About

By name, I’m David Petry. I’m happily married with two daughters and a step-daughter.

I have lived in Santa Barbara since 1976 when I arrived here to attend UCSB. I know this makes me a neophyte. I attended a gathering a few years ago when my book,  The Best Last Place, came out. People were introduced to me as third-, fourth-, and fifth-generation families. Before the night was out, I’d met two sixth-generation families. I have since met members of a seventh-generation family.

I came from places that people left. Redlands. Los Angeles. Indianapolis. I like about Santa Barbara that it is a place that people stay for  generations.

I majored in Environmental Studies and worked in newspapers. I wrote for the Nexus and became News Editor. I interned for a semester at the News-Press under Bob Sollen, the quick and insightful writer who crusaded and reported on a public environmental agenda early on. Then I wrote for the venerable and deeply missed John Hankins of the County News Service.

At the same time, during the nights, I was cooking in restaurants. With the young waitresses, the better money, and the daily drama the places offered, I strayed from the news and became a manager, first at the Enterprise Fish Company, and then at a flash-in-the-pan, Captain Quick’s on Victoria Street.

Later, I became a technical writer in the environmental and engineering fields, and then, because I had a daughter and I was following the money, in computers. At some point, I landed a job with a local software firm that swallowed fifteen years.

However, during that time, I took a side job. I wrote a history for the Santa Barbara Cemetery.

That task consumed my free time for the better part of eight years. The cemetery’s board, I now know, was hoping for a thirty page exposition on the beginnings, middles, and status of the enterprise. They’d completed a 300-page oral history of William H. N. Bryant, Jr., the cemetery’s manager and board member for an accumulated fifty years. His memories coalesced around his first years as he fought for recognition and stature with the board, and then traveled down selective and incomplete lanes of memory. The board wanted a quick and small publication to capture the essence of his oral history, and to incorporate other information as available.

I didn’t get the memo.

Honestly.

I simply agreed to start and see what there was. As I worked through the cemetery’s considerable archives and started spelunking in the basement of the County’s Hall of Records for title transfers and maps, I also delved into the study of research, history, and cemeteries in general. I was traveling for work and I began visiting one cemetery after another in the various towns and cities. Over the years, I visited over 1,000 cemeteries.

I am a big fan of historian Bernard DeVoto’s work. His The Year of Decision, 1846, was the inspiration for my first chapter. I wanted to show Santa Barbara in 1867, the year of the cemetery’s founding, as a place that wasn’t just erecting a fence around a plot of land where they buried people, but that was passing through an intense period of self-creation. In fact, I discovered that a fair portion of that self-creation was focused specifically on the burial of the dead.

What I constructed for my first deliverable of fifty pages was almost all context. I set the scene in the dusty streets of Santa Barbara. I brought in the ordered sequence of cemetery models that came before. I buried local otter hunter and businessman Isaac Sparks because his death was the first of the Protestant town fathers and therefore demanded a better cemetery than the unkempt square by the brick quarry against the base of the Mesa where he was initially buried.

I had created a full orchestration, where the board expected perhaps a nice rendition of taps on a single horn.

I received those first fifty pages back from the board and turned back the cover page. The text inside was marked, paragraph after paragraph, and then page after page, with bold red Xs. All that was left were the paragraphs that dealt solely with the cemetery itself. Even the description of the cemetery’s leading founder, Charles Huse, was reduced to a bare vignette.

I quit.

I packaged up my notes and files, my spreadsheets and source materials, the map I’d made of the cemetery archives, and I delivered them to the cemetery so they could find someone else to complete the work. History without context isn’t history. It’s advertising with dates.

I stayed in contact because I really enjoyed the staff at the cemetery and I had come to love the place itself. Every time I spoke to Randy Thwing, the manager, he said, ‘The box is here. We still want you to do it.’ Then two years later, a fellow writer was fired from the company where I was working and I told her, ‘There’s a project you may be interested in…’

That night, I printed out a fresh copy of the pieces I’d delivered two years earlier. I was mainly doing it to ensure I wasn’t going to embarrass myself by handing this writer something trite and incompetent. Instead, I was fired up all over again. I could see the book. I could feel the story coiled inside me like a snake, ready to strike. I called Randy and asked him, ‘What if I did the book the way I started?’ Randy said that would be great. The board, he said, had softened on context. It had grown on them.

I called the other writer and apologized. I was going back in.

The work had started in 1996 and then lay fallow for all of 1997 and part of 1998. From 1998 through 2003 I traced the cemetery’s history, and the history of American cemeteries. There were many avenues I followed, and some I literally stood at the entrance to and sadly turned away. I started giving tours, and the participants enriched my experiences with anecdotes and their own knowledge of Santa Barbara and of the cemetery and its ‘residents.’

I was largely finished by 2003, but there were no current photographs, and no publisher, and I had no knowledge of what was required for either. I packaged and brought various publication proposals to the board, but could not get over that wall with them.

I focused on finding a photographer, but couldn’t find one interested.  I looked with dismay at the well-researched Respectable Burial: Montreal’s Mount Royal Cemetery by Brian J. Young. The photos, assembled at the beginning of the book, appeared as though they’d all been shot during the same week in the Fall. The leaves were changing and off the trees, the sky a pallid blue, the colors draining away. I had seen ‘my’ cemetery in a thousand lights, in rain, fog, sunlight; dawn, dusk, and dead of night. I wanted it portrayed like that in the book.

So I studied photography and began visiting the cemetery every time the weather changed, and every possible dawn and dusk, shooting thousands of images over the next two years.

Then I ran into John McKinney, author and publisher at Olympus Press, at a school gathering and had a brief conversation about the project. He told me to come by and discuss it in more detail. I met with John and his wife Cheri Rae, and they were as fired up about the project as I was. John went to the cemetery board wearing the publisher’s hat, and they responded.

For a large portion of 2005 and 2006, I worked with Cheri Rae and designer Eric Larson of Studio E Books on the publication. Neal Graffy did a wonderful historical edit and wrote the Forward (stealing my fire with his wit and wisdom), and Cheri Rae did a structural and grammatical edit that surprised me with her attention to detail and consistency across the many pages, captions, footnotes, and index.

It was a labor of love, but the labor was not just to see a beautiful book published and deposited on the shelves of a bookstore or library. The love came from the lessons the project taught me about humanity and our shared lives.

Now, I’m setting foot into the economic stream as an author and historian and photographer, without the distracting and time-consuming fulltime employment. I look forward to meeting many new compatriots and friends along the way!