Santa Barbara Sagas
How the Granada Theatre Was Rebuilt
New Orleans and New York tend to vie for first place in lists of the country’s Best People-Watching Cities. Looking westward, San Francisco and San Diego frequently make the top 10. But if there were a category for Best People-Saga Cities, I have to think Santa Barbara would rank high.
We run into them all over town. Connie’s list alone includes an owl handler, members of a clandestine historical society, and a guy who worked on a government computer center on a secret Pacific island, to name a few.
I’ve scored some of my own along the way. Example: I happened to get chatting with a guy who served as a kind of wrangler for a parking lot on upper State. If a person parked in a space reserved for the stores that owned the spaces, he asked the driver to move. One time a parker got hostile and threw a punch, not knowing until too late that the wrangler had trained in the gym of former heavyweight champ Buster Douglas. Bad news for the parker, but good story for me.
