Heavenly Chorus

MASKER-AID 16 - 23 July 2020 Vol 26 Issue 29

SERVING MONTECITO AND SUMMERLAND

If you really want to be free, put on the mask, p. 5

A HEAVENLY CHORUS

IN THESE TRYING TIMES, THE MUSIC ACADEMY OF THE WEST LIFTS SPIRITS WITH SING! (STORY BEGINS ON P. 14)

Guilty Golden State Killer

How SBC DA Joyce Dudley and others helped bring closure to generations of victims, p. 20

Mastering Melanoma

Two Santa Barbara doctors are leading the way in advanced skin-cancer treatments, p. 34

Deep in the Weed

Supervisor Das Williams comes under increasing fire for his marijuana mess, p. 8

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

3

Inside This Issue

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MONTECITO JOURNAL

5 Editor’s Letter

Mask it or casket 6 Dear Montecito Jakob Hammer concocts delicious recipes in the kitchen as a student in the SBCC Culinary Arts program 8 On the Record Nick Schou continues his coverage of the SB Grand Jury cannabis report 10 Community Voices

Monument takedowns are complicated 11 Letters to the Editor A collection of communications from readers on topics ranging from politics to water security 12 Village Beat Montecito Association Board of Directors meeting updates; Seda Custom Skincare and Harbor Hills open 14 On Entertainment MAW’s Sing! Program continues virtually; local film series adapt to social distancing; UCSB’s 2020 Summer Reading Series: New Plays in Process; and more 18 Aging in High Heels An international love story in the time of corona 20 Golden State Killer Infamous serial killer Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. committed crimes a little too close to home 22 Perspectives

A look at the role taxes play in advanced societies

The Optimist Daily Paris debuts cinema on the water; Sydney now powered by renewable electricity 23 Body Wise

We could all use some emotional healing during these troubling times 24 Library Mojo Drive By Books! The library is open for sidewalk service making it easy for you to step away from the screen and hunker down with a real book 26 What Would Bud Do?

Steve Uhler sits down with Father Knows Best’s Billy Gray 27 Brilliant Thoughts

Ashleigh Brilliant ponders his classification as a hero to some 34 Calla’s Corner Two Santa Barbara doctors are at the forefront of detecting and treating skin cancer, including potentially life-threatening melanoma 37 Ernie’s World

Ernie adapts to the current world of telehealth appointments

Laughing Matters 40 MMMM Crossword Puzzle Solution 41 Our Town Artist Toni Scott draws on her multicultural heritage to examine our difficult history and point to a way forward 43 Nosh Town Coast Village Road now includes parklets so diners can frequent their favorite restaurants 44 Robert’s Big Questions This month marks the 30th anniversary of the destructive Painted Cave Fire 46 Classified Advertising Our own “Craigslist” of classified ads, in which sellers offer everything from summer rentals to estate sales 47 Local Business Directory Smart business owners place business cards here so readers know where to look when they need what those businesses offer

16 – 23 July 2020

Editor’s Letter

by Gwyn Lurie CEO and Executive Editor of the Montecito Journal Media Group

Masker-Aid

T

here’s an old saying, “If you don’t plan on doing it right, you’d better plan on doing it again.” As I write, Governor Newsom has just stepped way out ahead of the federal government and ordered sweeping re-closures or semi-closures of businesses in 30 counties across California, including our own.

In Santa Barbara, until now relatively unscathed by the ravages of COVID, hospitals are now at 50 percent capacity; ICU beds are 56% full; overall confirmed COVID cases have increased by 42 percent over the past two weeks and the 31st COVID death in our county was just reported. Which means Santa Barbara has now experienced 31 more COVID deaths than the entire nation of Vietnam, a third-world country of 100 million people which shares a thousand-mile border with China, the original Coronavirus epicenter. Santa Barbara, by comparison, is 7,000 miles and an ocean away from China but light years behind third-world Vietnam and other countries that mobilized an effective and successful, focussed and sincere, Coronavirus response.

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In Santa Barbara, according to recent reports, epidemiologists determined that 57% of recent cases came from person-to-person contact, while 42% were traced to community spread. Community spread is a nice way of saying someone got too close to someone they didn’t know was infected. When the White House said we’d be back in our churches by Easter, maybe that meant Easter of ‘21.

In any case, this is certainly not where we hoped to be by mid-July of this year.

Hope is not a plan.

Because the U.S. federal response has long since missed its opportunity to nip COVID in the bud – as China did, as New Zealand did, as Taiwan did, etc.

– our local response, meaning our state and county response, is critical going forward. This means our “down ticket” politicians, for example the people we elect like County Supervisors, suddenly have life or death importance.

At a recent press conference when reporters asked County Board of Supervisors President Gregg Hart if the County had considered enforcing the statewide mask order, Hart demurred, saying, “We will continue to message, explain, urge, and plead with residents and visitors alike to wear masks. But we’re not ultimately going to enforce our way out of this problem,” he said.

What?!? I actually had to re-read Hart’s statement twice. We have a statewide, mandatory mask requirement that we know would slow the spread of Covid and save lives and we are not prepared to enforce it? When just yesterday CDC director Robert Redfield told the Journal of The American Medical Association that “if all Americans wore a mask, rising cases of COVID-19 could be under control within four to eight weeks.”

It has become scientifically evident that infected people can and do spread

16 – 23 July 2020

EDITOR’S LETTER Page 364 • The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

5

Dear Montecito

by Stella Pierce

Montecito Alumni Write Letters from Life’s Front

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met Jakob Hammer, son of two of my favorite MUS teachers (Jackie and Kurt Hammer), in second grade. With our diametrically opposed love of Star Wars and Star Trek, Webkinz and Club Penguin, and contradictory opinions about Crocs as footwear, Jakob and I may not have seemed like a natural pairing, but we’ve now been close friends for over half my life.

As far back as I remember, Jakob has been a dedicated visual artist.

This took form in doodles, mostly, back during our elementary school days and branched out into game design and acrylic paint as we aged.

Given what I knew of this passion, I was surprised when he announced that he planned to pursue the culinary arts. Well, I say surprised, but perhaps skeptical more aptly fits the bill here. In my mind, my friend and I still had the culinary sophistication of our eight-year-old selves, sucking on popsicles after the jog-a-thon.

However, my skepticism was quickly

put into check after seeing Jakob’s essential reading for his major: textbooks ranging from a digestible pamphlet on “sanitary kitchen practices” all the way to a 750-page monster about meat chemistry; this kid wasn’t messing around. Additionally, since Jakob’s entry into culinary school, I’ve been treated to a few dinners at the Hammer household, and let me tell you, whatever they’re teaching the students at the SBCC Culinary Course, it’s working!

Dear Montecito,

I grew up on Hosmer Lane, going to school at the YMCA and then MUS. Even though my family and I moved to Carpinteria and then Goleta, I’ve always felt connected to Montecito – not only because my mom is a teacher at MUS – but because of how many best friends I met there.

Starting at MUS, I gravitated

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The 73rd annual Summer School and Festival has transitioned to the Music Academy Remote Learning Institute (MARLI).

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16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

THANK YOU TO OUR FAMILY

The Music Academy wishes to collectively thank and acknowledge all the members of the Music Academy Family for your thoughtful commitments to support our mission.

COMPEERS • COUNCIL OF CONTRIBUTORS • CORPORATIONS • ENCORE SOCIETY • FESTIVAL OF FRIENDS • FOUNDATIONS • MUSIC TEACHER STUDIO RENTERS • PRESIDENT’S CIRCLE • THE SHOPS CUSTOMERS • TICKETED GUESTS • VOLUNTEERS • WOMEN’S AUXILIARY This summer, videos with informative, educational programming and performances by fellows, faculty, and alumni are presented via the Concert Hall Online.

MONTECITO JOURNAL

7

ON THE RECORD

Nicholas Schou

Nicholas Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of several books, including Orange Sunshine and Kill the Messenger. If you have tips or stories about Montecito, please email him at newseditor@montecitojournal.net

Cannabis Under Fire: Part 2

D

as Williams, Santa Barbara’s First District Supervisor, suddenly found himself under a harsh, almost Perry Mason-style cross examination during a July 13 interview with Steve Chiotakis, host of KCRW’S Greater L.A. radio talk show. “Your campaign contributions come from pot lobbyists trying to grow weed,” Chiotakis scoffed at one point. “And look, it’s legal, yeah, but it kind of smells bad.”

As the Montecito Journal reported last week, that’s more or less the same conclusion reached two weeks ago by Santa Barbara’s Grand Jury in its scathing report targeting the cannabis policy pursued by Williams and fellow supervisor Steve Lavagnino. The duo, jurors wrote, offered “unfettered access” to the marijuana lobby via an ad hoc committee consisting of themselves, thus, effectively writing the county’s marijuana policy without any additional input or adherence to Brown Act public disclosure laws. The jury’s 26-page report chronicled a series of what could be charitably called poor policy decisions, while highlighting the close relationship between the two councilmen and the cannabis lobby.

Jurors took special exception to the fact that the ad hoc committee allowed cannabis farmers to simply sign voluntary affidavits claiming they were obeying the law while being taxed only on the “gross receipts” they claimed, rather than the actual square footage of the farms. The system is intended to be monitored by county officials who track cannabis from seed to sale via brandnew, bar code software established by state regulators and enforced via spot visits. Although there have been few enforcement raids to speak of, they have happened, including one on January 22 carried out by Santa Barbara County’s cannabis enforcement team, assisted by state food and game and agricultural officials.

Arrested that day was Barry Brand, then the head of CARP Growers, an industry group that represents a dozen legal cannabis farmers in Carpinteria.

The group churns out a steady supply of press releases about the industry’s charitable donations in town. As first reported in the Los Angeles Times, Brand provided campaign donations of $8,000 to Williams and $2,000 to Lavagnino.

It turns out that Brand, who voluntarily resigned from CARP Growers after his arrest, had been illegally processing cannabis into oil worth more than $1 million. (Among residents, cannabis oil processing is viewed as one of the chief culprits in the odor complaints that have plagued Carpinteria.)

With such seemingly scarce enforcement, the Grand Jury report has raised hopes among many Carpinteria residents that their concerns might finally be addressed rather than brushed aside. “I’ve never had faith that the Sheriff’s Department would really do anything,” said one former county official. “You have Das talking about getting rid of the bad guys, but one day they are a bad guy and then the next day they are giving you money.”

Making a Federal Case

Among Carpinteria homeowners, the war over cannabis legalization in Santa Barbara is personal. Tales abound of houses that have been on the real estate market for years without bids because they’re located across the street from a greenhouse that used to grow tulips but now cultivates marijuana.

In March, Williams survived a strong challenge by first-time supervisorial candidate Laura Capps, who made cannabis reform a central issue of her platform and won many votes in Montecito and Carpinteria. Many who supported Capps on this issue had already signed a January 20 letter on behalf of the Santa Barbara Coalition for Responsible Cannabis asking federal prosecutor Nicola Hanna (who is currently prosecuting Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar for corruption involving real estate developers in that city), to investigate the explosion of marijuana farms in Carpinteria.

“We are writing you to seek protection for the residents, businesses, schools, and children who are suffering from the unprecedented level of marijuana cultivation in Santa Barbara County,” the letter begins. “Most grievously impacted are the school children of Carpinteria Valley, as well as Buellton, and commercial grows near schools in other areas of the County.”

Among other demands, the letter requested an investigation of commercial cannabis cultivators that are operating within 1,000 feet of schools and other protected facilities in Carpinteria, especially given the concentration of commercial cannabis cultivation. The letter promised that a federal “investigation

8

MONTECITO JOURNAL

into these matters could uncover additional federal violations potentially involving corruption and other financial crimes.”

Attached to the group’s seven-page complaint were “Letters of Resolution” by the cities of Carpinteria, Solvang, Goleta, and Buellton, all of them condemning the county’s cannabis policy. In addition to Concerned Carpinterians, Padaro Lane Association, Friends of Shephards Mesa, and other groups, as well as three physicians from Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital’s Department of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, 105 residents signed the letter.

Although the agency received the letter six months ago, it remains unclear if the U.S. Attorney’s office in L.A., which is responsible for federal drug prosecutions throughout Southern California, many of them involving global cartels, is actively investigating the complaint. Sources in Carpinteria told the Journal the agency has since followed up with them about the complaint. The agency, though, doesn’t officially comment on ongoing investigations, except to say, “No comment,” which is exactly what Thom Mrozek, an agency spokesman, said in response to our interview request.

A Different World, Before Legal Pot

If federal prosecutors in Los Angeles were indeed investigating cannabis in Santa Barbara, it wouldn’t be the first time this has happened in recent years.

In 2012, the U.S. Attorney’s office sent dozens of letters to the city’s illegal dispensaries, putting them on notice for potential raids while simultaneously warning landlords that their buildings could be seized via federal asset forfeiture laws. Those who failed to heed the warning faced imminent prosecution.

On May 2 of that year, federal agents raided the Pacific Coast Collective on North Milpas Street, as well as a grow house located on Haley Street. That same week, the feds filed asset forfeiture lawsuits against three landlords charged with “knowingly” allowing illegal indoor marijuana businesses to operate in the city.

At the time, Williams, who had yet to arrive in Sacramento for his stint in the California State Assembly, served on Santa Barbara’s city council. An outspoken advocate of legalizing marijuana, he had done little in the months leading up to the raids to address concerns about the proliferation of unlicensed dispensaries, particularly on Milpas.

“The city wouldn’t do the right thing,” recalled Sharon Byrne, now the executive director of the Montecito Association but then the similarly titled head of the Milpas Community Association. “Das was on the council then and he was a real thorn,” she said. “It was very clear to us the city was never going to enforce the law and was just going to carry the water for the dispensaries. They were just shady operators from L.A. and had nothing to do with medical marijuana or anything like that.”

Then as now, Milpas and other downtown areas faced higher-than-average

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ON THE RECORD Page 334

16 – 23 July 2020

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

9

Community Voices About Monuments

I

n Wachtberg near the Rhine is a bronze monument to a heroic German general of World War I. He was able to bring back a few of his men. My German grandfather, Gustav Felsenthal, was among the hundreds of thousands holed up in the terrible trenches of France, 1915-1918.

Although Germany lost a war that should never have started, the young general managed to get the release of a few hundred Prisoners of War by negotiating with the French. After the Armistice, my “Opa Gustav” came home to my Oma, his 13-year-old son, and my seven-year-old mother. He was well enough to resume his cattle-dealing business. A second son was born, my Uncle Eric. Gustav Felsenthal’s return was a miracle.

German men were so scarce at the end of the “Great War,” that my four German aunts in their early 20s never married.

The tall bronze monument was dedicated to the general in the town of his birth for staying with the few surviving German soldiers. He brought them home from the Kaiser’s devastating war, a war that they had had no interest in. Twenty years later, as Hitler came to power, the heroic general joined the Nazi Party and soon became one of Hitler’s henchmen. The WWI monument stood silently overlooking an historic town square. After the second WW it didn’t come down as most such tributes didn’t. Germans simply wanted to get on with their lives. Monuments to a murdering Nazi were overlooked.

In the ‘80s a liberal German mayor is elected in Wachtberg. He is an historian with a conscience. A few years into his term, he wants the statue to be removed because of the brutality of this general who helped massacre thousands of Jews. The City Council agrees with him. A few of the townspeople are offended, especially the old veterans of WWI. They wage a campaign against the mayor. The statue, high on its stone pedestal, quietly stays up. The mayor barely wins a second term.

A few years later, Jewish tourists come through this cobblestoned Bavarian town, now fully restored to its pre-war charm. One of the tourists, my mother’s cousin Julius Rosenfeld, asks the day’s guide, “Excuse me, but don’t people know what this General did during WWII? The tour guide stammers, “It’s so complicated; they tried to… it was a long time ago.” He apologizes. The German tour company generously returns the cost of the tour and removes Wachtberg from its itinerary.

10 MONTECITO JOURNAL

by Josie Martin

In 1995 I returned to my parents’ much more modest village, Niederkirchen, well north of Bavaria.

It had once been so populated by prosperous Jews that a beautiful large synagogue was built there during the 1880s. On November 11, 1938, it was torched during Kristallnacht, the “Night of the Broken Glass.”

My German parents living nearby in France listened on the radio with horror. “It was named Kristallnacht because so many magnificent crystal chandeliers were destroyed in the hundreds of synagogues that were burned to the ground,” Maman explained, when I, a curious 13 year old, wondered how such a beautiful name could be given to such a horrific event.

That May of 1995, I was met by Niederkirchen’s former mayor, Herr Karl Bäcker. Karl had been my Uncle Eric’s boyhood friend before the second World War. He and his frail wife, Trude, greeted us with delicious Apfelkuchen and tea. The same Kuchen my mother baked when pippin apples were ripe at the Original Farmers Market in L.A., just before the High Holy Days.

It was the beginning of an emotional visit; the stories, the visit past my Opa’s house and the walk around the town to its outskirts and its ancient cemetery with a small corner for the Jews, the “Judischer Friedhof,” was neatly set among tall trees. In the Jewish tradition I placed granite stones on my grandmother Josephine’s 1937 grave.

At the end, Karl Bäcker took us past a big cow-barn, the site of the grand Moorish Style 19th century synagogue that had once been a Niederkirchen landmark in a prosperous village with nearly 100 Jews living peacefully within its population.

“It was here at the back of the Synagogue that your Tante Rosalia Mayer lived and had to flee when the Synagogue was set on fire by the Nazi hoodlums from a neighboring village,” Herr Bäcker told me sadly. I fell silent. I knew the story, but there I stood.

The site of the Synagogue was sold to a farmer in 1961 to build the present barn. Mayor Bäcker wanted to place a marker on the barn to memorialize the Jewish people who once worshiped in that sacred space. Trude protested – a sign on a cow-barn could never convey the irreplaceable loss of the Niederkirchen Jews. Instead, a handsome plaque affixed to the right of the cemetery’s entrance commemorates the Jewish community that once thrived in its midst.

It is but a piece of stone, not even a monument, but it meant everything to me. After so much death and destruction, Mayor Karl Bäcker, Trude Bäcker, and a handful of village aldersmen voted to memorialize the people who once were solid German Jewish members of their community. Through my tears of sorrow and gratitude I read the names quietly and lit a candle.

June 2020, monuments in the U.S. seem to come down like bowling pins. I am troubled by the desecration of statues to Columbus, Washington, Jefferson. They must stay. Confederate Generals? Sure, take the traitors down, but save them.

Put them in an historical museum so that their bronze presence can be used to teach young people about our tragic history of slavery. When even Woodrow Wilson’s name is to be removed from two buildings at Princeton University, I’m shocked.

Woodrow Wilson? The great scholarly president, winner of the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize? The “Poster President” with his dignified, blue-blood, pedigreed handsomeness? Not a single one of my American high school or university history books mentioned Woodrow Wilson’s “abhorrent views on race.” These monument take-

downs were more complicated than I wanted to think. President Wilson had overseen the RE-segregation of the federal government offices including the Treasury Department. While President of Princeton University, he called it, “Altogether inadvisable for a colored man to enter Princeton.” The current president Christopher Eisgruber said in a statement, “Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by standards of his own time!” (NY Times June 28, 2020) I’m glad black, brown, white students, and all the wonderful mixes in between will no longer have to sleep under the roof of a residential building bearing President Wilson’s name.

And yet… Wilson wasn’t a traitor against our country. I hope students will still be inspired, as I had been long ago, by Wilson’s progressive policies unparalleled until FDR’s New Deal and his prescient vision with the League of Nations, forerunner of the United Nations.

Heroes, exhilaration, worship! We seem to need icons/idols in our lives.

And yet common wisdom, and the Bible tell us throughout history, we have cursed and thrown down the idols when we discovered their clay feet. President Trump is so affronted by the “desecration” of our national heroes, whether they actually served our country or started a Civil War to tear it apart, that he wants the “desecrators” to be imprisoned for ten years. He announced this at the rally at the foot of Mount Rushmore, July 3rd.

I am a World War II survivor. I don’t ever want to walk past a monument to Adolf Hitler. There have been rumors… somewhere at an old frontier outpost, maybe Montana, North Dakota? At my advanced age, I’d probably do little more than curse and throw rotten eggs at it, write a letter. As a German-French immigrant, a naturalized citizen, you can bet I’d start a petition and work tirelessly to bring it down.

I hope it’s just a rumor.

•MJ

Montecito Tide Guide Day

Low

Hgt High

Hgt Low

Hgt High

Hgt Low

Thurs, July 16

2:15 AM 0.6

8:42 AM

3.2

12:53 PM

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07:26 PM

5.5

Fri, July 17

2:51 AM 0.1

9:25 AM

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Sat, July 18

3:26 AM -0.4 10:02 AM 3.6

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08:40 PM

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4:01 AM -0.7 10:37 AM 3.7

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5:13 AM -1.1 11:48 AM 4

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Wed, July 22

5:51 AM -1

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Thurs, July 23

6:30 AM -0.8 01:06 PM 4.3

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Fri, July 24

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“All my life I’ve wanted, just once, to say something clever without losing my train of thought.” – Robert Breault

01:51 PM

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07:11 PM 2.2 16 – 23 July 2020

Letters to the Editor

If you have something you think Montecito should know about, or wish to respond to something you read in the Journal, we want to hear from you. Please send all such correspondence to: Montecito Journal, Letters to the Editor, 1206 Coast Village Circle, Suite H, Montecito, CA. 93108. You can also FAX such mail to: (805) 969-6654, or E-mail to letters@montecitojournal.net

Purely Political

M

r. James Buckley is a True Believer. When Donald Trump descended the escalator and announced his candidacy for president of USA, he declared that he is racist, misogynist, and anti-immigrant. For good measure he declared soon after, that he can kill somebody on Fifth Avenue, and it would not change any vote from his supporters.

Mr. Buckley tries to be intellectual by supporting Donald Trump’s economy and changes in regulations. Granted, Trump did give massive tax cut for the rich, and regulation breaks for oil industry and school lunches. But then Mr. Buckley shows his true colors by classifying Hillary Clinton’s political career to “marital train.” Hillary Clinton’s career spans her lifetime starting with her speech at graduation from college which was printed on the front page of Life Magazine.

As a first lady of Arkansas she did research of state schools that resulted in improvement. As first lady of USA she advocated for women’s rights, and with Congressman T. Delay passed the very successful CHIP program.

She was elected as New York State Senator, and won second term by 67%.

As a secretary of state, she was effective and approachable by employees and foreign governments. She lost the 2016 election in the electoral college, but won plurality of the votes by 2,967,686 votes. Calling Hillary Clinton’s achievements as results of “marital train,” he not only diminishes her, but also millions of women who combine being mother, wife, and successful career on their own efforts.

Mr. Buckley is not only sexist, he is a dinosaur!

Bob Handy

Seriously Flawed

Last week’s issue featured, or at least contained, a letter labeled “President Putz,” that I feel requires a little pushback, since in that letter a recent “Purely Political” column (MJ # 26_27) of mine came into question. The letter writer, Mr. Sean Hutchinson, deplores my intention to vote once again for Donald Trump in the upcoming election and suggests that my doing so, “makes it plain how partisan dreams die hard.”

Perhaps partisan dreams do die hard, but those reveries don’t have anything to do with my presidential choice. The Democrat Party fell or 16 – 23 July 2020

jumped off the deep end of the pier long ago and I’d be hard-pressed to ever vote for someone who has taken that dive. The near rabid adoption of the Black Lives Matter Marxist agenda, the blind observation that recent nationwide “protests” were “mostly peaceful,” serious contemplation over various him-her-it-their pronouns, and other inanities keep me far away from considering any of those folks.

I may also suggest that Mr. Hutchinson check out the color of his own Flavor Aid (the less expensive drink that a truly demented Democrat by the name of Jim Jones served his 900-plus dead victims).

In any case, I eagerly anticipate pulling the lever for the re-election of Donald J. Trump, and plan to celebrate his victory with a cold glass of Montrachet; no Kool-Aid for me!

James Buckley

Water Security = Diversification

I have been following with interest the water series by Nicholas Schou in the Montecito Journal.

In my capacity as a licensed hydrogeologist for over 30 years, I performed numerous hydrologic, geologic, and groundwater studies for the Goleta Water District, the MWD and the City of SB. I also developed municipal wells for these water districts, along with hundreds of private water wells for homeowners and agriculture throughout the south coast.

Therefore, when the June 25th article in MJ asks the question: “What is water security?” I hope I can provide some additional and meaningful perspectives.

The answer is simple: Water security is diversification.

That said, other factors do come into play such as cost. If we did not have to consider economics, desal – a very expensive water supply – could be utilized as a sole source and would provide a very secure water supply.

During the days of the missionaries, the south coast relied on local surface water supplies as its primary source of water. The de la Guerra Springs and Mission Creek are two examples.

Then, as the population of the south coast increased, those water supplies proved insufficient, especially during drought. About a century ago, when south coast residents had the depleted

surface water resources on the oceanside of the mountains, Montecito and Santa Barbara built dams in the Santa Ynez Valley. Lake Cachuma, a federal project, followed in the 1950s.

While the “local” surface water supplies Gibraltar Reservoir (1920), Jameson Lake (1930) and Cachuma Lake (1955) produce relatively inexpensive water, they proved insufficient during severe drought. Water shortages occurred shortly after each dam was built. In southern Santa Barbara County, drought, sometimes 16 years in duration, occurs, on average, every other decade.

In 1991, when we had exhausted the water supplies in the Santa Ynez Valley, south coast residents authorized a bond measure that financed a project that conveyed water to Central California from reservoirs located in Northern California – aka, the State Water Project.

This distant water source turned out to be both the most expensive source of water that the south coast has ever seen, and the least reliable. In wet years we have not used much of our State Water allocation because it costs more than other sources. And in dry years, we receive only about 25% (sometimes less) of the water that we contracted for. So we end up paying for a lot of water that we do not receive, since we have to pay for the cost of the infra-

structure whether we use it or not.

As an example, from 2012-2017 Santa Barbara’s cost for State Water was approximately $5,000 per acre foot, about twice the cost of water from the desalination plant.

Ground water from water wells is relatively inexpensive, and relatively reliable, but limited in quantity.

Depending on whether you live in Carpinteria, Montecito, Santa Barbara, or Goleta, ground water can play a minor or major role in the water supply tool kit, but it is never plentiful enough to provide the majority of our domestic water needs. So other types of water sources are required in order to fulfill the needs of a growing population.

Wastewater reuse, the process of cleaning up water delivered to the wastewater treatment plant, is a viable alternative, and a reliable alternative, but is limited to non-domestic use. That may change someday, but right now, only a limited area near the Santa Barbara and Goleta wastewater treatment plants is available for irrigation usage. And treated wastewater is expensive.

There is a large and vocal group on the south coast that is in favor of increased water conservation. Santa Barbara County’s south coast is currently one of the most proactive water

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Village Beat

by Kelly Mahan Herrick

Kelly has been editor at large for the Journal since 2007, reporting on news in Montecito and beyond. She is also a licensed realtor with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, and is a member of Montecito and Santa Barbara’s top real estate team, Calcagno & Hamilton.

Montecito Association Discusses Homelessness

A

t their monthly board meeting on Tuesday, July 14, the Montecito Association Board of Directors voted to approve a pilot program to help homeless people in the Montecito area get the help and resources they need.

The program includes partnering with outreach coordinators from City Net, an organization comprised of a team of nonprofit professionals who work to end street-level homelessness. Founded by Brad Fieldhouse, the organization is currently already working in the City of Santa Barbara and partnering with Cottage Hospital to get local homeless the medical help they need.

MA executive director Sharon Byrne, who has been deeply involved with the homeless population for years, reported that there are 25-40 homeless on the streets of Montecito,

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living in various encampments near the Bird Refuge, Hot Springs freeway exit, near the Pointe Market on Coast Village Road, the area near the freeway and Coast Village Circle, the area between Olive Mill and San Ysidro roads, and near the railroad tracks near Montecito Shores and Bonnymede. “Right now there really is no one to call for neighbors who are experiencing problems,” Byrne said.

“I think it’s important that we look for a solution for Montecito.”

The project would be a collaboration between the Montecito Association, City Net, Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Department, and potentially the Montecito Community Foundation, who could help with raising the $40,000 needed for the sixmonth pilot project. The goal would be to provide consistent outreach to the homeless on a weekly basis, as well as case management, in an effort to reduce the number of homeless individuals in the area by 8-12 people.

At the end of the six months, the work would be presented to the County, in hopes it could be a longer-term project, funded by the County. “We have to show them how to do it,” Byrne said. “We are the pioneers here.”

“The existing systems that are in place do not work together to end homelessness,” Byrne went on to say.

“We have to change this way of doing it. The only thing that works is outreach.” The Board voted to tentatively green light the program, as well as form a working group to look into details.

The Board also discussed a project that has been discussed in Montecito for many years: undergrounding utility lines. It is estimated that 25% of utility lines in Montecito are already underground; in order to underground the rest, it could cost up to $300 million. The Board voted to have their Land Use Committee, with the help of the Transportation Committee, look into the issue.

During Community Reports, Cold Spring School superintendent Dr. Amy Alzina and Montecito Union School Superintendent Dr. Anthony Ranii reported that both campuses are intending to open for in-person teaching in August. “We will meet every health and safety measure available to get our kids back to school,” Dr. Alzina reported.

“Small school districts have the benefit of being able to pivot,” she added, saying that many larger school districts in the State have decided to adopt virtual learning for the new school year. As we’ve reported, there has been a significant boost in the Montecito real estate since the pandemic, and many buyers report moving to Montecito because both public school districts intend on opening for in-person teaching.

At MUS, a Summer School program on campus is slated to begin next week, with 65 students participating.

The school year begins on August 20.

Both schools will adopt the appropriate social distancing and PPE procedures, and have alternate plans for families who would like to take the independent study route. MUS is hiring more teachers, as there has been an increase in enrollment, and the school is ready to go to a virtual learning environment if necessary. “We are prepping for having to go back and forth if there is a need,” Dr. Ranii said.

“We expect it to be very successful.”

Sheriff Lieutenant Butch Arnoldi reported that there continues to be mail thefts and thefts from vehicles in Montecito. Lieutenant Arnoldi is also working with the County and the Forest Service on implementing new rules related to camping at our local trailheads.

Montecito Fire Chief Kevin Taylor voiced his concern over the number of fireworks heard in Montecito on July 4th and beyond. “Fireworks are not allowed at any time,” he said.

He reported that the MFPD Board approved a solar project at Fire Station 1, and that the Neighborhood Chipping Program was very successful this year, with 320 households participating. “We’re grateful to all of our community members who participated to keep our community safe,” he said.

For more information about the Montecito Association, visit www. montecitoassociation.org.

New Skincare Shop Opens on Coast Village Road

A new skincare boutique has opened on Coast Village Road, featuring a skin analysis system that is new to the industry. Seda Custom Skincare, located at 1125 Coast Village Road, develops personalized skincare products for women, men, and children.

Customers learn which personalized skin care products are best suited to their individual profile through an innovative skin, hair, and scalp analysis service called SkincareID. Company founder Seda Sakaci Celik, who was born in Istanbul, designed the SkincareID Skin Analysis system with the help of a team of researchers, and has spent years developing custom-prepared skincare

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” — John F. Kennedy

Seda Custom Skincare founder Seda Sakaci Celik demonstrates the skin analysis procedure

products. Her goal in opening Seda Custom Skincare, of which there are three additional locations in Turkey and one in Qatar, is to offer customized skincare formulations that meet the needs of each client’s skin, hair, and scalp. “It continues to amaze me that today, most skincare products are still mass produced and do not meet an individual’s true needs,” she said during a visit to the shop earlier this week. “My experience in skincare science and cosmetology have taught me that each person has a unique skin profile with very specific needs and characteristics.”

The SkincareID Skin Analysis sessions take approximately 50 minutes and measure key skin characteristics including hydration, pH, elasticity, sebum levels, moisture levels, wrinkle depths, pigmentation, pore size, dandruff, hair density, cellulite, and more.

The company’s proprietary software, combined with artificial intelligence, uses the skin analysis information to recommend specific skin care product formulations. All of Seda Custom Skincare’s products are individually prepared in the company’s manufacturing facilities and laboratories, with raw materials such as vitamins, herbs, collagen, and peptides, sourced from farms in Turkey, many of which are run by women. The products include shampoos, shower gels, cleaners, serums, sunblocks, moisturizers, and many others, as well as supplements that are taken internally. “You feed your skin from the inside, and support it from the outside,” Seda said.

Seda says she can treat an array of skin conditions, including rosacea, acne, melasma, psoriasis, anti-aging, and many others. Results are 100% guaranteed, as clients are invited to return for follow-up assessments with the SkincareID system. “We can see tangible results after they use the products,” Seda said.

Seda Custom Skincare’s Montecito shop is the company’s first Santa

VILLAGE BEAT Page 334 16 – 23 July 2020

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It goes without saying that the last few months have been a tumultuous time for everyone, and the global pandemic and associated social distancing and quarantines have had far reaching consequences for nearly every type of trade or commerce.

The local real estate market in Santa Barbara and Montecito is no exception, and we as agents are keeping tabs on the rapidly changing situation. While several listings have been withdrawn from the market, there are still buyers seeking to find their new home, thanks in part to record low interest rates. Working within the new mandates from the California Association of Realtors, we are still actively working for our clients, helping them reach their real estate goals.

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

13

On Entertainment

by Steven Libowitz

Sing! Sing! Sing! Music Academy Hits High Note

This year’s Music Academy of the West’s Sing! Program featured individual performances fused together over Zoom to create a masterpiece

M

usic Academy of the West’s Sing! program – a free, afterschool choral initiative that, in normal times, takes place at six elementary schools for Santa Barbara County kids age 7-12 – was only in its second year when the coronavirus pandemic forced schools to close back in March, obviously also ending any possibilities for the children to continue meetings and rehearsals in person. But not only did the gatherings carry on over Zoom, the program – whose goals are to allow the young singers to learn how to work with others, build confidence, expand

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their cultural experience, and get realworld appreciation of music – also forged ahead with its major planned performance, albeit a truncated concert delivered via video rather than the full show that was supposed to take place at Hahn Hall in May. More than 200 participants took part in the adjusted curriculum, taking classes and then rehearsing and recording performances from late April through mid-June. The final show was produced in the same way that so many professional concerts have been since the stayat-home orders went into effect, via individual performances being fused into one through the detailed use of recording technology known as layering.

The result, though, is nothing short of stunning, as the virtual choral concert has proven to be one of the highlights of MAW’s Concert Hall Online, daily video postings that serve as its only public offering this summer via a sampling of masterclasses, Picnic Concerts, compiled records, and more from the first four weeks of the Academy’s Remote Learning Initiative. The young singers shined on works by Britten and Handel as well as traditional songs from Brazil, Russia, Nova Scotia, Japan, and, most movingly, Shine on Me, an American spiritual from slavery days.

We caught up with Choral Director and Administrative Coordinator Daniel Newman-Lessler, who, along with Christine Hollinger and Erin McKibben, coached the kids and put together the program, to learn about

the mayhem behind the magic during a break from last-minute work to put together the Sing! choir portion of MAW’s Hansel & Gretel opera recording slated to air on the online platform on Monday, July 20. (Visit www.musi cacademy.org/home/concert-hall-online to view the videos.)

Q. You obviously didn’t sign up for running a program on Zoom back last August when the year began. How did you get up to speed with doing things online?

A. I was just another one of the choral directors but then we found ourselves in need of an administrator at the last minute so it was just learn on the job. I have some very basic background in recording, but not an engineer. So it was just sort of trial by fire.

I know you guys worked with an outside company to stitch together the concert.

But just having to break down rehearsals and do things via video to avoid latency seems overwhelming let alone help create the final mix.

Each of the directors had our own rehearsals because you can’t do anything in a group over Zoom without latency issues. We’d either be singing and playing with all of the students on mute, or have one of the students unmute themselves and lead the group, or play some kind of a recording that they would then sing along to on mute. Those teaching modalities were in addition to the regular theory and ear training things we would normally do.

“Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.” — Marquis de Lafayette

For the recording we created guide videos, the three directors individually playing piano and singing for the three choral parts, which virtualchoir. net editors then put together so that the videos and audio lined up so the kids could sing while listening through an earbud in one ear.

Putting together the concert was phenomenally painstaking. I listened to and made notes on every single student recording and went over all the edits measure by measure, page by page, to say what needed to happen with the recordings of each student.

It was a lot of back and forth with virtualchoir.net in massaging the mix for things like students where we could only use video if there’s too much background noise going on, for example.

I know the Music Academy fellows all received expensive tech packages to do something similar, which I imagine didn’t happen for Sing! It’s amazing what you were able to accomplish with what was closer to tin can and some thread. You must be really proud of how it turned out.

Virtual Choir gets major, major kudos because not only were they able to turn out an amazing performance at the end, but they also did it under a serious time crunch… (For me), it was a simultaneous feeling of both pride and then just exhaustion because I had to jump right back into the opera excerpt which is even more complicated because we’re getting the kids involved with the pre-professional fellows at MAW and they’re singing in German.

That sparks my curiosity about what draws you to work with elementary school kids in the first place?

Part of it is a sense of duty as a professional musician. I do things that are more musically fulfilling, composing and experimental things with groups in L.A. But it’s important to nurture and foster the next generation of people who love music and do my part by exposing them to as much really great music as possible. And that means music from all different cannons beyond Western classical and Eurocentric, with as great a diversity as possible. That’s part and parcel of raising a more complete human being who shares a sense of community and empathy, teamwork and understanding, and the desire not to just tolerate other cultures and communities, but to actively seek them out and engage with other people. Ones who aren’t like you and who don’t sing like you and may have entirely different tuning systems from you.

The concert program was developed last summer, before COVID and the recent focus on racial equality. How have current events informed the material?

I think it was John Cage who said 16 – 23 July 2020

that all music is political. There’s just the music that knows that it’s political and there’s the music that doesn’t know that it’s political. I very much resonate with that philosophy in that whatever music we work on with the kids cannot exist in a vacuum. So for a song like “Shine On Me,” which arose out of the suffering of enslaved black people and was arranged by the great Black composer-pianist Rollo A. Dilworth, we have to discuss what it means historically and in the current climate.

And I refuse to shy away from those issues with children. We don’t give them enough credit for how insightful they are, and how much they can handle if you discuss it in a way that is honest and open. I don’t want to shield them from things that they need to confront. The conversations that we had with these kids were devastating and inspirational. It’s really incredible to hear the wisdom that comes from the mouths of babes, so to speak.

I still remember when I was applying to grad school, a dean of music told me that whatever happens with my auditions that when I go out into the world I must make the music matter. As a result of these profound conversations surrounding this particular piece of music, that song mattered so much more, and you can see it in the faces of the kids. You can hear it in

their voices. It’s not just notes. It’s not just words. It’s not just rhythms. It all comes together to communicate something that needs to be communicated at this point in time.

Gardens Are for Living

Cinema Survives Shutdown

The Sunken Gardens at the Santa Barbara Courthouse is off limits for events as the coronavirus pandemic continues, as UCSB Arts & Lectures summer film series’ grass-fed version of beach blanket bingo would surely lead to a bounce in new cases of COVID-19. Instead, pivoting has produced a more practical solution for the free annual outdoor screening series to survive, albeit via creating community within the confines of your own car.

Game On! Grit, Grace & Glory – Movies Under the Stars in Your Cars, a sixweek series featuring family-friendly, feel-good, sports-centered flicks, also carries an appropriate theme for our times as each movie features a story about overcoming the odds. Instead of decamping in the downtown garden you’ll have to schlep out to the West Wind Drive-In off the 217 near Goleta for the seven-film series that started on July 15 and continues Wednesday evenings through August 19. The lineup includes several well-known clas-

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

17

AGING IN HIGH HEELS

by Beverlye Hyman Fead

Ms Fead moved from Beverly Hills to Malibu and then Montecito in 1985. She is married to retired music exec Bob Fead; between them they have four children, five grandchildren, and a dog named Sophia Loren. Beverlye is the author of I Can Do this; Living with Cancer, Nana, What’s Cancer and the blog www.aginginhighheels.com, and book Aging In High Heels. She has also produced a documentary: Stage Four, Living with Cancer.

A Very Long Distance Engagement

An Italian mayor, a Montecito philanthropist, and love in the time of coronavirus

E

veryone loves a love story, maybe even more so in these difficult times. I know I do, and by providence, my husband and I were able to be in the middle of this one.

The story started with longtime Montecito resident Marjorie Layden taking a trip through Europe to look for someone to fill a board of director spot for the prestigious Salzburg Global Seminar, a global nonprofit founded in 1947 with the mission to “challenge current and future leaders to shape a better world.” Layden serves on the board. She had also heard that the Mayor of Arezzo wanted to talk to her about possibly joining the board of the Guido d’Arezzo to support culture in Arezzo, a lovely city about the same size as Santa Barbara.

Layden, widow of Coca Cola, ECE, CEO, Henry Schimberg, is known for her many acts of philanthropy throughout the United States. She endowed and founded The Children’s School of Excellence in Rainier, Washington and is chairman of the School of Ethics at UCSB. One of her primary interests is in bringing music into the lives of children of all ages.

While in Europe or the Salzburg Global Seminar, she went to the city of Arezzo, Italy to look up Mayor Ghinelli, about whom she’d heard many good things. The woman who owned the hotel where Marjorie was staying invited her to a dinner party that evening, adding, “I also think the mayor will be there.”

As it happened, the handsome mayor of the town of Arezzo, Alessandro Ghinelli, a former promi-

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nent businessman and college professor, sat next to her at the lovely dinner party. They talked about their interests and realized how similar they were and time seemed to fade away.

In July, Arezzo hosts The Raro Opera Festival in a roman amphitheatre. Layden and the mayor attended and were captivated by 21-year-old virtuoso violinist Giani Zanon, who also had an interest in bringing music to children.

Layden and Ghinelli continued to see each other and fell in love. Soon, they both decided that despite their different cultures, languages, and countries, they were determined to make it work. Their dream was to make Santa Barbara and Arezzo sister cities. They had many plans in motion to help both cities. The biggest plan was to get married. They asked the young violin virtuoso to create a month-long festival for their wedding and he came up with the idea to bring many young virtuosos from around the world to perform and teach in schools. They would split their time, between the two cities.

This is where Bob and I come in.

We were coincidently in Capri right before the Saracen Joust of Arezzo, the town’s traditional reenactment of medieval chivalry games. When Layden invited us, we jumped at the chance. We took the train from Naples to Arezzo just in time for the Joust and the couple’s engagement party that followed.

The Joust was large and wonderfully noisy, filled with bravos, horses in their medieval outfits clumping on the cobblestones and bands marching and playing in the Piazza Grande. The horsemen were in their magnificent armor and people cheered for their sides to win. The mayor served as King of the Joust.

The next evening, as the sun went from orange to cadmium yellow, the other event, the engagement ceremony took place at the couple’s villa in the Tuscan countryside. This is where they announced their engagement to

Marjorie and Alessandro

their friends from all over the world.

At the finish of the weekend they announced a March 28 nuptial to the township.

But we all know what was to come.

Italy began to announce cases of COVID-19 and huge swaths of the country were put in quarantine by early March. Soon, countries all over the world were doing the same. Italy had to eventually close down entirely, as did most of the states in America.

This left Mayor Ghinelli suspended in Arezzo, where he is beloved and trusted, and our bride-to-be in Montecito, preparing for her wedding and working on her projects. Ghinelli gave daily reports to his people and they depended on him greatly for these reports!

At this writing, it has been almost five months since they have seen each other. Italy has slowly reopened and so has America, but it is still not possible for either to visit. They talk on the phone daily. Their plans move ahead, both for their cities, their foundations, and of course for their marriage.

These are trying times, for sure, but still love is love and hope is hope and plans for a bright future move on. •MJ

(805) 450-2059 | james@jjcsb.net 1230 Coast Village Circle, Montecito

18 MONTECITO JOURNAL

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16 – 23 July 2020

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

19

Golden State Killer

by Michael Bowker

Reign of Terror Included Goleta Victims The Most Vicious Rapist-Killer in California History Brought to Justice It was a mid-summer’s night in 1981 and Debbi Domingo, a junior at Santa Barbara High School, was just ending her shift at the Granada Theatre on State Street. She was handed a message from her mother’s best friend.

“Please come home,” the message read. “You need to come right away.”

Domingo considered the note. She and her mother had a terrible argument earlier and their last words were bitter. Reluctantly, Domingo went home and was stunned to see her house lit up and surrounded by police cars, news crews and cameras. The house itself was sealed off with huge amounts of yellow crime tape.

“I knew something horrific had happened,” Domingo said in a recent interview with the Montecito Journal. “The yellow tape was the most terrifying. I tried to run to the front door, but the police held me back. They told me there were two bodies inside the house and they believed one of them was my mother’s. I couldn’t comprehend it. I tried to break free. Then they said, ‘It’s messy.’ That’s when everything seemed to collapse.”

T

he origins of that terrible night began in 1945, when Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. was born, the son of a WWII hero and an Italian immigrant mother. Little is known about his early life, other than his family moved frequently. DeAngelo ultimately graduated from Folsom High School near Sacramento, served in the Navy in Viet Nam, and then came back to become a college honor student and a police officer. But those accomplishments will not be DeAngelo’s legacy because he also grew up to become the most vicious and prolific serial burglar, rapist, and murderer in California’s history.

DeAngelo’s reign of terror lasted 42 years and scorched the lives of dozens of victims – including Debbi Domingo and her family – before he was caught in 2018. Last week, he pleaded guilty to 13 homicides and 13 counts of kidnapping.

There is ample evidence, however, that he committed more than a thousand crimes between 1972 and the time of his arrest. He brutalized and raped more than 60 women and killed at least 13 people. He broke into hundreds of homes: peeping, rummaging, vandalizing, and stealing small personal valuables.

His acts of brutality and violation ranged from Sacramento, San Joaquin and the east San Francisco Bay Area, to Santa Barbara, Ventura and Orange counties.

He was a demented and cunning terrorist who declared an unholy, violent war on California until a breakthrough in DNA technology led to his arrest.

“He is an evil man who shattered lives,” said Domingo.

Last week, at DeAngelo’s guilty plea hearing in Sacramento, details of his crimes were read to the public for more than seven hours. The hearing was the result of a remarkable cooperative effort by the district attorneys in the six counties where he is known to have raped and killed his victims. After DeAngelo’s attorneys told officials, including Santa Barbara County DA Joyce Dudley, that he wished to plead guilty to the 26 counts of murder and kidnapping in exchange for escaping the death penalty, an agreement was reached with surprising quickness.

“I don’t think there has ever been anything like this before,” said Kelly Duncan, Santa Barbara Chief Deputy District Attorney, who worked on the case. “You had some pretty strong personalities involved in the DA’s offices of these six counties, but everyone came together to do what was right, especially

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Joyce Dudley and Debbi Domingo McMullan, 2018

when it came to pursuing justice for all the victims,” she said. “It was important that he agreed to admit to not only the murders, but the uncharged crimes as well.” These included the rape charges that had exceeded the statute of limitations.

“I think most of the surviving victims were in favor of the plea bargain,” said Domingo. “At first, there was some feeling that we wanted him to stand trial, but given the current COVID situation, the enormous cost of such a trial and the stress it would generate on almost everybody, it was decided this plea bargain was the best option.”

Carol Daly, a Sacramento homicide detective, has remained close with many of the victims for decades. “I’ve watched many of them struggle with the awful psychological aftermath of DeAngelo as an Exeter Police Department officer these vicious assaults. DeAngelo will in 1973 spend the rest of his life behind bars and we’re all thankful for that, but what he did left many scars.”

Linda O’Dell was 22 and had just moved to Citrus Heights, a suburb east of Sacramento, in 1976, when she and her husband woke up to a masked man standing by their bed, shining a flashlight in their eyes. As happened in dozens of other cases, the intruder had a gun and swore through clenched teeth that he would kill them if they did not obey. He made O’Dell tie her husband’s hands with shoelaces, then he tied her husband’s feet and her hands. He made her husband lie on his stomach and then put dishes across his back. “If I hear those dishes rattle, I’ll kill everybody in the house,” the masked man growled.

Then he took O’Dell into another room and took his time raping her.

Afterwards, he rummaged through the house, muttering to himself and eating food from the refrigerator. Often, after an hour or two, he would come back out of the darkness suddenly and thrust a knife next to the woman’s face. Then he would disappear into the darkness. His savagery would escalate in Santa Barbara County, however.

On July 27, 1981, the night Debbi was working at the Granada, her mother, Cheri Domingo, 35, and her boyfriend, Gregory Sanchez, 27, were in Cheri’s home on Toltec Way in Goleta. A masked man with a gun suddenly appeared in their bedroom. Investigators believe that Sanchez, who was tall and athletic, tried to fight the intruder, but he was shot in the face before being bludgeoned to death with a blunt instrument. Domingo was tied and raped. Then the attacker savagely hit her at least ten times with the same tool, shattering her skull.

Even one of the blows would have killed her.

In the years following the attack, Debbi blamed herself for not being there to save her mother. She could not get their last argument out of her mind and fell into a lasting depression. No help was offered to her and she sank into a world of drugs and homelessness.

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

21

Perspectives

by Rinaldo S. Brutoco Rinaldo S. Brutoco is the Founding President and CEO of the Santa Barbara-based World Business Academy and a co-founder of JUST Capital.

He’s a serial entrepreneur, executive, author, radio host, and futurist who’s published on the role of business in relation to pressing moral, environmental, and social concerns for over 35 years

Floating Cinema in Paris Will Screen Movie for Socially Distant Boats

Death and Taxes!

B

enjamin Franklin observed that “In this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Right now, we are up to our eyeballs in coronavirus deaths (over 140,000 as of today) and equally consumed by

taxes.

The coronavirus death numbers conclusively prove the necessity for the U.S. to have a better public health system. Every other modern western democracy has contained the virus, are now re-opening their respective economies, and are getting back to “normal” life. Not so here in the good ole U.S.A. There is no end of new infections (occurring at over 61,000/day), no end in sight for dramatically rising hospitalizations, and a public health system on the verge of total collapse in more than a dozen states. So, what’s the solution?

Knowing that taxes are as certain as “death,” it’s time to take a closer look at the role taxes play in advanced societies. We’re asking how taxes can be a solution for the current pandemic as well as a host of other social challenges we face. Think of that: seeing taxes as a benefit rather than a burden.

Perhaps nothing is as peculiarly American as our shared angst over paying taxes. After all, “No taxation without representation” became our Revolutionary mantra.

No one seriously complained about taxes during Roosevelt’s New Deal, which had a far higher tax burden. Nor did anyone seriously complain about taxes during the Eisenhower years (tax rate 70 percent)! Unfortunately, by 1970 everyone had forgotten the role taxes had played: 1) ending the Great Depression; 2) winning World War II; 3) rebuilding Europe under the Marshall Plan; 4) construction of the entire interstate highway system; and, 5) construction of most of the crumbling infrastructure that now must be replaced after decades of neglect. Yes, taxes worked all those miracles and many more in creating modern-day America.

Knowing that taxes are as certain as “death,” it’s time to take a closer look at the role taxes play in advanced societies.

Reagan ran primarily supported by individuals who wanted to share less of their personal and corporate wealth with the rest of society in a headlong pursuit toward plutocracy. In fact, many of the leaders of the anti-tax movement actually argued that they would like to shrink the government down to something like the Wild West, with everyone “fending” for themselves. That was never a good idea… and it created the mess we’re currently in.

The strange thing is that the U.S. actually has lower tax burdens than other modern western democracies. Simply stated, our total taxation rate doesn’t include what other countries pay for with their taxes. Things like education (e.g. I can go to Germany as an American, study, obtain a four-year degree, and return to the U.S. without paying a cent). Like all other modern states, higher education in Germany is free, just as education through high school is free here.

Americans also have to pay separately for their healthcare and are listed as having the 29th from the top system although we pay multiples of what other countries do. Americans pay separately for prescription drugs at a rate 40-50 percent higher than any other nation even for drugs made here. We individually subsidize our transportation costs because we have such poor public transit, so we inefficiently spend our money for cars, gas, tires, and airplane rides when all of Europe travels less expensively on intra and inter-city rail.

Unfortunately most Americans don‘t see what our tax dollars actually buy us, and we’re far too lazy to really demand that the government spend the money it collects in ways that would benefit us more. With better politics we could actually end up with: 1) a dramatically smaller military budget; 2) universal healthcare; 3) free higher education; and 4) free universal childcare from age two through kindergarten. Where to begin?

The government isn’t good at letting folks know what their taxes pay for.

We’re prejudiced because we know how the tax system is riddled by a lobbying industry that has written one “loophole” after another for each “special interest.”

22 MONTECITO JOURNAL

A

s lockdown has forced many cinemas to close their doors due to social distancing measures, many cinephiles have turned to drive-ins to watch their favorite flicks. And while drive-ins may make an exciting cinema experience, a floating movie theater in Paris takes outdoor movie-going to another level, swapping out cars with boats.

The waters of the iconic Seine river in the French capital will see the arrival of a floating movie theatre where people can enjoy themselves in socially distant boats. The “Le Cinéma sur l’Eau,” or “cinema on the water,” will be held on July 18 to celebrate the return of Paris Plages, an annual event that creates temporary beaches along the Seine and the Bassin de la Villette during the summer.

The floating cinema will welcome 150 locals who will be able to kick back in one of 38 small electric boats to watch Le Grand Bain, a French comedy about a group of men who start a synchronized swimming team and “A Corona Story,” a short film about COVID-19.

Each boat will seat four to six people, making sure that the groups consist of family or friends to makes sure social distancing measures are met.

The City of Sydney is Now Powered by 100% Renewable Electricity

The City of Sydney, the central borough of the larger Australian metropolis, will now be powered using 100 percent renewable energy, a switch expected to save it $500,000 and 200,000 tons of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere over the next ten years.

Two solar farms and one wind farm located across regional New South Wales will exclusively power the city’s 115 buildings, 75 parks, 23,000 streetlights, various sports facilities, and depots. The historic deal marks the most substantial green energy agreement by any council across Australia.

The move is expected to help Australia achieve its emission reduction targets faster, as well as generate new employment opportunities in the regions where the solar and wind farms are located.

“We are in the middle of a climate emergency. If we are to reduce emissions and grow the green power sector, all levels of government must urgently transition to renewable energy,” Lord Mayor Clover Moore said in a press release.

The City of Sydney has long taken action against climate change. The new clean energy deal is expected to serve as inspiration for other cities across the country to take similar action.

•MJ I personally do not like to pay taxes to the Federal government. I don’t like how they spend the money and I want to see fewer loopholes, fewer benefits for large companies and large lobbies, and fewer dollars spent on military hardware we’ll never productively use.

California, on the other hand, is a very high tax state where many people complain bitterly. Quite a few folks choose to live next door in Nevada where there are no income taxes. Many more people would if they could figure out how to pull it off! For me, I like how California spends its tax money. Thanks to taxes, I received a law degree from UCLA for almost nothing. I’m grateful I can breathe the air now our taxes cleaned up because I remember riding my bicycle and feeling my chest hurt from the pain of the smog in my lungs. I like the fact we have good sewer systems, good water systems, superb health and safety systems, and many other amenities which are not being maintained as they once were.

So, let’s look at what Federal taxes should bring us and we’ll have a whole different attitude about paying them. We get to that happy outcome by demanding that our taxes be immediately put to use ending the death march of COVID-19.

We need a Federally funded and managed program to end the pandemic – let’s demand it happen now. Let’s use our taxes to keep folks paid and able to maintain a roof over their heads as we did in the ‘30s because we will require incredible efforts to fix our economy. In the meantime, let’s keep pushing out those CARES Act payments to individuals; let’s keep sending trillions of dollars out to keep people employed by the PPP and SBA programs. Using our tax dollars that way, we’ll be able to transition the present pandemic death spiral back to a healthy America where we can again live in the lap of luxury we used to enjoy.

Let’s get back to the boom years from 1946 to 1970 when taxes were higher and society functioned so much better. Let’s make taxes work for us and we’ll all be glad to pay them!

•MJ

“Freedom lies in being bold.” – Robert Frost

16 – 23 July 2020

Body Wise

shoulders, back and jaw is possibly old fear you’ve been carrying around for a long time. Honoring what’s happening in your physical body is a good way to connect with this fear, current and past, and let it go.

by by Ann Brode Ann Todhunter Brode has been an Aston Patterning practitioner and body-oriented therapist in Santa Barbara for over forty years. A recognized master in her field, Brode writes down-to-earth, compassionate articles on the challenges & rewards of living consciously in the body. visit www.bodywisdomforlife.com for more information.

An Opportunity for Healing

T

he unrelenting disruption and uncertainty of our lives have rattled our emotional equilibrium. Patience has worn thin. The kids are getting scrappy and the parents are getting snappy. Small fractures in personal relationships are showing up and the large rift in our social contract has taken to the streets. This mandatory timeout has put us up close and personal with what needs to be seen, felt, and resolved with a kind of urgency we can’t avoid.

As every therapist knows, when stuff comes up, it’s a great opportunity for healing. The discomfort is a messenger; the pain is a guide; and honoring the process allows old wounds to mend from the inside out.

Here’s an easy way to understand the progression: life’s circumstances have stirred the pot and whatever was tucked away and silenced has floated to the top. Now, you have a choice.

You can shove it back down, rationalize it away, revert to old distractions, assign blame, and… hold on to it. Or, you can move towards the discomfort, identify the feelings, do some emoting, and… let it go. Whether or not you see the healing potential, with emotions on the surface everywhere, it’s hard to overlook the catharsis.

When an emotion gets triggered, it has an energetic footprint. The energy of fear feels very different in the body than the energy of anger. Sadness feels

different than joy. Like weather coming and going, the natural state of this emotional energy is fluid and moving. Emotion= E+motion. Because you experience emotions physically, your body is a part of this emotional equation. The simple questions of “what does it feel like” and “where do you feel it” are that much more effective when you add “what does it sound like” and “what does it look like.”

Including this expressive component gets the energy moving. Then, instead of getting stuck and gumming up the works, the energy moves along. This is important because, as neuroscientist Candace Pert, PhD, states: “When emotions are repressed, denied, not allowed to be whatever they may be, our network of pathways gets blocked… and we lose the full capacity to think and act effectively. We also lose our connection with compassion for ourselves and others.”

Like many people in these precarious times, you’re likely to find a bit of fear rumbling around. Is fear of the unknown gripping your shoulders?

Fear of being out of control bracing your lower back? Fear of the future clamping your jaw? Inspirational speaker and author Iyanla Vanzant recently stated on her show Fear Not, “… the fear that’s coming up is the fear you brought into this pandemic.”

What she’s saying is that the particular hyper-vigilance you’re feeling in your

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If getting in touch with your emotional body feels too scary or your resistance is too entrenched, this may be the perfect time to ask for help.

To experience how this works, you’ll need a private space to do some personal healing work. Invite your curious mind to step aside and explore your emotional body on its own terms.

Look for the tension/ agitation/ discomfort to zero in on the feelings. Stay connected with your emotional body and find the sound and gesture that comes from this place. At first, you’ll be self-conscious and feel awkward, but just make that sound on the exhale and sweep it away with your hands.

Then, see how you feel afterwards. As a mentor of mine, Dennie La Tourelle, used to say, “The only bad emotion is a stuck emotion.”

If getting in touch with your emotional body feels too scary or your resistance is too entrenched, this may be the perfect time to ask for help.

After all, when it’s up, it’s up and there are many ways to get it moving.

In this case you literally have nothing to lose except fear itself! Our community has an impressive array of talent-

ed therapists doing online sessions right now. Three months in, psychotherapist Michael Seabaugh recently shared that he and his patients have adapted well to the format, some even expressing a preference to continue teletherapy sessions once the restrictions lift. Connecting with a professional can help you avoid detours and distractions, offer valuable guidance, and fortify your commitment to heal.

As a somatic therapist, I’ve helped many people listen to and honor the emotional energy in their body.

Because our relationship with fear has a primal taproot, it’s energy can be stuck for years and we just think it is normal. When events catalyze fear on any level, we have the opportunity to dredge deep and get it all moving.

Rather than anchor down until these COVID times are over, why not do some emotional healing? Freeing up the E-motion opens the door to clear thinking and deep wisdom. Right now, we need as much of that as possible.

•MJ

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• The Voice of the Village •

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23

Library Mojo

by Kim Crail

Kim is the Branch Lead of the Montecito Library. Questions or comments?

Contact her: kcrail@santabarbaraca.gov

At Your (Sidewalk) Service

W

e are thrilled to announce that Sidewalk Service is in full effect at Montecito

Library.

You can request items using our online catalog (SBPLibrary.org/cata log) or please give us a call to request items with the help of staff (805-9695063).

Once your items are ready, you will be notified via email or phone. You are able to pick up during the following Sidewalk Service hours: Tuesdays 2:30-5:30 pm and Thursdays 10:30 am-1:30 pm.

Please wear a mask and stay six feet from others when you arrive. Call in advance with your library card to check out over the phone and your items will be ready for you on a table at the bottom of our stairs. You are welcome to send someone to pick up your items, we just need your library card number and name over

the phone to check them out.

We are pleased to be able to offer this contact-free service to keep us all safe while providing library materials for you. We know what voracious readers our patrons (of all ages) are and hope that this service is helpful to you.

No Plans to Reopen the Building

Many patrons have been asking about resuming full library services and having access to the building itself. Taking the safety of patrons, staff, and the greater community into account, this is still far into the future as far as we know.

We will do our best to assist library patrons over the phone or by email in the meantime. Please feel free to get in touch. We miss you and the library routines and chats that we enjoy together.

Ready and willing: check out and pick up books with the library’s sidewalk service

Book Drop

Now that we have Sidewalk Service, our book drops are open those same hours, Tuesdays 2:30-5:30 pm and Thursdays 10:30 am-1:30 pm.

By offering limited hours, we’re able to avoid handling returned items right away in order to quarantine them. If you need to return large items that won’t fit in the book drops, please give us a call.

cussion book and potentially a trend in dating for souls of all ages. It’s essentially the anti-Tinder, and a beautifully written story.

Cheers to the Moment

While it feels odd keeping apart and not seeing you face-to-face, it makes library life a little sweeter knowing that we’re serving our patrons directly.

Staff are available for limited hours Monday through Thursday and will do our best to return your calls and This month’s pick is Our Souls at emails as soon as we can. Montecito Night by Kent Haruf, a short novel Library is teaming up with Carpinteria full of down-to-earth charm. Two wid- Library to be able to provide sidewalk owed seniors who live in the same service at both branches. It’s wonderneighborhood start a friendship that ful to be able to return to one of those develops into romance, much to the fun activities, picking up much anticismall town’s surprise. It brings with it pated library gems! poignant reflections about love, hapWe wish you well and look forward piness, and not buckling to the expec- to speaking with you or maybe seeing tations of others. you 4:26 fromPM afarPage one of MontJournal_July8th'20:Layout 1 7/7/20 1 these days in the This would be a great book-club dis- parking lot.

•MJ

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• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

25

What Would Bud Do?

by Steve Uhler

Steve Uhler is a longtime freelance writer, author and former nationally syndicated film critic. He’d like to dedicate this piece with love to his mom, Joyce Uhler, who has been there all along, and still knows best.

projects, I mentioned I’d long wanted to interview him and chat a little over the old days. That much was true; I prudently left out the imaginary friend part.

Two days later my phone rang, the voice on the other end sounding as familiar as yesterday: “Sure. Come on down, and we’ll chat our asses off.” At last, after half a century, the kid in me was going to meet his hero.

•••

S

Me and Billy Gray

ometimes providence pops up in the unlikeliest of places – even during pandemics. But who would have predicted that COVID-19 could make a childhood dream come true?

Like countless others during the initial days of stay-at-home lockdown, one of my Corona Coping Methods was binge-watching old television shows – peeling off the decades, gorging on reruns of Roseanne, devouring episodes of M*A*S*H and You Bet Your Life. But mostly I self-medicated with the cathode comfort food of my childhood, Father Knows Best.

The show had a lot going for it – sharp character-driven humor, intelligent writing, stellar production values – all tied up with uplifting confectionery moral lessons. It also took place in a world with no divorces, no racism, and family dinners that required shirt and tie. It was what they used to call “Quality Programming,” and even at age 10 I knew the show packed about as much nutrition and substance as a bowl of Cocoa Puffs. Still, both felt good going down.

In an epoch of TV trifles like Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best scratched a little deeper beneath the veneer of the

American nuclear family – like a short play by Thornton Wilder disguised as a domestic sitcom. In their way, the Anderson family was every bit as dysfunctional a unit as their more contemporary counterparts, The Conners.

These were complex, flawed characters, facing everyday moral conundrums. Most complicated of all was Bud, the misfit teenage son book-ended between two sisters. As portrayed by actor Billy Gray, Bud could be bad, and as a kid I could relate to that. I took vicarious delight in his scheming. Bud Anderson was the boyhood friend and big brother I never had.

Now, decades later and inching my way through month three in lockdown – idle and depressed – a wistful vision came to me: Wouldn’t it be cool to spend a day hanging with Bud Anderson? The kid in me craved a powwow with my old childhood hero – but it’s hard to book time with a fictional character from an ancient TV show.

Still, a kid wants what a kid wants.

Sending off a blind email, I reached out to Gray, now 82 and living a few miles down the coast in the same Topanga house that he bought for a song way back in 1957. Introducing myself as a writer currently between

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Finding his house on a warm June afternoon – a blink-and-you-missit multilevel cottage precariously perched over a vertigo-inducing ravine – I tentatively entered a steel gate leading to a sunken patio deck.

There in the shade sat a familiar figure. A little older, but still, well, recognizably Bud. Setting two chairs at a wrought-iron table in the shade overlooking the canyon, we measured out a comfortable distance, adhering to the new social distancing. I ask how he’s adapting to this new anything-but-normal paradigm.

I didn’t create Bud, but a lot of Bud was in me, no question.

“The pandemic? It hasn’t really altered my way of life much,” he says, sipping a glass of cranberry juice. “Except for the fact that I’m in the most vulnerable group. That’s given me pause,” he says, smiling, a hint of the old smart-ass Bud shining through. “But with a hopelessly insecure, incompetent, narcissistic sociopath at the helm – what is one to do?”

From the ‘40s to the mid-’50s Billy Gray was one of the busiest child actors in Hollywood, appearing in such films as In A Lonely Place, Jim Thorpe, All American, The Seven Little Foys’ and, most memorably, as Patricia Neal’s precocious son in the 1951 sci-fi classic, The Day The Earth Stood Still. In 1954, he auditioned for a part in a new TV series about an ordinary American family in a small Midwestern town— and the rest is pop culture history.

For better and worse, Father Knows Best is Gray’s lasting legacy, and he knows it. “It’s endeared me to a lot of blue-haired ladies, that’s for sure,” he says.

An intuitively naturalistic actor, Gray took a one-dimensional part and made it layered and nuanced, often tapping into his gift for deadpan physical comedy. As the series evolved, producers found more ways of incorporating Billy Gray’s real life traits and talents into Bud Anderson’s fictional ones, including his love of bongo playing and motorcycles. “I didn’t create Bud,” reflects Gray, “but a lot of Bud was in me, no question.”

In an era of squeaky-clean white bread teenagers on TV, Bud Anderson was something of a subversive anomaly. Simultaneously dim and Machiavellian, he was forever taking ill-advised ethical shortcuts down dark alleyways. Bud was self-absorbed, deceitful and manipulative – a template for every wise-ass teenage misfit. That’s why I liked him.

When I tell him that I related to Bud’s darker tendencies, Gray smiles.

“They did have him doing some pretty despicable things,” he confesses.

“But I just approached it as if, ‘Well, people are despicable. We’re capable of ugly traits. That’s part of being human.’ So I was trying to make this kid as human as is demonstrated every day by everybody else in the world. We are deceptive and selfish.

I didn’t try to shade it or make it into something it wasn’t. I went for the naivete of being human.”

By the time the series wrapped in 1960, Gray was ready to move on.

“I was actually tired of playing that character. This is where I think I was underestimated as an actor; I wasn’t getting offered anything other than Bud Anderson-type parts.”

Billy Gray, however, never had the chance to move on to bigger things.

Driving one afternoon in 1962, Gray was pulled over by a traffic cop. “I was trying to park and the cops came over,” he recalls. “I rolled down the window and they smelled a little odor.

They looked under the seat of my car, and there was a little baggie of seed and stems that I’d forgotten about.

That was the end of it. Busted.”

Seriously? Seeds and stems, but no Bud? In those days, being caught with

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“By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be boss and work twelve hours a day.” – Robert Frost

16 – 23 July 2020

marijuana was a career-destroying catastrophe. “I didn’t know quite how to handle it,” he recalls. “The way it went down was I pleaded no lo contend-re and got one-to-ten, suspended. I was with MCA at the time.

My agent said, ‘Nope. Can’t handle you anymore.’ And that was it.”

Overnight, the media relegated Gray to the same ward as dope pushers and addicts. Suddenly, there was no work.

People thought they could use our family as a model.

And that’s totally unfair to parents, and kids.

Fortunately, he was financially comfortable. He also had another passion – motorcycle racing, particularly the sport known as Class A Speedway Racing. Gray also had a gift for it, winning numerous trophies and titles during the ‘70s and ‘80s. It wasn’t Hollywood, but he was happy. When he talks about his racing years, his eyes light up.

Sixty years after Father Knows Best ceased production, Gray seems to have come to terms with his legacy as Bud Anderson. “I’m very proud of it. I did good work. In fact, I think that hurt me. I think people thought that Bud was who I was – that I wasn’t acting, that it was just me.

And it wasn’t.”

He still harbors ambivalent feelings over the show. “I’ve evolved over the years. I’ve received a lot of communication from out in the

world about how helpful people found the show. My first take on it was that they would always compare it to their own life – and comparison is invidious. People thought they could use our family as a model.

And that’s totally unfair to parents, and kids, to be compared to some idealized, fictitious TV characters.”

As afternoon morphed into evening we talked about many things: His lifelong friendship with TV mom, Jane Wyatt (“I was pall bearer at her funeral,” he says, choking up. “She was a wonderful, grand lady.”); being cast with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, only to lose the part due to his Father Knows Best commitments; recounting adventures getting lost in Peru while filming director Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, which very nearly lived up to its title. Watching the late afternoon sun slide down behind the hills, we sat like two reluctant Lions in Winter waxing over old times, until the cranberry juice was drained – as good a time as any to say goodbye.

Later, driving back home up 101 and feeling lighter than I had in months, I pondered this brave new world with suns that set too soon, handshakes that can kill, pot that can be purchased in boutique stores, and long-ago childhood wishes that come true – not free.

Glancing in my rear-view mirror at the invisible kid in the back seat, I asked out loud, “You happy now?”

“Yeah,” I heard a phantom voice say. “Thanks, Pops.”

If, as the saying goes, the child truly is father to the man, I had done good by my younger self. And, for once in this lost boy’s life, father really did know best.

•MJ

The best little paper in America (Covering the best little community anywhere!)

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16 – 23 July 2020

Brilliant Thoughts

by Ashleigh Brilliant Born London, 1933. Mother Canadian. Father a British civil servant. World War II childhood spent mostly in Toronto and Washington, D.C. Berkeley PhD. in American History, 1964. Living in Santa Barbara since 1973. No children.

Best-known for his illustrated epigrams, called “Pot-Shots”, now a series of 10,000.

Email ashleigh@west.net or visit www.ashleighbrilliant.com

I The Hero

P

eople sometimes flatter me by saying that I am their hero – because I have managed to make a living by the unconventional means of marketing my own thoughts. There may be some merit in inventing – so to speak – a new profession. But, in general terms, I don’t consider myself a heroic character. (But then, I know, most heroes don’t. When you see them interviewed on the news, they usually say something like, “I was just doing my job.”)

The original Hero, of Greek mythology, was actually not a man, but a woman – in fact, Hero was her name.

But – to make things a little more confusing – the true “hero” of her story was her lover, whose name was Leander.

They lived on opposite sides of the Hellespont (which separates Europe from Asia), and what Leander (whose home was at Abydos, on the Asiatic side) did that was truly heroic was to repeatedly swim across the strait to be with her. (The distance is only 4 ½ kilometers, but conditions there can be rough and perilous.) Eventually, however, his luck ran out, and, one dark night, on his way to another tryst with his true love, he lost his way, and drowned – causing Hero, when she saw his body washed up on the shore, to take her own life.

I myself am a person who tends to shrink from such trying situations, rather than getting involved in them.

But, at least once in my life, I found myself called upon to act what I have always looked back upon as the role of a hero. As a matter of fact, my own story also involves the crossing of a body of water in darkness. And this was in Asia – but thousands of miles from the Hellespont.

It happened some years ago, when Dorothy and I were in the Himalayan foothills of Nepal, as part of a tourgroup of eleven people from Santa Barbara, under the auspices of an agency called Distant Horizons. On this particular day, we’d had many exhausting hours of touring. (Curiously, tourists, despite the long hours and often very poor conditions, never get paid for all the work they have to put in.) It was evening, and we were all tired and hungry, arriving after dark at a hotel which happened to be situated on a small island in a lake.

Strange as it seemed, there was only one way to reach the hotel – by means of a ferry. But we were dismayed to find that the “ferry” consisted of noth-

• The Voice of the Village •

ing more trustworthy than a small, square, wooden raft, on which there was barely room for us all to stand, together with our luggage, and the native ferry-operator. And the only means of propulsion he had was simply by pulling on a long rope, which was connected to either shore.

The craft seemed dangerously overloaded, and would surely never have passed any safety inspection in the comfortable Western world which we had so recently left behind. There were no railings, let alone life-preservers, and as we were carried out into the darkness, we all shrank back as far as possible from the unprotected sides, where the water was literally lapping at our feet.

I could not only feel the fear in myself, but I could sense it in my companions.

This, we were no doubt all thinking, could so easily turn into some horrible headline in our hometown newspaper – one which we would never read.

I myself am a person who tends to shrink from such trying situations, rather than getting involved in them. But, at least once in my life, I found myself called upon to act what I have always looked back upon as the role of a hero Then it happened. Something suddenly moved me to start singing! – and I came out with what seemed the most appropriate song for the occasion – that rousing old spiritual, “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” with its beautiful message of faith in “crossing over” safely, to another shore, in a better world. Others joined in – and immediately, almost miraculously it seemed, the tension began to subside. For once, I had the radiant feeling that I had done the right thing at a critical time.

We all knew then that we were going to make it across. And we could even laugh when, after I came to the lines, Jordan River deep and wide – Hallelujah!

Milk and honey on the other side – Hallelujah!

One of the more rotund ladies in the group, who had been listening, but not singing, exclaimed feelingly, “Milk and Honey! – is that all?” Like the rest of us, she was clearly looking forward (at least that night) to something more substantial on that other shore.

•MJ MONTECITO JOURNAL

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THANK YOU MONTECITO FOR ANOTHER YEAR OF WILDFIRE PREPAREDNESS!

T

he community of Montecito is recognized across the nation as a leader in community wildfire protection and the Montecito Fire Department would like to thank all of our residents for their continued contributions in preparing for wildfires. The Montecito Fire Department has partnered with district residents to prepare for approaching wildfire seasons through the Neighborhood Fire Prevention Project for almost two decades. The project focuses on reducing the density of vegetation along strategic portions of roadways and private properties. The main goal is to assist community members in increasing what is referred to as “defensible space” around infrastructure most at risk from wildfire. Creating defensible space around these areas has shown to greatly decrease the odds of sustaining damage to community values during a wildfire. Vegetation reduction is encouraged along driveways and roadways to provide safer evacuation corridors for community members. Reducing the amount of combustible material near roadways and homes provides first responders safe access and limits the fire intensity in areas they will be working during a wildfire event.

This program, which provides no-cost chipping to strategic neighborhoods to assist homeowners in maintaining defensible space is based on a “you cut, we chip” model and is often referred to as the “Neighborhood Chipping Program”. Home owners are responsible for cutting and gathering vegetation from around their homes and piling it at a roadside location. The annual project starts with each property owner receiving a Neighborhood Fire Prevention Project mailer identifying the specific dates the project will be in each participating neighborhood. The mailer provides specific instructions identifying the responsibilities of the property owner, such as where to prioritize their efforts and how best to prepare their trimmings for removal. One week prior to the start of the project the Department places signs throughout the participating neighborhoods and delivers Marborg roll-off dumpsters to designated locations. Signs placed next to each dumpster explain that it is provided strictly for vegetation unsuited for the chipper such as palm fronds, succulents, vines, grasses, and leaves. The Department contracts with a local vendor, Eco Tree Works, which chips all appropriate material and then hauls the chips away from the property. By providing free on-site chipping, the Montecito Fire Department empowers community members to take concrete steps that protect their homes from wildfire.

2020 NEIGHBORHOOD FIRE PREVENTION RESULTS

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n its 21st year, the program yielded outstanding results, surpassing the already strong participation and total volume of material collected in years past. When the Fire Prevention Bureau staff compared participation maps from previous years, they observed that wildfire mitigation activities are contagious!

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16 – 23 July 2020

2020 CHIPPING

BY THE NUMBERS

Chipping Program Participants: 320 households Participation Increase Over 2019: 60% increase in participation and a 40% increase in the weight of vegetation removed Vegetation Piles: 900 piles Service Areas: 9 neighborhoods, all within the Very High Fire Severity Zone Passes through the Community: Chipping crews spent 3-10 days in each neighborhood Project Duration: The program ran for ten weeks beginning on March 2nd and ending on July 2nd Fuels Reduction: 315 tons of woody biomass were chipped and 55 tons of vegetation were removed through the roll-off dumpsters

NEIGHBORHOOD FIRE PREVENTION PROJECTS MOVING FORWARD

T

he chipping program has been funded by the Montecito Fire Department’s annual Wildland Fire Prevention budget with the exception of a grant received in 2012. The Department recently received notice that the Neighborhood Fire Prevention Project was selected to receive three years of funding through the California Climate Investments Fire Prevention Grant Program. The state grant aims to invest funds in projects that reduce risk of wildland fires to habitable structures and communities, while maximizing carbon sequestration in healthy wildland habitats. The Department was successful in receiving the grant funding due, in large part, to the tremendous community support for the Neighborhood Fire Prevention Project. Currently, this program is only for select neighborhoods within the Very High Fire Severity Zones. The Department will utilize the supplemental funding to continue to expand the project into additional neighborhoods in 2021. If you wish to have a chipping day for your neighborhood, please contact one of the Wildland Fire Specialists, Nic Elmquist or Maeve Juarez at (805) 969-7762.

The Montecito Fire Department would like to extend our gratitude to all participants who made the 2020 Neighborhood Fire Prevention Project a great success! Our partnership is helping create a more fire adaptive Montecito while continuing to increase the resiliency of our adjacent wildland landscapes. In our continuing effort to prevent wildfires, we would like to remind you that fireworks are never allowed within the district.

For more information regarding wildfire preparedness and/or to provide comments on the project, please visit http://www.montecitofire.com.

16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

29

GOLDEN STATE KILLER (Continued from page 20)

For more than 25 years, the DomingoSanchez case went unsolved. So did a seemingly unrelated double homicide that had occurred on October 1, 1979, in a Goleta condominium complex on Avenida Pequena. A popular local physician, Robert Offerman, and his girlfriend, area psychologist Debra Manning, were found shot and killed.

Area law enforcement followed up several leads in both cases, but no suspects were arrested.

“The community was shocked, and so was I,” said retired Montecito attorney Bill Allen, who was living next door to Offerman at the time.

“Everyone thought it was a local perpetrator, though. No one even came close to guessing what turned out to be the truth.”

Another double homicide was committed on March 13, 1980 in Ventura, when Charlene Smith, 33, and her husband Lyman Smith, 43, were Debbi Domingo, after a long day at the hearing found bludgeoned to death in their where DeAngelo pled guilty to murdering mother, home. Shoelace ligatures were found. Cheri Charlene had been raped. A rape kit was used and the perpetrator’s semen was frozen – a move that nearly 35 years later, would ultimately prove the key to solving the case.

In May, 1980, Keith Harrington, 24, and his wife Patrice, 27, were found beaten to death in Dana Point. Patrice had been raped and shoelaces were found.

Yet, another rape-murder was reported on February 6, 1981 in Irvine, the victim 28-year-old Manuela Witthuhn. A final rape-bludgeoning death was reported on May 4, 1986, when the body of Janelle Cruz, 18, was found in her home in Irvine. She had been beaten so severely many of her teeth were found in her stomach.

DeAngelo’s history of crimes are well-chronicled now, although some things are still being revealed. For example, his father, Army Air Force Sgt. Joseph DeAngelo Sr., won medals in WWII, but was physically abusive to his wife, according to one family account. She, in turn, reportedly abused her children. Joseph Sr. was transferred to Mather Air Force Base in Rancho Cordova in 1959.

DeAngelo played baseball at Folsom High. Pictures of him then showed a fresh-faced teenager, seemingly the all-American boy. In 1964, he gained his GED and enlisted in the US Navy, spending 22 months in Viet Nam. His title then was “Damage Control Officer.” He was honorably discharged and then attended the California State University at Sacramento where he graduated with honors – and a criminal justice degree. He then married Sharon Huddle, who became a leading family law attorney in Sacramento. She reportedly left him in the early 1990s, after his crime spree had apparently stopped. They have three grown daughters.

In May 1973, DeAngelo joined the police department in Exeter, a small town near Visalia. Shortly afterward, his picture appeared in the local paper for his role in arresting four burglary suspects.

However, reports of odd burglaries during which bedrooms were ransacked and underwear often strewn around the house began to skyrocket in the area.

The thief quickly earned a nickname, “The Visalia Ransacker.” That crime spree ended after local journalism professor Claude Snelling was shot and killed trying to prevent the masked “Ransacker” from kidnapping his young, teenage

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Brain-damaged, Abused, or Just Born Evil?

T

he biggest unanswered question now that Joseph DeAngelo has admitted to being the Golden State Killer, is what compelled him to commit murder and mayhem for decades?

Three potential questions emerge: was he brain-damaged; was he terribly abused as a child; or was he just born evil?

Sacramento homicide detective Carol Daly, who first worked on the case in 1976, said, “I feel in my heart he was just born evil.”

Carl Stincelli, an investigator who has also been involved with the case since the mid-1970s, agreed with Daly. “He is one of the evilest men ever to walk the planet,” Stincelli said. “He was just born that way.” Four other California investigators echoed the same answer.

Finally, Dr. Peter Yellowlees, a renowned professor of psychiatry at UC Davis, was asked for his scientific opinion. “Some people have a singular goal in life and that is destruction,” Yellowlees said. “You can diagnose them all you want from a scientific point of view, but the bottom line is they are pure evil.”

When Kelley Duncan, Chief Assistant District Attorney for Santa Barbara County was asked that question, she hesitated only for a moment. “I think you have to go with what the doctor says. Joseph DeAngelo is an evil, evil man.”

daughter. DeAngelo pleaded guilty to that murder last week. Records show DeAngelo attended extension classes at the College of the Sequoias, where Snelling taught.

At that time, DeAngelo was not a suspect in the murder, and he moved back to the Sacramento area where he was hired by the Auburn Police Department.

It was from that position that he launched his terror on Sacramento.

DeAngelo began breaking into houses and raping the female occupants – sometimes as many as five times per month in 1975 and 1976. His MO was the same in each case, mask, flashlight, knife or gun, shoelace or twine ligatures and terror and domination. Sometimes he would stick the point of his knife into the female victim’s face to make sure she complied with his demands. He was nicknamed “The East Area Rapist (EAR)” by the media.

“He raped and terrorized the city for two years,” said Carl Stincelli, who was on a special team formed to catch him in 1976. “We all worked overtime and had helicopters and everything else out looking for him. We checked out thousands of suspects, but we couldn’t catch him.”

What they did not know was DeAngelo was perhaps informed about the Sacramento law enforcement strategies by an unwitting friend in the Sacramento Police Department.

In 1976 the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories loaned their computer system – one of the largest in the world at that time – to Sacramento law enforcement to help them track down the EAR. He continued to elude them, however, often by escaping down the American River Parkway on stolen bicycles.

Last week, DeAngelo admitted to killing two people, newlyweds Brian and Katie Maggiore, who had the misfortune of witnessing DeAngelo try to break into a house in Rancho Cordova while they were walking their dog.

Brian was a young officer at Mather Air Force Base. DeAngelo stopped his crime spree in Sacramento after that, but continued to prowl, peep and rape in Modesto, Stockton and then the East Bay area. Thinking he was a newly emerging criminal, law enforcement there nicknamed him “The Original Night Stalker.”

Shortly afterward, DeAngelo was fired from the Auburn Police Department after being arrested for shoplifting. He was caught stealing dog repellent and a hammer.

Why DeAngelo came to Goleta in 1979 from Sacramento is unclear. How and why he targeted Cheri Domingo and Debra Manning is also unclear. Reports, which Duncan would not confirm or deny, are that tiny blue paint chips were found at both Goleta murder sites. At the time, a building where CVS now stands in the Calle Real Shopping Center was being painted a blue color. It could be that DeAngelo was working as a painting contractor for a time in Goleta. What is known is he used San Jose Creek, which runs near both murder sites, in much the same way he had used the American River Parkway – as his highway to murder. He attempted a robbery-rape near Toltec Way before he killed Offerman and Manning, but his intended victims in that case escaped and called for help. DeAngelo pedaled away on a stolen bicycle and disappeared.

Much has been written on the clever DNA website trick used to ultimately catch DeAngelo. In 2016, after a new book had given the still unknown rapist-murderer a new name, “The Golden State Killer,” analysts decided to try something new to catch him. The rape kit DNA from the Smith murders in Ventura was accessed

“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.” – Robert Frost

16 – 23 July 2020

and a profile – which is like a DNA fingerprint – was found.

Led by Contra Costa County investigator Paul Holes, the DNA profile was put on GEDmatch, a website used to help people track down their relatives.

With the help of a genealogist, the team soon built a family tree belonging to the killer and painstakingly eliminated everyone but a 72-year-old man still living in Citrus Heights – DeAngelo. After DeAngelo’s DNA was harvested from his garbage can and other places, investigators confirmed that his DNA and the killer’s were a perfect match. Joseph James DeAngelo was the Visalia Ransacker, the East Area Rapist, the Original Night Stalker, and the Golden State Killer. He was arrested in his home on April 24, 2018.

He remained in the Sacramento County Jail without talking for nearly two years before asking for the plea bargain.

Duncan was pleased with the outcome. “Joyce Dudley had a great deal to do with it,” said Duncan. “Her leadership was crucial to make sure every family member of the victims in Santa Barbara County, and all the others throughout California, were able to witness justice being done.”

For Debbi Domingo, the journey back to emotional health was a long one.

After moving to Texas, her brother talked her into going back to church. “I remember walking in, so timidly, and sitting in the back row. I didn’t even know if I belonged there because I had let my mother down.”

Like many of the victims of DeAngelo, she prayed investigators would find her mother’s killer. Against all odds, those prayers were answered. It has been a long road back for Domingo, who finally forgave herself. “I realize now had I been home, I probably would have been killed as well. It took me a long time to accept that.”

She was able to get off drugs two decades ago and went to work for the Texas Department of Corrections. She has been married to her husband, Kerry, for 16 years. They have five grown children and their seventh and eighth grandchildren are on the way.

“It was surreal sitting there listening to DeAngelo admit to all the details regarding the murder of my mother, Greg and all the others,” she said. “The prosecutors did a brilliant job of painting a true picture of what he did. It was horrific and grueling to listen to, but now, at last, maybe we can find some peace with what happened.”

A hearing that will allow all victims to express themselves to DeAngelo and the court is scheduled in Sacramento for the middle of August.

•MJ

WADE WEISSMANN ARCHITECTURE GROWS ITS PRESENCE IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, NAMES LEADER OF THE CALIFORNIA OFFICE

A

s the founder and principal of Wade Weissmann Architecture, (WWA), Wade has spent the last twenty years designing classically inspired estates of many genres around the world. With roots and a main office in his hometown of Milwaukee, clients led him to Southern California seven years ago, and the amazing clients, projects and beautiful natural setting has WWA fostering growth in the Southern California market. In addition to both Wade and his Executive Business Strategist, Kate Rasmussen, spending more time in the region and overseeing their Southern California projects, a new full-time contact and leader of the California office has been selected, Andrew Petrovsky.

1025 Castillo Street, Santa Barbara, CA 93101 (805) 845-7654 | wadeweissmannarchitecture.com

M O N T EC I TO, CALIFORN IA

Location, Location, Location | 1437 South Jameson Lane Once part of the Esther Fiske Hammond “Bonnymede” estate, this approx. 3.27 acre estate site is superbly located on the ocean side of the freeway in Montecito between the Rosewood “Miramar” and Four Seasons “Biltmore” hotels and a short walk to Miramar Beach. Never before built upon and with all utilities on site, this building site is ready to become someone’s new estate. Set behind private gates, this parcel offers privacy, sweeping mountain views. Minutes from shopping, dining and churches, this location offers the very best in Montecito living. Call Greg for a private tour of the property and get ready to build your dream house.

SOU TH JA M ESO N .CO M

Greg Tice

Offered at $5,575,000

Greg.Tice@sothebyshomes.com 805.886.0121

© Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. All rights reserved. Sotheby’s International Realty® is a registered trademark. This material is based upon information which we consider reliable but because it has been supplied by third parties, we cannot represent that it is accurate or complete and it should not be relied upon as such. This offering is subject to errors, omissions, changes including price or withdrawal without notice. If your property is listed with a real estate broker, please disregard. It is not our intention to solicit the offerings of other real estate brokers. We are happy to work with them and cooperate fully. Operated by Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. Real estate agents affiliated with Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. are independent contractor sales associates and are not employees of Sotheby’s International Realty, Inc. Equal Housing Opportunity. Greg Tice DRE: 462018

16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

31

ENTERTAINMENT (Continued from page 15)

sics (A League of Their Own, The Karate Kid, and Friday Night Lights) along with a pair of documentaries (Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable and Pelé) and the Jackie Robinson biopic 42, which forms a baseball double header, er, feature, with the much-beloved tear jerking comedy Field of Dreams. Softball, soccer, martial arts and football join baseball as the backbone sports for the series that encompasses such uplifting messages as the value of believing in yourself, being part of a team, supporting the underdog, coming back from a devastating injury, and turning a healing vision into reality.

Gates open at 7:30 pm, one hour before the screenings start, and the events boast food trucks, goodies from the concession stand and live entertainment before the features roll.

Visitors are reminded to wear masks and maintain a distance of six feet from others when outside of your cars.

For more information, call (805) 8933535 or visit www.ArtsAndLectures.

UCSB.edu.

Concerts in Your Car

This innovative concept to keep live music happening during the COVID-19 crisis has turned the massive parking lot at the Ventura County Fairgrounds into a site for “pop”-up entertainment. The Concerts in Your Car drive-in series features two or three live performances each week that people can enjoy from the comfort and safety of their own vehicles and still get a great view of the action as each show finds the acts performing on a tall, 360-degree view stage plus live digital projection on multiple giant screens.

The schedule for the next fortnight includes John Jorgenson Bluegrass Band, featuring former members of The Desert Rose Band, on July 16; a triple bill with Fishbone, Ozomatli and Rey Fresco on July 18; Journey tribute band DSB (Don’t Stop Believin’) on July 23; ‘90s pop sensation Third Eye Blind, who are still enjoying the “SemiCharmed Life” nearly a quarter-century after their six-times platinum debut; and an AC/DC tribute group Noise Pollution on July 30.

Rubicon Goes Retro, the theater company’s adjunct series at the same site, continues July 20-22 with 2 AM at the Sands, starring veteran Broadway leading man Andrew Samonsky backed by a nine-piece swing band performing Quincy Jones arrangements of a sampling of Sinatra songs (“I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” “Fly Me to the Moon”) along with “Amore” and other favorites from his late-’60s Las Vegas Rat Pack buddies. Adding a local flavor, Samonsky is a Ventura native who has starred on Broadway and elsewhere in South Pacific, The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Bridges of Madison County. Call

32 MONTECITO JOURNAL

(805) 648-3376 or visit www.concert sinyourcar.com.

Play Reading Season Launches on Zoom at UCSB

After the sensational success this spring of UCSB Launch Pad’s Alone, Together project that found more than 20 past playwrights-in-resident contributing short original works created to be performed and directed by theater students and faculty over Zoom, the 2020 Summer Reading Series: New Plays in Process might seem a bit anticlimactic. But don’t sell the season short as the powerful program packs a lot into its four weeks, with a quartet of professional playwrights joining the UC Santa Barbara community as artists-in-residence in a collaboration with Artistic Director Risa Brainin and a team of undergraduate students and local actors.

The format provides a hands-on experience for the students and professionals to participate in the creative process in real time, with the young artists also being able to explore such areas as stage management, dramaturgy, lighting, costume, sound and scenic design in addition to acting, all while being mentored. The students also get the experience of offering ideas to the playwright as the script evolves before each week-long collaboration culminates in a public reading. The whole thing serves as an incubator to put plays and playwrights in the pipeline for Launch Pad’s longer preview productions during the academic year.

The 2020 season kicks off on Friday, July 17, with Once Upon A Family by Barbara Lebow, a past Launch Pad playwright whose earlier collaborations include Plumfield, Iraq, La Niñera, the Nursemaid and Killing Spiders.

Local thespians Julie Fishell and Ann Torsiglieri join the student cast for the 7 pm reading of the work that examines the lives of a multi-generational, middle-American family that are forever changed when they are abruptly thrown into the aftermath of a deadly shooting.

Linda Alper’s Shanghai, which will be read on July 24 and directed by Sara Rademacher, is part adventure story, part coming-of-age and part exploration of a fascinating, nearly forgotten, piece of history where the city was the only place that took in visa-less European Jews in the decade surrounding World War II. Set for a staged reading on Friday, July 31, James Still’s THE CRATCHITS (in America) is an imaginative parallel story to Charles Dickens’ famed A Christmas Carol, set in a declining American city called Dickens, where a family of broken relationships with the same name is trying to find ways to repair and move forward.

The series comes to a close at 4 pm

on Saturday, August 8, with a reading of Elocutia Do(es) Pygmalion by Cheryl L. West, a veteran playwright and TV scribe whose previous works include Broadway’s Play On! and The Watsons Go To Birmingham - 1963, previously workshopped at UCSB. A Black riff on Shaw’s Pygmalion with comic twists and turns and sharpeyed observations about race, class, and language-based identity, West’s new effort finds Elocutia meeting Professor Herbert on the University of Chicago campus, where he tries to tame her wild tongue as she teaches him about being of his authentic self, comic twists and turns and sharpeyed observations about race, class, and language-based identity.

A Q&A session with all of each week’s artists follows the weekly staged readings, which can be seen at https:// ucsb.zoom.us/j/99608151740. Details at https://launchpad.theaterdance. ucsb.edu/reading-series/2020.

Online ‘Personal’s

Center Stage Theater’s daily Digital Arts Festival came to a close back in May, with the daily doses of videos, photos and interviews with local artists of all kinds to share their creative processes and samples of their work perhaps set to return later this summer. In the meantime, a Quarantine Edition of Speaking of Stories’ Personal Stories presentations has taken its place. The series features true stories in a variety of genres, each performed by their authors, who may be professional writers or actors or neither. This Zoom-only series of performances are being released as pay-per-view videos that were filmed at Center Stage’s black box theater (yes, with lots of social distancing and sanitizing). Meredith Brace, Carolyn Butcher, Tom Hinshaw, Kathy Marden, and Dale Griffiths Stamos are the storytellers for the current second installment. Catch them, or find out more details, at www.

CenterStageTheater.org.

Supreme Solicitor Speaks

Theodore B. Olson, the former Solicitor General of the United States from 2001-2004 during President George W. Bush’s first term, who prevailed in more than 75 percent of the 65 cases he has argued in the Supreme Court, will conduct a conversation with representatives of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum that will be livestreamed on YouTube at 4 pm on Friday, July 17. Olson’s most famous cases include the Bush v Gore showdown arising out of the disputed 2000 presidential election and his most recent win, U.S. Dept of Homeland Security v Regents of the University of California, in which he challenged

“Older people shouldn’t eat health food, they need all the preservatives they can get.” – Robert Orben

the Trump Administration’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (“DACA”). In between, Olson joined his Bush v Gore opponent in bridging the political chasm to fight California’s Prop. 8 ban on same-sex marriage, which resulted in nationwide legalization for such marriages in 2013.

Other upcoming talks through the Reagan Library this month include No. 1 New York Times bestselling author of 20 thrillers Brad Thor talking about his latest book Near Dark: A Thriller (The Scot Harvath Series Book 20) on July 21; Fox News host, former editor of Men’s Health magazine and author Greg Gutfeld whose new book, The Plus: Self Help for People Who Hate Self Help, will be published four days after his July 24 appearance; Karl Rove, the former senior advisor to President George W. Bush and “The Architect” of Bush’s two successful campaigns, who will discuss the possible outcomes and implications of the 2020 presidential and congressional elections on July 26; and Maryland Governor and chairman of the National Governors Association Larry Hogan on the launch date for his new book, Still Standing: Surviving Cancer, Riots, a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics that Divide America, on July 28.

All the events are available for free viewing online at www.YouTube.com/ ReaganFoundation. Visit www.rea ganfoundation.org/programs-events.

Sundays With the Symphony

The Santa Barbara Symphony next episode of its live streamed series is the first to feature its former concertmaster of a decade, the almost unbearably charismatic fiddler Gilles Apap. Curated and hosted

by Music and Artistic Director Nir Kabaretti, the 30-minute broadcast, produced by local videographer David Bazemore, features an interview and performance of Fritz Kreisler’s Schön Rosmarin by the virtuosic violinist, plus current symphony cellist Paula Fehrenbach teaming with Brian Head for the guitarist’s arrangement of Villa-Lobos’ Aria from Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5; mezzo soprano Nina Yoshida Nelsen singing “The Card Aria” from Bizet’s Carmen with Joshua Quinn on piano; and the Israeli pianists Sivan Silver and Gil Garburg – who last appeared at the Granada just this past January – performing RimskyKorsakov’s Scheherazade, Movement I. The episode will be screened live at 3:30 pm on July 19 and can also be accessed via the Symphony website at https://www.thesymphony.org/ livestream. A follow-up watch party will be presented on the Symphony’s Facebook page (www.facebook.com/ SantaBarbaraSymphony) at 7 pm. •MJ 16 – 23 July 2020

ON THE RECORD (Continued from page 8)

crime and homelessness. “The city wasn’t doing anything and we had more of these damn things opening up than Starbucks. It was out of control.”

After doing a quick Google search, Byrne found herself on the line with the Justice Department. “I just called them up,” she said. “I asked them, ‘Can you come up and enforce the law?’ I mean, if I started a stall and sold pot on the street, nobody would stop me.”

According to Byrne, once the U.S. Attorney looked into her complaint and prosecutors began sending stamped letters to the offending dispensaries and their landlords, the illegal dispensaries were soon gone. “Within a month they were up here,” she said of the feds. “But that was 2012, a different world, before legal pot.”

Greetings, Greater L.A.!

In his KCRW interview this week, a relaxed sounding Williams didn’t hesitate to defend his relationship with those lobbyists, although he found their frequent requests for meetings “annoying.” That said, he had no qualms about those campaign contributions, in fact quite the opposite. “Most of the people that grow marijuana in my community, Carpinteria,” he told Chiotakis, “are the same flower growers, old Dutch flower growers, that are pillars of the community. They fund Girls Inc., the Boys and Girls Club, the school district. I don’t have a problem with their support.”

Look, it’s legal, yeah, but it kind of smells bad.

Williams even went so far as to characterize the massive explosion of marijuana farming in Carpinteria as a major success. “The process has been enormously good for the community and the county,” he said, adding that despite many county residents losing jobs during the pandemic, the cannabis industry, which Governor Gavin Newsom has ruled “essential” to California’s economy, was keeping people working. “We have 5,000 jobs that aren’t going away,” Williams claimed, adding that anyone grateful for any social service in Santa Barbara should essentially thank him for raising millions in tax revenue via the cannabis crop.

More Dispensaries?

In some ways it’s easy to see why Williams seems so unconcerned.

Looking back over the past four years, it’s clear that the U.S. government’s anti-marijuana policy has changed radically since a majority of California voters legalized recreational marijuana for adults in November 2016. The illegal dispensaries that used to operate are gone, and there are only two legal dispensaries currently operating in Santa Barbara, with none in Montecito, Summerland, or Carpinteria.

But on June 29, Santa Barbara County issued a press release stating that it was holding a series of community meetings aimed at getting public input for adding several more dispensaries throughout the county. Every area in the county with its own community plan must participate in the hearings, including Isla Vista, Santa Ynez Valley, Toro Canyon/Summerland, Orcutt, Eastern Goleta Valley, and Los Alamos.

Montecito, it’s worth mentioning, is not on that list. At first, sources said, county officials indicated they might locate a dispensary in the parking lot adjacent to the CVS Pharmacy, but supervisors, including Williams, quickly scuttled the idea. “Montecito was exempted thanks to a quirk in the county code,” Byrne explained. “Our business district is so weird; it’s all locals,” she said. “It’s not a suitable site.”

While Carpinteria isn’t on that list either, local residents are of course far more concerned about the unchecked growth of cannabis farms and the never-ending odor. “I always call people and ask about the smells,” said one resident who asked not to be identified by name.

Although complaints seem to have gone down lately, she thinks some of it has to do with people staying indoors as much as possible. “With this COVID thing, I am not out as much,” she said. “But there are still people who have been trying to sell their house for years and they’ve had just terrible complaints about the smell.”

Another resident who acknowledged signing the complaint letter sent to the U.S. Attorney’s office six months ago insisted that the feds are indeed taking the matter seriously. “To me, the grows around the high school are in violation of federal law saying you can’t grow within 1,000 feet, but why would you grow marijuana near schools, period?” the person asked. “This is what the US Attorney is investigating: the health issues, the sheer greed.”

•MJ 16 – 23 July 2020

VILLAGE BEAT (Continued from page 12)

Barbara location. The company is now working on opening a second location at La Cumbre Plaza and plans to open additional locations throughout Southern California over the next few years. Seda plans on hosting free informational workshops from the La Cumbre location, tapping into her educational background to provide information on such issues as toxins in cosmetics, acne, hormonal effects on the skin, and more. Seda is the author of two skincare books, currently available for purchase on Amazon in her native Turkish language.

The shop on Coast Village Road is open Monday through Saturday from 10 am to 6 pm. Appointments for the SkincareID Skin Analysis sessions are highly recommended and can be made by calling the shop or booking online on the company’s website.

All sanitary precautions are strictly upheld.

Seda Custom Skincare is located 1125 Coast Village Road, Montecito.

For more information or for an appointment call 805-978-5788 or visit the company’s website at www.

SedaCustomSkincare.com.

In Business: Harbor Hills

Conner Rehage, President and CEO of Harbor Hills Financial Advisors, has recently opened a branch of his company in Montecito’s upper village; the office is the second location for the locally-grown business.

“I’ve always wanted to be here in Montecito, as I’ve been involved in the community for many years,” Rehage said during a recent visit to the office, which shares a space with Muzinich Law Group.

The family-friendly office space is now home to Rehage and his team, which includes Senior Financial Advisor and Partner Tony Purpero and Financial Advisor Sarai Anderson. The team provides financial advice to clients at all wealth levels, and provides a much different relationship than advisors who work directly for a national bank, according to Rehage. From educational and retirement planning, to individual stock selection, fiduciary analysis, risk analysis and behavioral coaching, wealth preservation, wealth transfer, estate planning, insured products, charitable planning and hedge funds, the team handles it all.

Rehage grew up in Goleta and attended SBCC and Chico State, only to return to his Santa Barbara roots and work for Edward Jones Investments right out of college.

He quickly took over the Montecito office at age 23, growing the company’s assets in Montecito to more than five times the highest amount they’d ever been. “I have the benefit of start-

• The Voice of the Village •

The Harbor Hills team at their new Montecito office: Senior Financial Advisor and Partner Tony Purpero, President and CEO Conner Rehage, and Financial Advisor Sarai Anderson

ing in this business young, which has enabled me to grind and build relationships,” he said.

Conner eventually left Edward Jones to help take over his father’s life and health insurance company, The Rehage Organization, after his father’s passing. He quickly wanted to get back into managing money, and in 2019 he formed Harbor Hills, opening two offices in Santa Barbara.

Harbor Hills finds success in investing in individual stocks instead of funds, Rehage explained. “Our investment style is to own the winners, such as Apple and Amazon,” he said. “95 percent of advisors go towards passive funds, where we are focused on clear winners, which tend to be technology-type companies.”

One of his longtime clients sings his praises: “Having gone through numerous money managers over many years – from the Wells Fargo and Bank of America private banks to Dean Whitter, and many others, I can tell you that there is no one that can hold a candle to Conner. His judgment, knowledge, loyalty, and performance are far above and beyond all the rest,” he said.

Rehage is a familiar fixture in many community organizations, including the Montecito Rotary and Montecito’s Beautification Committee and Village Fourth Committee. His family life is also busy: Conner and his wife, Gianna, a nurse at Cottage Hospital, have a two-year-old son, Preston, and are expecting their second baby later this year.

For more information about Harbor Hills, visit www.harbor-hills.com.

The Montecito office is located at 1485 East Valley Road, Suite 2. Conner Rehage can be reached at 805-6808879.

•MJ MONTECITO JOURNAL

33

Calla’s Corner

by Calla Jones Corner

Advances in treatment have led to better outcomes such as this

Calla Jones Corner moved with her husband, Richard, to Montecito in 2007. Before that, she had been the Swiss Correspondent for The International Herald Tribune and The Associated Press from 1972-1984, writing from Lausanne. From 1984-1989 she was a stringer for The Wall Street Journal, European Edition, writing from Brussels. Her articles and stories have appeared in Gourmet Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Writer’s Digest, Cape Cod Life, and many other publications here and abroad.

Mastering Melanoma

In for the skin: Dr. Burnett (left) and Dr. Davis at the Elings Oncology Building, home of the RidleyTree Cancer Center

W

hen a young, skilled dermatological surgeon asks if you mind “talking shop” with his assistant while he takes out a squamous-cell skin cancer from your forehead, you answer, “No, I don’t mind.” Especially if you’re a writer and the doctor took out a melanoma on your forearm just nine months before.

When that doctor, answers “chicken breasts and pigs’ feet” to the question of “what do dermatologists practice on in residency?”, that writer has a story that should be told.

The doctor is Mark Burnett, a 38-year-old Santa Barbaran.

Doctor Burnett and his colleague, Dr. Julian Davis, an oncology cancer specialist, recently gave a lecture to the community (virtually) on how to spot and treat skin cancer as part of the Ridley-Tree Cancer Center Lecture Series. The lecture’s emphasis was on melanoma, the deadliest form, which is seeing a rise in cases here in Santa Barbara and around the country. Both doctors are on the staff of Cottage Hospital.

Born and raised in Santa Barbara, Dr. Burnett is a board-certified dermatologist and fellowship-trained Mohs micrographic surgeon at the Santa Barbara Skin Institute. Dr. Julian Davis is a Medical Oncologist at the Ridley-Tree Cancer Center. He is a published oncology researcher, and has a special interest in hematologic malignancies and advanced cutaneous cancers like melanoma.

The good news I got from the eminent doctors’ lecture is that detecting melanoma has evolved to such a degree over the past 15 years that most melanomas are now caught at their earliest stage. Innovations in Mohs surgery have vastly improved surgical cure rates and advancements in systemic medications means

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34 MONTECITO JOURNAL

and

that even those with Stage 4 melanoma have dramatically better outcomes.

The bad news is that many people still don’t take the necessary precautions to prevent skin cancer and that there are many doctors who do not have access to the training required for recognizing the early stages of melanoma or who are not yet aware of the revolutionary new detection methods and medical treatments available.

Though the causes of skin cancer have been known, or at least suspected, for decades, what is not generally known is why cases of melanoma have increased significantly here in the U.S. Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is thought to be one of the primary drivers of this recent trend. The WHO classifies UV radiation and tanning beds as “Group 1” in carcinogens along with cigarettes and plutonium.

The risk of melanoma increases by 35 percent in those who have used a tanning bed 10 or more times in their lifetime and jumps to 75 percent for those who used them before the age of 35.

People over 50, like myself, who as teenagers and young adults didn’t take sun exposure seriously and bought into the lore that a tan made you more attractive, are partially responsible for the increase in melanoma incidence. I never used a tanning bed, but I was a keen sailor, hiker, and skier.

Mohs surgery is a method that uses microscopically controlled layers around a skin cancer to ensure complete removal of all cancer cells, which can look like nothing more than a tiny, odd-looking white pimple to the naked eye (as was my case). While many dermatologists learn Mohs surgery in their residencies, only a handful are selected each year to undertake a one or two-year dedicated fellowship after their dermatology training. Dr. Burnett says, “Mohs surgery provides the highest cure rates for skin cancer because 100 percent of the surgical margin around the entire tumor is examined by the Mohs surgeon.”

More Mohs

When my first squamous cell cancers were diagnosed in New York over two decades ago, there was only one Mohs surgeon in Manhattan. The cancer had spread locally but significantly. I was fortunate that it could be excised with Mohs surgery, but I was left with a noticeable scar over my left eyebrow. For the second squamous removal, I underwent Mohs surgery and was referred to a gifted oculoplastic surgeon who repaired the surgery on my lower eyelid in his office. I lost my eyelashes, but there is no scar.

Dr. Burnett believes that, “Mohs surgery fellowships have come a long way in the last twenty years and fellowship-trained surgeons are among the most skilled at facial reconstruction following Mohs surgery, because that is all we do each day.”

He adds, however, “There are only about 1,500 fellowship-trained Mohs surgeons in the entire country and among this group only a small group of fellowships provide training to treat melanoma with Mohs surgery, which is more complex, technically, to treat than other skin cancers”.

I can attest to the evolution in Mohs surgery. The procedure performed by Dr. Burnett to remove my third squamous cell carcinoma resulted in a hole nearly one-inch in diameter in my forehead, which he reconstructed with an imperceptible outcome, as if nothing ever happened there.

Dr. Burnett says that 90 percent of melanomas do not arise from known genetic mutations, but are from sporadic mutations as a result of environmental factors such as excessive UV radiation, or increased susceptibility to UV radiation that comes with having traits such as fair skin that burns easily, red or blond hair and freckles. “However,” he says, “melanoma can appear in those who have no known risk factors, indicating that there is still a lot we do not know about the pathogenesis and development of melanoma.”

The goal of the dermatologist, Dr. Burnett says, is to detect melanoma in its early stages so that only surgery is required to excise the cancer. He emphasizes that avoiding unnecessary and excessive biopsies is important and thinks patients shouldn’t become “pincushions.”

In the past, dermatologists had only their unaided eyes to rely on in order to detect melanoma. Dr. Burnett says a doctor’s eyes are still an important factor in detection. As an example, he gives the “ugly duckling sign” that dermatolo

16 – 23 July 2020

gists use to distinguish when a mole looks different from other moles, as well as the ABCDE mnemonic (asymmetry, irregular border, color, and diameter of more than six mm, as well as evolving new characteristics, such as bleeding or itching).

Better Detection Through Technology

One of the leading technological advances has been the dermatoscope. Dr. Burnett compares it to the stethoscope in how it has advanced medicine for the field of dermatology. Now a standard part of dermatology training, it allows the doctor to evaluate a suspect melanoma by using specific algorithms.

Another new technology is Total Body Photography, wherein sequential photos over time are taken of the entire skin surface and then compared to new lesions. TBP has replaced memory, which was what doctors and patients previously relied upon to assess a change in a mole. When combined with a dermatoscope, the chances of detecting melanoma as early as possible rise significantly.

Pigmented Lesion Analysis (PLA) is another non-invasive tool that uses an adhesive to gently take off the skin cells overlying a suspicious mole in order to analyze the genes. This promising new technique aims to reduce the number of biopsies.

“Coming down the pipeline,” says Dr. Burnett, “is wider use of 3D Total Body Photography, which only a few academic centers have – 3D offers greater detection than 2D.” He adds that “A.I., relying on software algorithms, is also in the pipeline, but we are not at the point when a camera or robot can come in and do the scan by itself.”

All of these methods of detecting melanoma rely, in the end, on the gold standard – traditional microscopy and a trained dermatopathologist to determine if melanoma is “in situ” or “invasive.”

“In situ” is used when the cancerous cells are limited to the very top layer of the skin, the epidermis. In melanoma, that means that the cancer cells have a near zero chance of traveling to another place in the body. Most melanoma in the U.S. is diagnosed as “in situ,” a testament to advances in detection technology. Ninety-nine percent of those with “in situ” go on to live long and healthy lives.

“The likelihood of the spread of an ‘in situ’ tumor is very rare and only occurs if there was an invasive component that went undetected when the tissue was sampled,” explains Dr. Burnett. “On the other hand, an invasive melanoma has the potential to grow and thicken to such an extent that it might reach blood vessels or lymphatic channels requiring extensive surgery as well as other treatments.”

Changing Behaviors

During his part of the lecture, Dr. Burnett emphasized that behavior must change in protecting against skin cancers, especially in teenage years and the young twenties: sun-protective clothing, seeking shade, using sunscreens, and doing regular minute-long self-examination with a long and hand mirror for patients with a history of melanoma.

He also suggests taking monthly selfies of hard-to-view areas, like one’s back, in order to detect any changes from month-to-month. He says that whatever sunscreen one chooses, it should have at least a SPF of 30, be applied thick and often.

For his part, Dr. Davis said he’s “excited” to be leading, along with Dr. Burnett, the developing Santa Barbara Multidisciplinary Cutaneous Oncology Program, which also involves other local dermatologists, pathologists, surgical oncologists, radiologists, radiation oncologists, and medical oncologists. The goal of this disease-focused group is to apply and contribute to the already significant advances in treating melanoma, squamous, and other advanced skin cancers that have taken place over the past 10 to 15 years and to reduce the five thousand yearly deaths from skin cancer in the U.S. His job, he says, is to design a treatment plan after melanoma diagnosis, based on what stage cancer a patient has, as well as the patient’s age and overall health status.

One technique used to help stage a patient’s melanoma is a sentinel node biopsy, which is performed by surgical oncologists. For this procedure, a radioactive dye and blue dye are injected into the melanoma. The dye tracks the first lymph nodes to where a melanoma would spread. Those nodes can then be removed, dissected and analyzed to see if the melanoma has spread.

brain, liver or lungs. Stage 4: Spread to a distant site or organ and, in general, not curable.

The classical treatment of chemotherapy has been beneficial, but with the significant toxicity of chemotherapy the treatment has had to be reevaluated. “We are very fortunate,” says Dr. Davis, “that there has been a dramatic improvement in medication to treat advanced melanoma. Instead of traditional chemotherapy, targeted molecular therapy that can block melanoma pathways, and immunotherapy, which activates the patient’s own immune system to fight their cancer, are the two main types of therapy that have shown incredible success in this disease.

The Nobel Prize in Medicine was recently awarded for this type of new immunotherapy. Dr. Davis is opening up new clinical trials for melanoma patients, which can give patients access to new cutting-edge treatments or combinations not yet approved by the FDA. “Cancer,” says Dr. Davis, “is very good at invading the immune system.

When it succeeds, it is able to shutdown the lymphocytes that are fighting back.

Before this new generation of immunotherapy, survival from Stage 4 melanoma was six-to-twelve months. Now, by using a combination of drugs, five-year survival is fifty percent. We are also seeing established treatments that have proved successful in metastatic Stage 4 melanoma now filtering down to Stage 3 melanoma.”

During his lecture, Dr. Davis puts up slides of a male patient with melanoma on his scalp. The cancer was excised, but further surgery was not considered when the melanoma resurfaced as a very large skin graft would be needed.

With a combination of two immunotherapy drugs, in six to seven months, the cancer was completely gone and Dr. Davis said he was able to stop the treatment.

This case was of particular interest to me, as the latest squamous cell on my forehead went into the hairline. I had asked Dr. Burnett if I was at risk of having melanoma spread to my scalp. He reassured me that scalp cancers rarely appeared in women.

I was able to offer the doctors two personal tips: The first was from the talented plastic surgeon in Manhattan two decades ago. If a combination of over-thecounter arnica and bromelain are taken 10 days before surgery, bruising will be much reduced. The second is from a beekeeping friend in Montecito: Bee Magic, a cream made from bee pollen, royal jelly, and propolis will work like magic to reduce scarring when rubbed on new and recent scars.

Answer to why chicken breasts and pigs’ feet? Because they are cheap and portable and most like human skin.

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The Stages

The stages of melanoma were updated in 2018 and now are: Stage 1: thin melanomas with generally excellent prognosis. Stage 2: thicker or ulcerated, but is not yet into the lymph nodes and capable of metastasizing. Stage 3: Lymph nodes are positive for cancer but the cancer has not yet spread to bones, 16 – 23 July 2020

tos Get Phoized n Orga

• The Voice of the Village •

d New iPa o! to p setu MONTECITO JOURNAL

35

EDITOR’S LETTER (Continued from page 5)

the coronavirus even without showing symptoms. But masks really help, especially medical ones. Our own SB County Public Health Department website states: “Masks help reduce the spread of coronavirus especially when combined with physical distancing and frequent hand washing.” Hart himself said: “the virus is very active in our community now… each of us must continue to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our neighbors… That means not getting complacent about washing hands, wearing masks, and regularly disinfecting surfaces. It’s our best and, frankly, our only defense.”

Yet still, we’re not enforcing the ordinance?

Here’s the thing that gets me the most. It’s been widely reported and confirmed by medical experts that the first and foremost reason to wear a

sible for one third of all traffic fatalities, and the majority of people who die in accidents caused by drunk drivers are not the drunk drivers themselves?

Of course not. We enforce these laws because as a society we understand that sometimes personal liberties get outweighed by a greater and more encompassing public benefit. Our liberties are our liberties until they infringe on someone else’s liberties. Like when your personal liberty might kill me or my kids. Might kill my husband. Might kill my mom.

Mask wearing is no different. Contrary to Supervisor Hart’s assertion, anything short of widespread and consistent enforcement allows people to interpret this public health mandate as optional. As merely a suggestion – a message, a plea.

A couple short years ago we learned the value of enforcement.

Our nation suffers from a pervasive and tragic lack of courageous leadership that seems to trickle down to our local officials who are apparently afraid to tell their constituents the cold hard facts mask is to protect others. And there is mounting evidence that even just a cloth mask helps protect the wearer.

To review, we have a state-wide mandate to wear a mask in public when social distancing is not possible. We know wearing a mask is mostly to protect others in case we are walking around, unknowingly, infected. And still, one needs only to drive around town to see hundreds of people, walking in groups, unmasked. People with no way of knowing if they’ve been infected.

Our mask-wearing mandate is being downgraded, in part by our local officials’ unwillingness to enforce it, into a public health choice. Which is, of course, completely ineffective since mask-wearing itself has become, irrationally, a political hot-button and mask refusers rightly understand that there are no consequences for flouting this unenforced “mandate.”

Personal Liberties: America’s Strength and Achilles Heel

Meanwhile, we have other regulations that exist to protect people from the reckless behavior of others, and no one questions them. Drunk driving, for example. Are we being too hard on these drunk drivers? Should we simply be messaging and urging them to not drive drunk? Should we not be enforcing our way out of this drunk driving problem even though drunk drivers are respon-

Your Montecito and Santa Barbara Real Estate Agent

In January 2018 our County officials urged Montecito residents to evacuate from our homes when the local Office of Emergency Management, and the Supervisors themselves, knew there was a potentially catastrophic debris flow coming. A mere 13% of our community chose to leave. As a result, twenty-three precious lives were lost. In subsequent evacuations the county went beyond messaging. Mandatory evacuations were issued community wide and first responders went door-to-door requesting the dental records of those who chose to stay. But at least that last group of stalwart stay-behinds didn’t put others at risk.

Our nation suffers from a pervasive and tragic lack of courageous leadership that seems to trickle down to our local officials who are apparently afraid to tell their constituents the cold hard facts: that until we decide to forgo some personal liberties to protect the lives of others, we are doomed to limp along pathetically and drastically in terms of economic, social, and health outcomes, until some scientist somewhere can successfully develop a vaccine or a cure for this rampant, indiscriminate, juggernaut of a disease.

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Henning Ansorg, Santa Barbara County’s Public Health Officer. I wondered how he feels we are doing in the mask wearing department. Turns out, not good enough. “There are a lot of people not wearing masks,” Ansorg said. “Some are local, but many are visitors.

Our tourism industry needs to be more proactive. If I owned a hotel, I would have a mask on every pillow for every guest that arrives instead of a chocolate chip cookie. With a note that says: If you are visiting from out of the area, please play by the rules. Please wear a mask. This is our community and this is how we protect each other.”

Dr. Ansorg also stressed the need for a strong PR campaign. “We have to sell the idea that it’s the responsible thing to wear a mask. Social pressure goes a long way,” Ansorg said.

So I am urging, messaging, pleading, and in fact social pressuring our leaders to rise to this unprecedented occasion and do the right thing. To unequivocally enforce the state rules that were put in place to keep us safe and to help us get our normal lives back. Your willingness to lose a vote or two might just enable you to save a life. Or two. Or thirty-one.

Our Governor gave a state-wide mask order. Our Board of Supervisor President says “We’re not going to enforce our way out of this.” But that’s precisely how one defeats COVID. Globally, the places COVID has been eradicated went early and hard and no-nonsense. Regardless of whether our local politicians will show the political mettle to lead us through this, let’s commit to courageously leading ourselves. Please wear your mask when out in public.

•MJ

Pam Anderson Skin Care FACIALS • WAXING MICRO-DERMABRASION

RDouglas@bhhscal.com | 805.318.0900 RachaelDouglas.com Montecito | Hope Ranch | Santa Barbara | Goleta

©2020 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties is a member of the franchise system of BHH Affiliates LLC

36 MONTECITO JOURNAL

DRE 02024147

OTHER SKIN CARE SERVICES AVAILABLE 2173 Ortega Hill Rd, Summerland, Ca 93067 • (805) 895–9190 pamandersonsb@gmail.com

“I’m sorry, if you were right, I’d agree with you.” – Robin Williams

16 – 23 July 2020

Ernie’s World

by Ernie Witham

Ernie has been writing humor for more than 20 years. He is the author of three humor books and is the humor workshop leader at the prestigious Santa Barbara Writers Conference.

An Apple Computer a Day Keeps the Doctor Away

P

er instructions, I moved my face really close to my computer monitor. “Look into my eyes,” the doctor said. Was she going to hypnotize me? Make me cluck like a chicken? “I just want to watch your eye movements to rule out a few things.”

“I can roll them around in a circle.

Watch.”

“Ah, okay, that’s weird,” she said.

“Does it make you nauseous to do that?”

“Sometimes.”

“Made me nauseous to watch,” she said. “So, I wouldn’t do that anymore.”

Bummer, my four-year-old grandson loved that trick. Even more than my nose flute.

“Look left without moving your head,” the doctor said. “Now right.

Now up. Now down.” Not sure what she noticed, but I saw some tiny specs on my monitor that looked like ant carcasses. I wondered if I should tell her this. Maybe they weren’t really there and it was all in my head. Could I be committed by a doctor via telehealth?

“Stick out your tongue. Oops, too close to the screen. Now it’s all wet.”

She was right, but the good news was that the ant carcasses were gone. If they ever existed. I think they did because I could taste something odd. I spit a few times to get rid of the carcasses (carcai?) then used my elbow to clean the monitor screen.

“Hold your tongue and move it left,” she said.

“Rike dis?” I asked.

“Yes, now right. Now up. Hmm.” It’s never great when a doctor says “hmm.”

“Revery fring okay?”

“I need to watch you walk,” she said.

“Ron da sqween?”

“No not on the screen on the floor.

And you can let go of your tongue

now.” I moved away from the computer. “I want you to walk with one foot in front of the other, toe to heel.”

“Last time I tried that I fell over onto the police officer and almost ended up getting arrested for DUI,” I told her, then quickly added: “It was a really long time ago.”

“Hmm,” she said again.

Telehealth is common these days because no one wants you to come to the clinic if you have a medical issue, which is a bit odd. Why would you go to the clinic if you didn’t have a medical issue? To read the magazines?

Watch the televisions ads about gastro-intestinal drugs you should ask your doctor about? Or just to try and guess what happened to the guy across the room with all the Scooby-Doo Band-aids stuck on his face?

So, instead, now we connect through Zoom to a doctor, who may or may not be in the clinic at all. They could be connecting from Tahiti. Eight telehealth calls per day probably pays for one of those over-the-water bungalows. Today’s doctor probably had a mai tai and a fish sandwich just below my field of vision.

“Oomph.” I banged into the wall.

“Hmm,” she said.

I’ve had a few dizzy spells. My primary doctor couldn’t figure it out.

“Odd,” he said. So he sent me to an ENT. “Unusual,” she said. I even had an MRI. “We didn’t see anything in your head,” the technician told me. So now I was seeing a neurologist. “Close your eyes and touch your nose with your fore finger.”

“Ow,” I said, as I poked myself in the eye. She mumbled something that sounded like: “one for the journals” then had me try touching my nose with my other forefinger. I came much closer this time.

“I think it’s an inner ear thing. I’ll

send you some neck exercises. Have you ever had physical therapy?”

“A few times from Ned, Tom, Allyson, and John.”

“Was it from walking into walls like just now?”

“No. Not always.”

That was pretty much the end of the session, except for the simple follow-up survey of 47 questions to help the clinic serve me better – but still not in person – in the future. I had just finished my assessment when my phone rang. It was a computer-voice. “Hello, this is your healthcare provider calling.

It’s time for your annual prostate exam.

It will be a telehealth session. Do you have any latex gloves?”

I will be really glad when and if normal ever returns.

•MJ

Ernie gets ready for his self-test

Laughing Matters

J

ohn F. Kennedy was a master at deflecting criticism with self-aware irony. On his appointment of younger brother Bobby to the Cabinet: “I see nothing wrong with giving Robert some legal experience as attorney general before he goes out to practice law.”

Send us your best joke, we’ll decide if it’s funny. We can only print what we can print, so don’t blame us. Please send “jokes” to letters@ montecitojournal.net 16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

37

CITY OF SANTA BARBARA - GENERAL SERVICES DIVISION PO BOX 1990, SANTA BARBARA, CA 93102-1990

CITY OF SANTA BARBARA - GENERAL SERVICES DIVISION PO BOX 1990, SANTA BARBARA, CA 93102-1990

INVITATION FOR BIDS

INVITATION FOR BIDS

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that sealed bids will be received via electronic transmission on the City of Santa Barbara PlanetBids portal site until the date and time indicated below at which time they will be publicly opened and posted for:

NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that sealed bids will be received via electronic transmission on the City of Santa Barbara PlanetBids portal site until the date and time indicated below at which time they will be publicly opened and posted for:

BID NO. 5857

BID NO. 5844

DUE DATE & TIME: AUGUST 6, 2020 UNTIL 3:00 P.M.

DUE DATE & TIME: JULY 30, 2020 UNTIL 3:00 P.M.

WATERFRONT LUMBER AND HEAVY TIMBER

PUBLICATION OF LEGAL ADS AND NOTICES

Bidders must be registered on the city of Santa Barbara’s PlanetBids portal in order to receive addendum notifications and to submit a bid. Go to PlanetBids for bid results and awards. It is the responsibility of the bidder to submit their bid with sufficient time to be received by PlanetBids prior to the bid opening date and time. The receiving deadline is absolute. Allow time for technical difficulties, uploading, and unexpected delays. Late or incomplete Bid will not be accepted.

Bidders must be registered on the city of Santa Barbara’s PlanetBids portal in order to receive addendum notifications and to submit a bid. Go to PlanetBids for bid results and awards. It is the responsibility of the bidder to submit their bid with sufficient time to be received by PlanetBids prior to the bid opening date and time. The receiving deadline is absolute. Allow time for technical difficulties, uploading, and unexpected delays. Late or incomplete Bid will not be accepted.

If further information is needed, contact Jennifer Disney Dixon, Buyer II at (805) 564-5356 or email: JDisney@SantaBarbaraCA.gov.

If further information is needed, contact Jennifer Disney Dixon, Buyer II, at (805) 564-5356 or email: JDisney@santabarbaraca.gov

The City of Santa Barbara is now conducting bid and proposal solicitations online through the PlanetBids System™. Vendors can register for the commodities that they are interested in bidding on using NIGP commodity codes at http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/business/bids/purchasin g.asp. The initial bidders’ list for all solicitations will be developed from registered vendors.

The City of Santa Barbara is now conducting bid and proposal solicitations online through the PlanetBids System™. Vendors can register for the commodities that they are interested in bidding on using NIGP commodity codes at http://www.santabarbaraca.gov/business/bids/purchasin g.asp. The initial bidders’ list for all solicitations will be developed from registered vendors.

Bids must be submitted on forms supplied by the City of Santa Barbara and in accordance with the specifications, terms and conditions contained therein. Bid packages containing all forms, specifications, terms and conditions may be obtained electronically via PlanetBids.

Bids must be submitted on forms supplied by the City of Santa Barbara and in accordance with the specifications, terms and conditions contained therein. Bid packages containing all forms, specifications, terms and conditions may be obtained electronically via PlanetBids.

The City of Santa Barbara affirmatively assures that minority and disadvantaged business enterprises will be afforded full opportunity to submit bids in response to this invitation and will not be discriminated against on the grounds of age (over 40), ancestry, color, mental or physical disability, sex, gender identity and expression, marital status, medical condition (cancer or genetic characteristics), national origin, race, religious belief, or sexual orientation in consideration of award.

The City of Santa Barbara affirmatively assures that minority and disadvantaged business enterprises will be afforded full opportunity to submit bids in response to this invitation and will not be discriminated against on the grounds of age (over 40), ancestry, color, mental or physical disability, sex, gender identity and expression, marital status, medical condition (cancer or genetic characteristics), national origin, race, religious belief, or sexual orientation in consideration of award.

______________________________ William Hornung, C.P.M. General Services Manager

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: The Lucky Group, 2441 Calle Galicia, Santa Barbara, CA 93109. Noel Lucky, 2441 Calle Galicia, Santa Barbara, CA 93109. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on July 9, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL). FBN No. 2020-0001675. Published July 15, 22, 29, August 5, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Social Superstars, 827 State St., Suite 21, Santa Barbara, CA 93101. Derren G Ohanian, 701 Grandview Ave, Ojai, CA 93023. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 30, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL).

FBN No. 2020-0001616. Published July 8, 15, 22, 29, 2020.

Published 7/15/2020 Montecito Journal

ORDER FOR PUBLICATION OF SUMMONS: CASE No. 20CV01391. Notice to Defendants: Samuel Choe, Jiale Zhu, and Does 1-20: You have been sued by Plaintiff: City of Santa Barbara. You have 30 calendar days after this Summons and legal papers are served on you to file a response at the court and have a copy served on the plaintiff. A letter or phone call will not protect you. Your written response must be in proper legal form if you want the court to hear case. There may be a court form that you can use for your response. You can find these court forms and more information at the California Courts Online Self-Help Center, your county law library, or the courthouse nearest you. If you cannot pay the filing fee, as the court clerk for a fee waiver form.

If you do not file your response on time, you may lose the case by default, and your wages, money, and property may be taken without further warning from the court. There are other legal requirements, you may want to contact an attorney right away. If you cannot afford an attorney, you may be eligible for free legal services. You can locate these non-profit groups online at www.lawhelpcalifornia.org, or by contacting your local court or county bar association. Name and address of the court: Superior Court of California, County

38 MONTECITO JOURNAL

MONTECITO WATER DISTRICT

NOTICE OF PUBLIC MEETING ON WATER AVAILABILITY CHARGE TUESDAY, JULY 28, 2020, 9:30 A.M. VIA TELECONFERENCE* NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN that, at the regularly scheduled meeting of the Board of Directors of the Montecito Water District to be held on Tuesday, July 28, 2020, at 9:30 A.M. the Board will hold a public hearing to consider the adoption of a resolution to continue an existing Water Availability Charge for the purpose of main replacement and enlargement. A written report, detailing the description of each parcel of real property and the amount of the charge for each parcel for the year, is on file and available for public review at Montecito Water District’s Office located at 583 San Ysidro Road. For information on a specific parcel’s acreage and proposed fee, owner may call 805.969.2271or email info@montecitowater.com.

The District is proposing to continue the existing charge as it was established in July 1996 and with such exceptions as have previously been granted by the Board, with no increase in the charge or change in the methodology by which it is calculated. The District will continue to collect such charge on the tax rolls, as in previous years.

At the Public Hearing on July 28, 2020 oral and written presentations may be made concerning said written report and proposed fees by anyone affected by said fees. The Board of Directors will also hear and consider objections and protests to the application of the fee. Any objection or protest must be presented to the District on or before the close of the July 28, 2020 Public Hearing or be precluded from consideration for the 2020-2021 tax year. *The public meeting will be conducted by telephonic and electronic means in accordance with Executive Orders N-2520, N-29-20, and N-33-20 by the Governor of the State of California. Remote participation information can be found on the meeting agenda and will be posted at the above location, on the website www.montecitowater.com, and available by calling 805-969-2271. ###

_______________________________ William Hornung, C.P.M. General Services Manager

Published 7/15/20 Montecito Journal

of Santa Barbara, 1100 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, CA 931211107. Filed March 11, 2020, by Elizabeth Spann, Deputy Clerk.

nal statement on file in my office.

Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL). FBN No. 2020-0001481.

Published July 1, 8, 15, 22, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Bahama Bob’s Spa Service, 3620 Santa Maria Ln, Santa Barbara, CA 93105.

Melinda J Gerow, 3620 Santa Maria Ln, Santa Barbara, CA 93105. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 24, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL).

FBN No. 2020-0001558. Published July 1, 8, 15, 22, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Good Neighbor Productions, 5008 Yaple Ave, Santa Barbara, CA 93111. Saulius E Urbonas, 5008 Yaple Ave, Santa Barbara, CA 93111. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 9, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office.

Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL). FBN No. 2020-0001421.

Published July 1, 8, 15, 22, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Santa Barbara Limitless Services, 214 Reef Ct., Santa Barbara, CA 93109. Elizabeth L Smith, 214 Reef Ct., Santa Barbara, CA 93109. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 15, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the origi-

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Regina’s Treatery, 545 Toro Canyon Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108. Valley Heart Ranch, 545 Toro Canyon Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93108. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 19, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office.

“Why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves?” – Robin Williams

Run, MJ Public/legal notices section, July 8 & 15, 2020

Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL). FBN No. 2020-0001528.

Published July 1, 8, 15, 22, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Santa Barbara Health and Healing Center, 2099 Refugio Road, Goleta, CA 93117. Amy Hazard, 4124 Modoc Road, Santa Barbara, CA 93110. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 9, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL).

FBN No. 2020-0001413. Published June 24, July 1, 8, 15, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Theme and Variations, 1769 San Leandro Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108. Pamela Thiel, 1769 San Leandro Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 10, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL).

FBN No. 2020-0001435. Pub-

lished June 24, July 1, 8, 15, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Lagoon Designs, 410 Nicholas Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108.

Leah Yahyavi, 410 Nicholas Lane, Santa Barbara, CA 93108. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 8, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL).

FBN No. 2020-0001405. Published June 24, July 1, 8, 15, 2020.

FICTITIOUS BUSINESS NAME STATEMENT: The following person(s) is/are doing business as: Turn Key Realty & Mortgage, 801 S. Broadway Suite 16, Santa Maria, CA 93454.

Kenneth Lee Batson, 920 W. Apricot Unit 103, Lompoc, CA 93436. This statement was filed with the County Clerk of Santa Barbara County on June 15, 2020. This statement expires five years from the date it was filed in the Office of the County Clerk. I hereby certify that this is a correct copy of the original statement on file in my office. Joseph E. Holland, County Clerk (SEAL). FBN No. 2020-0001470. Published June 24, July 1, 8, 15, 2020.

16 – 23 July 2020

LETTERS (Continued from page 11)

conservation areas in the United States.

Water usage is less than what it was in the 1950s, even though the population of the south coast has doubled. I think we are at the point where you just can’t put any more bricks in the toilet.

The role of the State Water Project will be debated for many years to come, but when the day is done, State Water will likely turn out to be the least reliable and most expensive water source of all when we consider how many gallons of State Water are actually delivered to the south coast and the historic cost. Advocates of State Water will disagree with me, but over time, I think we will find out that the State Water did not deliver the amount of water that it was supposed to deliver. This dilemma will only worsen as climate change and endangered species, like salmon and steelhead, continue to whittle away at our State Water deliveries.

So the answer to Santa Barbara and Montecito’s chronic water shortage, and Mr. Schou’s question of water security is a diversified portfolio of desal, ground water, and the water sources on the Santa Ynez River, when available, with wastewater reuse playing a lesser role, and water conservation maintaining current water demand.

Michael Hoover Author, Drought & Flood: The History of Water in Santa Barbara & Montecito

Don’t Hold Your Breath

Last week, the Santa Barbara Grand Jury released its report on the county’s cannabis mess blasting the S.B. Board of Supervisors for its mismanagement of the county’s cannabis production, dismissing public input, ignoring major environmental impacts, and allowing excessive production et al. The comprehensive 26-page Grand Jury report on the county’s woeful Cannabis Ordinance underscores the many concerns we have urged upon the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors for the last three years. An Ad Hoc Committee, made up of just Supervisors Das Williams and Steve Lavagnino, was cited by the Grand Jury as the origin of the county’s cannabis troubles.

In February, prior to the March 3, 2020, primary election, the Santa Barbara Independent published an endorsement of incumbent Das Williams for 1st District Supervisor against challenger Laura Capps, President of the SB School Board. This paragraph stands out: “But we also believe Williams will learn to admit his mistakes quickly and with compassion, and that he will strive to repair relationships with those who have been his past allies.”

Fast forward three months to the June 11, 2020, Board of Supervisors meeting when: 16 – 23 July 2020

• Das Williams rejected his very own Planning Commission’s unanimous recommendation to require CUPs (Conditional Use Permits) on all cannabis projects; • Das Williams, along with Supervisor Lavagnino, were the only no votes on the Board to ban cultivation within EDRNs (Existing Developed Rural Neighborhoods).

• Das Williams, Steve Lavagnino, and Supervisor Gregg Hart killed a motion by supervisors Peter Adam and Joan Hartmann that would have required odor abatement at the property line.

Supervisor Williams has since only doubled down in his disdain for the majority of his constituents, casting devastating votes against residents, Ag interests, and school children. He grows ever more insulting and contemptuous of his constituents – in person, from the podium and in his emails.

The proposals presented at the June 11 B.O.S. meeting are scheduled to return to the Supervisors on July 14, 2020. Do we dare hope there will be a change in Das Williams’s blatant disregard for the opinions and basic needs of his own constituents? If past actions are any indication, don’t hold your breath.

We believe it is time for the Santa Barbara Independent to publish a retraction and apology to the people of the 1st District and to Laura Capps, and to rescind its endorsement of the blatantly biased and possibly corrupt Supervisor Das Williams. It is sad that his supporters, propped up with cannabis money, succeeded in blindsiding the Independent’s editor, whose endorsement likely gave him the winning edge in an unusually close election that he had no right to win. Since then, he has done nothing but re-commit to the cannabis lobby and gratuitously exacerbate division.

Signed, Fifty-six Residents of the 1st District: M. Athanassiadis, Valerie Bentz, Jennifer Brickman, Paul Brickman, Arnold Brooks, Anthony Brown, Joann Chase, Maureen Claffey, Eileen Conrad, John Culbertson, Catherine Dealy, Brian Edwards, Linda Ekstrom, Paul Ekstrom, Sharen Eskilson, Joan T. Esposito, Les Esposito, Dan Emmett, Rae Emmett, Robyn Geddes, David Goodfield, Llewellyn Goodfield, Marilyn Goodfield, Cathy Henszey, Kim Jones, Pati Kern, Beryl Kreisel, Ron Macleod, Ken Manfred, Linda Manfred, Jim Mannoia, Sarah B. Mascarenas-Trigueiro, Mimi Mauracher, Carrie Miles, Maureen Murdock, Sandra L Nargi, Lionel Neff, Langdon Nevens, Jim Neuman, Bobbie Offen, Merrily Peebles, Andrew Pfeffer, Christopher L. Reif, Tracey Reif, Lori Robinson, Pat Saragosa, Zave Saragosa, Carla Singer, Jill Stassinos, Kaye Walters, Claudia Ward, Leonadi Ward, Al Weil, Sandy

Weil, Joseph Zicherman, and Martha J. Zicherman

Up in Smoke

I am surprised that Das William’s suggested in the MJ that White senior citizens are more bias against weed then the dominate (unidentified) demographic of Santa Barbara County. Most of the Woodstock-Haight-Ashbury-Isla Vista peace movement that forwarded the normalization of pot in today’s society were White hippies, some now conservative and all senior citizen.

Too much credence to Cheech & Chong I think in this attempt to raceshame.

(Overall too much mention of race in politics, this instance no exception.)

As for William’s contention that the County is shy in understanding pot law, he must be correct. The sheriff was recently ordered to return $3 million in cash and derived cannabis oil to a Carpinteria grower (not mentioned by any local press, for which there is no excuse).

Matt McLaughlin (Editor’s Note: Not that we know of any evidence of unreconstructed hippies serving on the Grand Jury, it was Steve Lavagnino, not Williams who characterized the report as resulting from the bias of old folks.)

Our Own Revolution

With July 14 upon us, I am half expecting SB’s own storming of the Bastille. Folks, it’s getting ugly and believe you me, it’s going to get much worse. But, perhaps, there is a silver lining – allow me to explain: With great economic turmoil comes change, sometimes positive (New Deal) and sometimes not (Fascism).

I have seen our economic tsunami transform usually complacent residents into community questioning activists. Some have taken an “off with their heads” approach to SB-city government, while others have exposed the larger-than-Governor salaries that many of our local public employees are commanding (www.

TransparentCalifornia.com). Facts are important because when our politicians begin their COVID-inspired money grab we need to know what – if anything – they are doing to tighten their own belts.

CA has requested and/or received $22B in federal “COVID-related support.” Shockingly, this falls short of the $24B CA spends EACH YEAR for its public Pensions and Post-Employment benefits. These lifetime benefits are funded not on a pay-as-you-go basis but, instead, primarily by borrowing.

Healthcare alone has created an $85B (BILLION!) deficit. That’s just healthcare, not the pensions themselves.

Understand, our pols will increase our Property Taxes (Proposition 15 is

• The Voice of the Village •

the first step), our State Income Taxes (the highest in the U.S.) and our local Sales Taxes before they mention executive salaries, head count, or pensions.

They will allow our infrastructure to crumble, our poverty rates to skyrocket (third highest in CA), our privately funded foodbanks to swell and our schools to crater to protect their own nest eggs. This is the reality and until we demand that government work for the people – not itself – it will continue.

This is not about our hardworking public salaried employees (I was once one) or vested retirees! This is about unrealistic future expectations and an unsustainable model. One that we as taxpayers continue to allow through our complacency and ignorance (me too!). Did you know that SBC has an $800M+ accumulated Pension liability? Or, that our completely over-budget/unnecessary $110M North Jail will bring our annual custody-related-expenses to $92M – SBC’s unique answer to Justice Reform.

Our County needs to do something that they are likely incapable of doing: develop a turnaround strategy for themselves. Read Al Dunlop (dating myself), map a path that reduces our bureaucracy and dismantle the bottom-up budget approach of our 24 County Departments (“prior year spending plus X”). In other words, clean your own house BEFORE demanding more of our money.

California risks a mass exodus unless BOTH the private and public sectors tighten their belts such that our economic ship can be righted.

Let’s all begin to rise from our complacency and shine a light on the facts.

If this happens it would, indeed, be a silver-COVID-lining. Stay vigilant, involved and healthy!

Jeff Giordano SB County Resident

Leash Your Dogs

I was recently visiting and taking a walk on the trails of Santa Barbara’s Campus Point Beach. A couple watched as their two enormous, unleashed Saint Bernards crowded myself and my friend on a staircase. When I expressed concern, the woman scoffed and said Bernards are friendly. On a staircase or any such area where care is necessary, one enormous dog, let alone two, is a danger. In fact, in such a situation the animal’s “friendliness,” especially coupled with their size, is an increased hazard and liability. As a dog-owner it is your responsibility to understand this. It is also your responsibility to know and respect UCSB Policy: Dogs on campus grounds must be on a leash not more than six feet long or securely confined in a vehicle at all times. Dogs under voice command are not considered on leash, and are not permitted.

Leash your dogs.

Michael Schrimper •MJ MONTECITO JOURNAL

39

DEAR MONTECITO (Continued from page 6)

towards art and creative writing – anything that would let me make stuff. After that, I was homeschooled, which gave me the freedom to more deeply explore these and to consider which of my interests I’d end up studying in college.

Game design, concept art, architecture, writing, and culinary arts were all, at one point, my career path of choice. As of right now, I’m a Culinary Arts student at SBCC set to graduate next year. I still set aside time for art classes and the occasional writing project (mostly in the form of Dungeons and Dragons campaigns for friends and family), but the majority of my time is dedicated to the SBCC kitchens, located below the cafeteria.

I’ve spent hundreds of hours split between the bakeshop, lab kitchen, and student-run café, and I’m incredibly fond of these spaces as well as the people who learn and teach in them. This semester I was enrolled in the Advanced Restaurant class where a dedicated cadre of my peers and I worked together to open a restaurant, bringing the menu to life ourselves. The beginning was rocky, but we quickly got in the swing of running a gourmet restaurant. Open on Thursday and Friday nights, we served a four-course menu featuring dishes such as green tea-smoked quail salad, corn custard empanadas with mezcal ice cream, and Chinese beef noodle soup. One of my personal favorites on the menu was the farro salad which was a delightful combination of farro, sauteed mushrooms, corn, carrots, and peas, with a buttermilk feta dressing.

I was devastated when, like most restaurants, we had to close our doors due to COVID-19. My classmates and I spent the remainder of our semester talking shop over Zoom and plotting to open a food truck. In the process of coming up with dishes for the restaurant, I spent quite a bit of time reflecting on my favorite meals and food memories, many of which are centered in Montecito. It was a welcome surprise when my friend Stella asked me to write a letter reflecting on my hometown.

I have great memories of walking with my brother to get sandwiches from John’s or going to Pierre Lafond with my aunt for madeleines and an Orangina. I took my first cooking class after school at MUS – I think it was second or third grade? Often when I cook now or theory-craft recipes in my head, I’m trying to evoke that same kind of comfort and indulgence I felt in those spaces as a kid. I would spend countless hours playing at Manning Park with my friends, acting out our own imaginary stores. All that time

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dedicated to play is why I think it got stuck in my head that all I had to do was find a way to play for my living, then I’d be set! And I’m still determined to figure it out.

My first job was at Jeannine’s Bakery where I’ve worked on and off for the past couple years, getting a taste of the exacting dedication to the community that it takes to be a local institution for so long. I’ve gotten a chance to work at each of the locations (even briefly as a cake decorator at the Montecito shop).

And just a block away from there is Scoops, home of a wonderful pistachio gelato which I would often indulge in after work. I probably frequented the ice cream shop more than strictly necessary, but as a cook, I’m legally allowed to write it off as research. Even though I don’t live there anymore, I find myself in Montecito from time to time, usually when I’m helping out in my mom’s classroom or visiting friends. I’m always struck by how small it is and how much the community cares for each other.

The global pandemic has hit my routine like a truck and it’s been strange being suddenly inundated with free time after spending nearly all my time at school, in between, or working (procrastinating) on homework. Old hobbies are coming back into my life vying for my attention.

I feel a bit of pressure to be productive and efficient with my time, but I’m trying to be patient with myself and stay in touch with the part of me that has always found joy in making things for their own sake.

My friends and I are sporadically collaborating on comic ideas and video games, and I’m continuing to study whatever I find interesting at the moment; I’m currently lost somewhere deep in the YouTube rabbit hole devoted to coffee.

I’m thinking more and more about the future as I get closer to graduating from college. Travel is definitely in the books, but mostly I plan to find a place to work where I like the food and the people making it. Beyond that, I’ve been thinking increasingly about the sort of spaces I like to spend time in. Ones that have good food and encourage a healthy sort of laziness where you feel comfortable sitting for hours drawing or chatting with friends.

Fireplaces and board games come to mind as well as fantastic coffee and fresh bread. I want to eventually open a café, serving hours from 6 am to 12 am, featuring everything from delicious gelato to whole baked fish.

It’s probably a bad idea given how many restaurants fail, but as is tradition, I’m going to try anyway.

Yours, Jakob •MJ

Jakob at Goleta beach on January 18, 2020

2020 Puzzle 7: “Jazz Combos” Solution

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his month’s MMMM challenged solvers to find a category describing some jazz performances. The grid has no obvious theme entries, so now what?

Scanning reveals a few jazz nicknames (DUKE, FATS, …), and then a few more. A deeper search produces five intersecting pairs: BIRD/DIZ, COUNT/ DUKE, MILES/FATS, TRANE/SATCH, and PREZ/ELLA. If you take the letters where the pairs intersect in order of their appearance in the grid, you get D-U-E-T-S, or DUETS, a category describing some jazz performances, and this month’s meta answer.

FunkyPhD points out that (coincidentally!) four of these pairs actually performed together – all except TRANE and SATCH. It was hard to completely avoid a few stray jazz nicknames entering the grid, which made the solve slightly trickier for some. Aptly named solver Bird Lives points out that jazz guitarist TAL Farlow and Duke’s trumpeter CAT Anderson have wandered onto the bandstand. RAY Charles shows up as well.

Check out https://pmxwords.com/july20solution to see more and hear an original song in the theme from this month’s answer by Pete and his band… •MJ

“I found there was only one way to look thin: hang out with fat people.” – Rodney Dangerfield

16 – 23 July 2020

Our Town

by Joanne A. Calitri

Joanne is a professional international photographer and journalist.

Contact her at: artraks@yahoo.com

The Arts, “Lockdown Series” Part 1: Toni Scott on Bearing Witness and the Transformative Power of Art

Toni Scott in her studio with her latest sculpture, “Death at the Hands of the Police”

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or this new “Our Town” series, we are interviewing visual and musical artists in hopes of sparking larger discussions about the inherent value of art and creativity, especially at a time when the arts are playing such a prominent role in contextualizing our experiences while COVID-19 has made having live experiences with the arts more challenging.

Kicking off the series is visual installation artist Toni Scott.

Born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, Scott earned a bachelor’s degree in International Relations from the University of Southern California.

She subsequently studied at Otis College of Art and Design and more recently earned a master’s in fine arts from UCSB. In fall 2018, Scott was selected as Artist in Residence at the Squire Foundation in Santa Barbara and as UCSB’s College of Creative Studies Artist in Residence.

Of multiracial heritage, Scott gained widespread acclaim for her 2012 solo, mixed-media installation, “Bloodlines,” which was funded by a grant from the Annenberg Foundation and which helped inaugurate the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, located near her alma mater USC. Scott followed that by showing “Bloodlines Africa” at Cornerstone Institute in Cape Town, South Africa, and “Aswarm with the Spirits of All Ages Here: Inconceivable Spaces of Slavery and Freedom,” at the University of North Carolina’s Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History.

Along with her African American heritage, Scott is a citizen of the Muscogee Creek Nation. She has explored her indigenous roots and the history genocide against Native Americans through multimedia exhibits such as Indig Enous.

Her current in-residence studio near Goleta sits on land where the Mikiw and Kiya’mu Villages of the Chumash Native American Indians once lived.

Q. In this era of social distancing is visual arts a plus or minus – can visual arts influence change in the human condition, and what advice do you give the art world going forward?

A. Visual art is always a “plus.” History has proven art is a tool, from Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” which helped bring the issue of civil rights to American living rooms, to Shepard Fairey’s, “Yes We Can” image of Obama, which helped mobilize a whole new generation of voters by putting a new face on politics.

Art is powerful. The arts in general are critical for the human spirit and towards inspiration and healing. It is a vital voice for humanity, chronicling history and educating, commemorating and by giving commentary on society as a whole. My hope for the art world is to see it engage more of a variety of voices, to offer a platform for diversity and to support the arts on all levels.

What are the social, economic, and political issues of race and discrimination that are influencing your experience as an artist right now?

From my earliest memory, race has played a significant role in shaping my identity. I have a multi-ethnic ancestry of African, European, and Native 16 – 23 July 2020

American. I am a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation and a descendant of emancipated African Americans who were slaves on three plantations in the South.

My life has consisted of boundaries drawn along racial lines and a world largely absent of positive images of people of color in the media and museums.

Today, systemic racism remains active. Rampant violence and acts of discrimination are still an everyday norm. This pathology impacts my work and thinking daily, and while I prefer abstraction, the call to respond to social injustices in my art cannot be ignored. My “Bloodlines” exhibition bears witness, my spirit stays restless, and the lack of access to opportunity still abounds.

Are you creating new works based on that influence?

Yes, works that respond spiritually, culturally, and politically. Spiritually, my painting series Emography of Genetics features works that are abstract and inspired by my prayers: my prayers for peace, my prayers for healing, and my prayers for humanity. The paintings are expressed through ascemic (automatic) writing and glossolalia (speaking in tongues), a form of writing and speaking produced through my spiritual practice, subconscious agency and genetic memories.

The paintings are contextualized in a personal belief that we are all interrelated as human beings that carry memories embedded in our DNA. Culturally, my Indigo Sacred Water paintings are living prayers. They embody more than 10,000 years of ceremonial practices and beliefs by my indigenous Muscogee Creek ancestors who lived as protectors of the earth and the waters covering it. They are also deeply tied to my African and African American ancestral heritage.

The sanctity of my practice incorporates both of my cultures, which embrace song, dance, libation, and prayer ceremonies offering water to ancestral spirits, giving praise to God first, and then honoring the earth and those who walked on it before us. My hope is to build a bridge between the old and new worlds with these living prayers.

Are you seeking new mediums with which to create art?

In addition to representational works focused on social justice, I’m also creating conceptual works with a social, political, and spiritual narrative. I Can’t Breathe signifies displacement and violence against people of color. In my sculpture, the eyes are closed, the mouth covered with fabric with the last words spoken by Eric Garner and George Floyd. I expanded the list of materials I use to include concrete to initiate a discussion on what is valued. As I began casting, I left the surface raw and broken to reflect pain and loss.

Concrete is the material of the streets; it is the foundation in which we build our lives and make contact with each other. It is also a place where many have gasped their last breath, violently and tragically, at the hands of those we pay to protect us.

I cast the body for Death at the Hands of the Police using materials that are accessible and inexpensive, such as plaster, chicken wire, and paper mâché. Inherently, bandages are designed to treat broken bones, the bandage is both a medium and a metaphor, and in my work, literally the shell of a Black man, a poignant reminder of our human toll. The plaster cast of a Black man is a commentary on a broken system, broken spirits, and broken bodies. It is now time for healing.

Is there a similar story in all your ancestors you hold close and express in your work, regardless of the current times?

Yes, that we are a multicultural, multiracial country and the importance of examining the historical foundation that has shaped this country.

In my exhibit Bloodlines, my multi-cultural history reconnects with a span of 400 years of stories and images of my ancestors. The knowledge of my bloodline has become immeasurably important to me. The broader truth is that it is an American story that represents an interconnection of millions of people by race, religions, and regions, as a new American nation was built. “Bloodlines” is where the past and the present intersect and profundity and meaning are, hopefully coalesced. It is a testimony to the dehumanizing cruelty of institutionalized slavery and post-slavery colonialism in America, and the human spirit that would not be broken.

What’s next for you?

Critical to my work is advancing understanding between races and promoting relationships between nations. There is power in relating deeper historical consciousness and transcending tragedy through narratives to a message of resilience, redemption and hope. I am committed to sharing the results of my own personal ancestry and helping others to discover and explore their own family history and global connections. I believe the world can be a better place, a more empathetic and understanding one. With every breath I breathe, every step I take, and every work I create, I am resolved to advance humanity and the human condition.

411: www.toniscott.com

• The Voice of the Village •

•MJ

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41

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42 MONTECITO JOURNAL

“I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.” – Rodney Dangerfield

16 – 23 July 2020

NOSH TOWN

VILLAGE EATERIES PIVOT AGAIN: by Claudia Schou NO INDOOR DINING? NO PROBLEM! LOCAL EATERIES PIVOT TO AL FRESCO SERVICE MONTECITO STYLE

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rench bistro tables, olive trees, and soft breezes stirring lavender blossoms. These days, dining is a moveable feast as restaurants pivot, creating stunning al fresco settings.

A state mandate to curb a surge in COVID-19 called for the immediate closure of indoor dining rooms, but it has not prevented local restaurant owners from pivoting. They’ve moved outdoors to serve socially conscious diners – Montecito style.

Cava Restaurant & Bar was one of the first along Coast Village Road to erect a parklet and introduce a new pandemic dining experience. Owner Carlos Lopez-Hollis said his staff wanted to “put some extra love” into his space: They painted it, adorned it with lights and umbrellas, and affixed custom signage to add a special signature.

“We have been complimented routinely for the past six weeks for adhering to smart practice, and that’s been incredibly reassuring to us,” said LopezHollis.

If the decision to move dining rooms outdoors was out of necessity, it’s serendipity that it’s happening during summer – locals say that’s the busiest season of the year.

“The city has done a great job in allowing our bakery and other restaurants to use parklets and pavement for outdoor dining while we’re going through all of these changes,” said Bree’Osh Bakery Owner Pierre Henry, who made adjustments to the street surface so that his outdoor space would have an easy entrance and ADA accessibility. “It’s a great idea because people feel safer being outdoors right now, plus I’m sure it’s going to save a lot of restaurants from going bankrupt.”

On Coast Village Road, six parklets (some shared) are transforming the look and feel of Montecito’s eucalyptus tree-lined byway. Cava, Jeannine’s, Tre Lune, Bree’Osh, Ca’Dario, Renaud’s, Lucky’s Steakhouse, and Coast + Olive (and the soon-to-be-unveiled Mesa Burger) are helping to define and refine the art of pandemic dining. Guests will find outdoor sanitizing stations, QR codes for contactless menu viewing, sunbrellas, heat lamps, fresh flowers during the day, and candles in the evening.

“Our regular diners are really excited about our new outdoor parklets,” explained Lucky’s Steakhouse General Manager and Executive Chef Leonard Schwartz, adding that some of the eatery’s loyal diners felt a bit displaced by the recent restrictions and have happily returned. “We can provide a safe and comfortable environment for them to resume their dining traditions.”

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For every seating, a staff member at Lucky’s is assigned to wipe chairs and surfaces in public areas with disinfecting products, Schwartz said. At dinnertime, fully masked and gloved bussers quickly remove tablecloths and store them in secure laundry bags.

Ca’Dario, a popular Italian eatery nestled in Coast Village Plaza, ramped up its outdoor dining service with public health in mind. “We’re taking every precaution to ensure a safe and pleasurable dining experience for our guests,” explained Ca’Dario General Manager Fernando Gomes, who spent the past few weeks implementing new protocols such as stocking up on personal protective equipment and initiating staff temperature checks at the beginning of each shift.

Ca’Dario offers outdoor dining service at all three of its Santa Barbara locations. Its outpost in Montecito can accommodate up to 45 guests on the plaza’s outdoor platform.

Gomes said most diners have been compliant with mask requirements, although there have been a few occasions, he said, when staff gladly provided a new face mask to diners who forgot to wear one. “We haven’t really had any issues with diners not wearing their face masks.

Most diners are socially conscious about the pandemic, and the restaurant is doing its part to follow the guidelines and keep our diners safe.” Carryout service – which currently represents about 30 percent of its sales revenue – has been a popular choice for customers since the beginning of the pandemic, Gomes added.

Local restaurant owners and staff are not only adapting to the new rules of COVID-19era dining, they’re seizing the opportunity to connect with diners and introduce new items to their menus.

Tre Lune offers fine Italian cuisine in roughly 600 square feet of outdoor dining space with seating for up to 60 guests. The outdoor dining space is contained by concrete borders and ambient greenery in white wood planters that match the restaurant’s exterior. “It’s a very pleasant experience for diners,” said Tre Lune General Manager Leslee Garafalo.

To complement its new outdoor dining experience, Tre Lune introduced a light-fare menu from 3 pm to 5 pm Monday through Thursday, featuring a gourmet cheese and olive plate, artisan pizzas, fried zucchini flowers, and braised meatballs.

French bistro tables, olive trees, and lavender plants at Bree’Osh’s parklet aren’t the only elements reminiscent of Provence. The popular bakery added country-style bread selections to its menu, including gluten-free seeded bread on Wednesday and buckwheat and ciabatta breads on Friday. The bakery offers all-organic and sourdough-based breads in styles such as baguettes, ficelles, and rye country from Tuesday through Sunday.

Booking a dinner reservation is not required but is highly recommended. So pick a restaurant from the many tempting options and don’t forget today’s pandemic diner’s etiquette: Wear a mask before you’re seated and when you leave your table.

•MJ

Chef Dario Furlati serving pizza & authentic Northern Italian Cuisine in Montecito, Santa Barbara and Goleta

With gratitude to our community for its support.

We wish you the happiest and healthiest of summers.

Now open for lunch, dine-in dinner service and take-out!

11:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday We are now open until 9:30.p.m. Friday and Saturday 4 p.m. - 9 p.m. Daily 805-884-9419 ext 2 | cadariorestaurants.com

16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

43

Robert’s Big Questions

by Robert Bernstein

Degrees from Physics departments of MIT and UC Santa Barbara. Career in designing atomic-resolution microscopes. Childhood spent in Europe and the East of the US. Passion to understand the Big Questions of life and the universe. Duty to be a good citizen of the planet.

Painted Cave Fire 30th Anniversary

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his month marks the 30th anniversary of the end of the Painted Cave Fire which officially burned from June 27, 1990 to July 2, 1990.

Here are my photos from that horrific fire that I have never shared before.

At the time, it was the most destructive fire in California history, with 641 structures destroyed. 4,900 acres were burned. Andrea Lang Gurka, age 37, died while fleeing the flames along San Marcos Pass Road.

It was an exceptionally hot day. Records indicate the high temperature was 109 degrees. The call went out for a brush fire at 6:02 pm and the first fire engine arrived just minutes later. Firefighters were still finishing up fighting another fire at that time.

This was the scene from near my apartment off Phelps Road in Goleta where Girsh Park is today:

It looked a bit scary, but under normal circumstances it looked manageable.

Most of the time the prevailing winds would be uphill on the mountain face.

Which would take the fire away from the major populated areas. But the extreme heat and powerful down-slope winds made this anything but normal.

The smoke was soon billowing high in the air over our neighborhood.

And flames could be seen sweeping down the mountain.

In just two hours the flames had come all the way down to the freeway and jumped over the freeway as if it was not even there. It was not that the fire was so intense. It was more a matter of the winds blowing embers at high speed over vast distances.

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As night fell, people gathered to watch from our area of Goleta.

Many of us did not realize that San Marcos Pass was almost directly above us. Including the KEYT reporters, who at one point reported that the fire was coming into our neighborhood. Fortunately for us they were wrong. The fire came down in the area near 154 and Highway 101.

Firefighting planes flew over our heads on the way to the fire. At this time the firefighting air base was here at the Santa Barbara Airport. That meant they were on it quickly, but they were no match for the fierce winds and heat.

Our company, Digital Instruments, had been in an old brick bank records building near the corner of Hollister Ave. and Modoc Road. We had moved out to the area near Hollister and Storke not long before the Painted Cave Fire. It was sad to see that entire neighborhood around where we had been almost completely destroyed. I rode my bicycle over to that neighborhood to survey the damage.

“My psychiatrist told me I was crazy and I said I want a second opinion. He said okay, you’re ugly too.” – Rodney Dangerfield

16 – 23 July 2020

The iconic Santa Barbara restaurant “The Philadelphia House” was in total ruins and never came back.

The fact that a tile company burned showed how complete the destruction had been.

Interestingly, our old building was not damaged. I climbed a nearby hill by the railroad tracks to get broader views of that neighborhood.

And a view of the total destruction looking back up toward the mountains.

16 – 23 July 2020

Later, I went for a ride with my coworker friend Peter Maivald up San Marcos Pass Road and we got this sweeping view of the total destruction below.

Our illustrious employer Virgil Elings owned a house on Via Clarice in the middle of that area of total destruction. His one house was an island that was spared. He had a small orchard on his property that had an automatic watering system.

He stayed on the property as long as possible, hosing down his roof. Then he turned on that watering system and fled when there was no other choice.

Those actions saved his home. Again, it showed that in this case the fire was big, but mostly it was spread by embers. Keeping things watered was enough to keep the embers from taking hold.

Firefighters will always tell people to get out and not risk getting caught in the fire, but sometimes it does pay to stay awhile and fight the fire. It is a big risk, though, no doubt about it.

Fire investigators quickly determined that it was a case of arson and found the point of origin near the intersection of Highway 154 and Painted Cave Road. But arson fires are very difficult to investigate because much evidence is destroyed in the fire. The case soon went cold. But about five years later Peggy Finley told her minister that her former boyfriend Leonard Ross had admitted to starting the fire.

Ross told her he lit the fire to burn out his neighbor Michael Linthicum as a result of an ongoing feud between them. Linthicum’s house in fact was one of the first homes destroyed in the fire. Ross said he did not realize it would get out of control.

But there was never enough evidence to prosecute Ross criminally. However, in 2000 he was successfully prosecuted in a civil case and ordered to pay $2.75 million in damages. Ross earned very little money in a craft business and his own property was so remote it was of little value. There was little chance of paying much of those damages.

When the Painted Cave fire happened it was so extraordinarily huge and destructive it was hard to imagine anything worse coming later to our region.

But the December 2017 Thomas Fire was almost 60 times bigger in terms of acres destroyed and almost twice as destructive in terms of structures. While the Thomas Fire killed two people directly, another 21 deaths resulted in the Montecito mudflow which was a result of the fire.

Record fires have been coming ever more often in recent years in terms of area and structures destroyed. The worst to date being the November 2018 Camp Fire which destroyed the entire town of Paradise. It destroyed 18,804 structures and killed 86 people.

Humans have created a perfect storm of destruction by altering the climate and by building ever more into previously natural areas.

Let us remember the terrible loss and tragedy of the Painted Cave Fire on this 30th anniversary. And let us also redouble our efforts to stop the forces that are leading to ever more of these tragedies.

•MJ

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

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(Some of her tables are actually ON State Street, but she has plenty of room inside too!)

Mollie’s Ravioli, Spaghetti, Lasagna (voted “Best in the World” by James Buckley), and other freshly made pasta dishes are always cooked fresh, as are her Osso Bucco, Calamari, Turkey Meatballs, and many traditional Italian dishes (with an Ethiopian flair), all made and prepared in house by Mollie and her staff.

To make a reservation (or to order take-out) from Mollie’s at 1218 State Street, call 805-770-8300.

Ciao! Stay safe and healthy!

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ADVERTISE IN THE LOCAL BUSINESS DIRECTORY (805) 565-1860 Greg Brashears Open for Dine-in or Take out Place take out order at

nuggetbarandgrill.com

Real Estate Appraisals

California Certified General Appraiser Serving Santa Barbara County and beyond for 30 years

V 805-650-9340 | EM gb@gregbrashears.com

Sweet Wheel Farm & Flowers

WE BUY BOOKS Historical Paintings Vintage Posters Original Prints

FARM DIRECT TO YOU

2285 Lillie Avenue Summerland Local Organic Produce Heavenly Baked Goods & Sourdough Breads

805-962-4606

SweetWheelFarms@gmail.com 805.770.3677 / BOX DELIVERY AVAILABLE

info@losthorizonbooks.com

LOST HORIZON BOOKSTORE now in Montecito, 539 San Ysidro Road 16 – 23 July 2020

• The Voice of the Village •

MONTECITO JOURNAL

47

TA K E A V I R T U A L T O U R T O D AY

© 2020 Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties (BHHSCP) is a member of the franchise system of BHH Affiliates LLC. BHHS and the BHHS symbol are registered service marks of Columbia Insurance Company a Berkshire Hathaway affiliate. BHH Affiliates LLC and BHHSCP do not guarantee accuracy of all data including measurements, conditions, and features of property. Information is obtained from various sources and will not be verified by broker or MLS. Buyer is advised to independently verify the accuracy of that information.

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296 LAS ENTRADAS DR, MONTECITO UPPER 6BD/11BA • $28,500,000 Nancy Kogevinas, 805.450.6233 LIC# 01209514

2697 SYCAMORE CANYON RD, MONTECITO 5BD/7½BA 3±acs • $10,900,000 Nancy Kogevinas, 805.450.6233 LIC# 01209514

810 BUENA VISTA DR, MONTECITO 6BD+apt/9BA • $8,950,000 MK Group, 805.565.4014 LIC# 01426886

MIRAMAR BEACH, MONTECITO LOWER 2BD/2½BA • $7,950,000 Cristal Clarke, 805.886.9378 LIC# 00968247

833 KNAPP DR, MONTECITO LOWER 4BD/3½BA+GH • $5,350,000 Anderson / Hurst / J. Enright, 805.618.8747 LIC# 01903215 / 00826530 / 00557356

877 LILAC DR, MONTECITO UPPER 3BD/4½BA+Guest Apt • $4,450,000 Daniel Encell, 805.565.4896 LIC# 00976141

684 LADERA LN, MONTECITO UPPER 5BD/3½BA • $4,395,000 Cristal Clarke, 805.886.9378 LIC# 00968247

700 RIVEN ROCK RD, MONTECITO 2.49 ± acs • $3,975,000 Jody Neal, 805.252.9267 LIC# 01995725

1284 COAST VILLAGE CIR, MONTECITO 2BD/2½BA • $2,850,000 Daniel Encell, 805.565.4896 LIC# 00976141

2121 SUMMERLAND HEIGHTS LN, MONTECITO

2942 TORITO RD, MONTECITO UPPER 3BD/3BA • $2,475,000 Joyce Enright, 805.570.1360 LIC# 00557356

1126 ORIOLE RD, MONTECITO LOWER 4BD/3BA • $2,395,000 Nancy Kogevinas, 805.450.6233 LIC# 01209514

45 SEAVIEW DR, MONTECITO 2BD/2BA • $1,595,000 Team Scarborough, 805.331.1465 LIC# 01182792 / 01050902

1034 FAIRWAY RD, MONTECITO 1BD/1BA • $926,000 Rachael Douglas, 805.318.0900 LIC# 02024147

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3BD/3BA • $2,699,000 Calcagno & Hamilton, 805.565.4000 LIC# 01499736 / 01129919