done,’” he said, “‘and his new job is giving, that’s what he does.’”

That giving spirit led the Rebele's to contribute to a myriad of causes in Santa Cruz County, including a $500,000 endowment for the UCSC Cowell Press, $50,000 for the effort to save Watsonville Community Hospital from bankruptcy, $2.4 million to establish the Aptos C ommunity Youth Program at St. John’s Church in Aptos, expansion efforts for KSQD FM radio and establishment of the Seacliff Village skate park.

In 2005, Rebele was named “Man of the Year” by the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce and four years later, he and Patricia received the Gail Rich Award for their contributions and support of the local art scene. In 2015, the couple received the Lifetime Achievement Hero award from the American Red Cross of the Central Coast.

Susan True, CEO of Community Foundation Santa Cruz County, described Rebele in an email to the Sentinel as someone “nourished by his faith” who was “intolerant of turning away from problems.”

“He was a fierce advocate, loyal friend, formidable debater, and his laughter, applause, and opinions filled every room he entered,” wrote True. “He used his power of persuasion as a powerful force for good and accompanied his power with incredible kindness. Reb was a founding member of the Community Foundation, an honorary trustee, and a generous and forward thinking donor and volunteer.”