SO LONG, WILLY: Over the years, I managed to have considerable sport at the expense of Willy Chamberlin, the longtime Santa Ynez rancher and former 3rd District county supervisor who died of cancer two weeks ago. It should be acknowledged Chamberlin gave as good as he got where The Santa Barbara Independent was concerned. In the last analysis, I’d say he got the last word. Given what that word was, I was happy it worked out the way it did.
Chamberlin was the proverbial tall drink of water who dressed in a cowboy hat, blue jeans, and a belt buckle the size of a Thanksgiving turkey platter. Back in 1992, Chamberlin ran for county supervisor as the outraged voice of ranchers and farmers against the prevailing environmentalist majority. Weirdly, Chamberlin managed to lose and win simultaneously, and in so doing he broke the hegemony long enjoyed by the Goleta slow-growth cabal and Isla Vista eco-warriors who had successfully strip-mined the youthful idealism of UCSB students, converting it into a formidable political machine. [See Kelsey Brugger’s cover article on the same.] Chamberlin managed to get on our bad side early, proclaiming in the June primary that he’d been endorsed by every newspaper on the South Coast. It simply wasn’t true. When we pointed out that neither the Daily Nexus nor The Independent had endorsed Chamberlin, he elaborated how he been endorsed by every reputable paper. Needless to say, we milked our aggrieved sense of offense for all it was worth.
As a supervisor, Chamberlin wasted few opportunities to gut, hobble, or otherwise hamstring anything that vaguely resembled an environmental regulation. If we didn’t report on his every move, it wasn’t for lack of trying. To the extent we ever got under Chamberlin’s skin, he never let it show. In person, he was in-your-face cheerfulness personified. That being said, Jerry Cornfield, the Independent reporter then covering county government, did note with alarm how Chamberlin would twist his nipples whenever the opportunity arose. While I never experienced this — or even witnessed it — Cornfield is genetically incapable of exaggeration or hyperbole, so it must be true. Accordingly, I remained outside Chamberlin’s striking distance.