Barney Brantingham, Former ‘Santa Barbara News-Press’ and ‘Independent’ Writer, Has Died

Santa Barbara lost a beloved reporter on May 29, when Barney Brantingham died from complications of pneumonia at age 93, his daughter Wendy Brantingham said. Brantingham chronicled our beachside town in a masterful style, always with one ear cocked to the truth of what he was hearing, his eyes bright with interest.

“Like Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin, Herb Caen, and other city columnists of his era, Barney captured the heart, spirit, and energy of his town, day after day, year after year, so that his body of work became a kind of living history of Santa Barbara,” said Jerry Roberts, Brantingham’s editor at the Santa Barbara News-Press. “He knew everyone, he knew everything that was happening, and he seemed to know it first, before anyone else. He was a warhorse journalist, a kind man, and an enduring community treasure.”

Having grown up on Chicago’s south side, Brantingham worked for the Chicago Heights Star in 1957, fresh out of the military and a stint in Panama, before he headed for California and a weekly newspaper in San Clemente. Traveling north on a visit to Santa Barbara, “I drove up State Street and fell in love,” he said, when he retired from the Independent in 2017.

Brantingham’s first job here, however, was with TM Storke’s News-Press in 1960. He covered the courts for 17 years, and then became the paper’s star columnist, writing his “Off the Beat” column and becoming known around town as simply “Barney.” Or, as Nick Welsh of the Independent would say, “If the Pope came to town and Barney was there, people would ask who the guy with Barney was.”

Barney wrote “Off the Beat” for three decades and through the tenure of four publishers, from Storke to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Times, and then Wendy McCaw. The column and Barney’s job were cut short by the “News-Press Mess,” when he joined the editors who quit in protest of the publisher’s meddling in the daily paper’s news coverage, despite McCaw’s inducements to keep him on staff.

“He was the quintessential Man About Town, a handsome, charming, easy-to-talk-to-guy whom everybody knew and everybody liked,” said Melinda Burns, a fellow reporter at the News-Press. “He loved his job, but he didn’t hesitate to resign when the chips were down, back in early 2006.”

Roberts, whose departure precipitated the rest, said, “It was [Barney’s] resignation from the News-Press in 2006 — not that of a batch of anonymous editors who left at the same time — that caught the community’s attention, and made people throughout Santa Barbara County clearly understand the high stakes of the battle for ethical journalism that had erupted in the newsroom. He will always be my hero.”

Burns recalled one of Barney’s writings about the “News-Press Mess” that later appeared at the Independent: “Russian playwrights couldn’t have written anything sadder,” he wrote in a new column called “On the Beat.”

“When Barney decided to begin writing for the Independent, the whole staff gathered in the lobby to cheer and welcome him on his first day at work,” said Marianne Partridge, editor in chief of the Independent. “He was not only a great reporter, but a kind and thoughtful man. It was an honor to have his byline in the Indy.”

Every week, for 11 more years, Barney continued to dig up stories about Santa Barbara and Santa Barbarans, bringing light to some topic of local interest, whether a shelter for homeless youth or the best fish tacos at El Mercado De la Guerra during Fiesta. Ever the storyteller, even after retirement Barney would occasionally send an item in, most recently a Fiesta piece in our pages last year, which was his last. He will be missed.

Barney Brantingham’s stories written for the Independent have been collected here.