In this week’s Independent, Nick Welsh covers the retirement of everybody’s favorite Santa Barbara columnist, Barney Brantingham. When I started at the SBNP as an intern, people used to ask me all the time if I’d met Barney and if so, what he was like. I’d respond that he kept to himself in the newsroom but he sure did seem to know what was going on around town. It seemed like it was no big deal for him to churn out a column almost every day of the week while making it look like the easiest job on the block. I admired that work ethic and tried to emulate it. It was an approach that served me well in my newspaper days.
But the place where Barney really showed his true colors was when everything went to hell at the paper in 2006. He was much loved by the readers – he very easily could have hung on there for a very long time without too much strife. But he walked out early and covered the rest of us walking out for the Indy. That took guts, and it made me sure I was doing the right thing when I departed.
Barney was Santa Barbara’s Herb Caen, a name that probably doesn’t mean much except to us newspaper types. But he loved the town and he covered it through the eyes of the people who live here – the kind of writing that we don’t really get to read much anymore. Thanks, Barney, for being a mentor to me and a much-loved voice for our city.
