The first time I saw Carol was in the Fiesta Parade in 1953. Her father was El Presidente that year and led the parade riding one of Dwight Murphy’s magnificent palomino stallions. Carol was in a carriage with her mother and siblings, resplendent in their Fiesta finery. My mother pointed them out.
I was 17, new to Santa Barbara, and found it all highly picturesque. My father had bought a store in the 1100 block of State Street, and we were moving out from Kansas City. We watched the parade from folding chairs on the curb in front of the store.
I started at Yale that fall, and by the time I came back for Christmas, my mother got me invited to parties with a Montecito set that included Carol. My parents’ house on San Ysidro Road was a couple of blocks from the Storkes’ house, which had a tennis court. Carol matriculated at Smith College the following fall. We saw each other a couple of times in the East. I took her to a football weekend at Princeton, but we never actually dated. That Christmas, she was a reluctant debutante at the Coral Casino, and I was another girl’s escort.
The Storkes were a leading family in Santa Barbara. Carol’s grandfather, Thomas More Storke, was the publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press, then a thriving and respected newspaper. TM won a Pulitzer for standing up to the John Birch Society and played an active part in the creation of Cachuma Dam, which enabled the city’s postwar growth, and the establishment of UC Santa Barbara. Carol’s father, Charles, was associate publisher of the News-Press, managed the radio station, and helped get Earl Warren Showgrounds built. We saw the Storkes at the Santa Barbara National Horse Show.
After college, Carol and I both moved to New York but followed different paths and never saw each other, though we both worked at Ed Koch’s City Hall for a while. When I moved to Santa Barbara in 1992, after my father died, my mother told me that Carol was divorced and had moved back the previous year. Knowing no one else of my generation, I called her up and we met for lunch. We immediately hit it off. We were New Yorkers, for one thing, and talked the same language at the same speed. Before long, I moved into her house in Goleta with my 14-year-old son, Alfred, and we decided to spend the rest of our lives together. Carol’s father said, “Welcome to the family.”
Suddenly, I had deep roots. Carol was a ninth-generation Santa Barbaran. Her ancestry went back to José Francisco Ortega, the first commandant of the Presidio, as well as the More brothers, Scots who accumulated substantial land holdings including one or more of the Channel Islands.
In our first months together, Carol had been laid off from her job as a computer programs designer. I was waiting for my predecessor’s departure to become the arts editor of the Independent, so we had plenty of time for picnics and other outings to get to know each other. In the fall, we went back to work. As music critic of the Independent, I had free tickets for concerts, and we relished Santa Barbara’s wealth of classical music. (I later became the music critic of the News-Press, then owned and well-run by The New York Times.)
Carol’s love of horses was fostered by her maternal grandfather, Sellar Bullard, who had a hilltop avocado ranch in Goleta. He gave her a pony, then horses as she got older, taught her to ride, and she had wild adventures on horseback with her sister Barbie in the lemon groves that predated the present suburban neighborhoods. She showed in the Santa Barbara National when it was still in Pershing Park.
Carol had brought two horses with her when she moved back to Santa Barbara in 1991, boarding them at a nearby stable and riding with her horse friends on the weekend. I only gradually realized how important horses were to her — as important, she insisted, as the arts were to me. I was a dude-ranch rider and eventually got a horse of my own so we could ride together on the cliffs of More Mesa and the far reaches of Rancho San Julian. For several years, Carol wrote a monthly column on horse-related topics for the Independent, which gave her a pretext for talking to people and looking into the traditions and innovations that interested her. With a cadre of fellow horse-lovers she organized efforts to preserve Earl Warren Showgrounds, which was threatened with development. Thanks to their ubiquitous Save Earl Warren bumper stickers, they won.
As time went on, I started doing theater, and Carol got more serious about training her horses and competing in horse shows. Where to keep her horses was an increasingly frustrating problem. She wanted her own barn, but such property was unaffordable in the area. By the early 2000s, her father and my mother had died, Alfred had grown up and was living on his own, and there was really nothing holding us in Santa Barbara.
In 2003, we moved to Oregon. The house in Goleta translated into a seven-acre farm along Silver Creek in the beautiful Willamette Valley. We renovated and expanded the house, Carol built herself a well-equipped horse barn and arena, and I made the chicken house into a spacious writing studio. It was Carol’s lifelong dream come true — horses right outside the back door. She was doing everything she dreamed of: working with a trainer and winning the championship in adventure trail at the Oregon Equestrian Center in Eugene, camping and exploring the Cascades on horseback with her friends. I kept myself busy with music, poetry, a few plays, and book-publishing.
Carol, who died on January 25, was the last of the Storkes to be active in Santa Barbara, but the marks of the family remain. Charles, her father, was good friends with Henry Yang, the chancellor of UCSB, which honored his benefactions with a ceremony at the foot of Storke Tower. The carillon TM had given to the university was neglected; Carol and I agitated for a new carillonneur and lay on the grass below the tower, basking in the vibrations of the concerts she played.
Carol joined her father on the board of the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation, an essential counterweight to the Paseo Nuevo. Charles contributed vision and money to the restoration of Casa De la Guerra. I remember the unveiling of a plaque in his honor on the south facade of the building, facing his father’s News-Press building, another Santa Barbara classic, Storkes bookending the Plaza.
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