Santa Barbara’s Pioneering Pearl 

If the pearl is indeed “the oyster’s autobiography,” as Italian film director Federico Fellini once said, with each layer creating more and more luster and depth, it seems fitting that the story of Santa Barbara’s most famous pearl, so inextricably tied to our town’s aesthetic development and civic history, should be written by one of the most avid preservers of her legacy. 

Cheri Rae’s new book, A String of Pearls: Pearl Chase of Santa Barbara, ties together the previously untold story of the woman who played such a major role in transforming Santa Barbara into the city it is today through a string of vibrantly written stories about all sorts of things, from her social work to her romances, her founding of various civic and social organizations, her work on the waterfront, and of course, perhaps her best-known local legacy as a historic preservationist. 

I sat down with Rae, a longtime writer friend and colleague (and occasional Independent contributor) to talk about her latest passion project. 

Ten years ago, you published the pocket guide, Pearl Chase, First Lady of Santa Barbara. What was your first encounter with her?  When I first moved to town, I wrote a book to get to know Santa Barbara called Walk Santa Barbara: City Strolls and Country Rambles, so I immersed myself in Santa Barbara history. That was in 1989, and I kept coming across the name of Pearl Chase, but I didn’t know very much about her. She just sort of intrigued me. 

The way I decided to finally do something was I was editing The Capital newsletter for the Pearl Chase society many years ago [she still does] and I would go to their board meetings and people would come from various nonprofits around the city and they would ask for grants, and I realized that they really didn’t know anything about Pearl Chase. I always felt this sort of loyalty. Well, you gotta have some knowledge. And that’s what made me do the little book. At the time, our publishing company was just doing these mini books. … I’m kind of embarrassed about it now, because it’s so little. And I felt like she deserved so much more. 

I always said, “Somebody needs to write a biography about her” — that was, like 10 years ago. I never imagined that it would be me. I figured somebody will be inspired and do it. Nobody did. 

I always think of Pearl Chase as being invoked by preservationists or even people in the City Council when somebody’s proposing something outrageous, like she would roll over in her grave if somebody wanted to do a neon sign in town.  [Laughs.] Well, she was responsible for a great deal. I was really interested in how she came to be and how she got to have the kind of power that we invoke these days. What was her background, and it was remarkable because she was very lucky in a lot of ways. But then she overcame a lot of tragedies…. I think she was the smartest and most prepared person in the room, always. 

You said she went to Santa Barbara High, class of 1904.  And she had to wait a year to go to Cal Berkeley, because she wasn’t old enough to go. So she graduated from Berkeley in 1909. … What do you do when you come back to Santa Barbara with a college education in 1909? There weren’t many options. So she got more education. And then she ended up as a teacher and hated every minute. She taught home economics at Santa Barbara High.

That’s fascinating.  I know, and it was about as far from this intellectual, brilliant woman with a degree in history as you could possibly get. But she just kind of threw herself into it and was as good of a teacher she could possibly be until she had an opportunity to leave. 

I think that one of the really interesting facts about her is that people always say she never took a dollar. She always worked for free. If you start thinking about that, how’s that possible? How do you do that? Well, I found the way that happened was that after she was in a terrible car accident, her brother and her father realized how much she hated teaching. And she told them, “I never want to teach again.” So they said, “Okay, we will support you; we will make it possible for you to represent the family in town. And we will provide for you economically in exchange for caring for her father,” because the mother had died in a terrible accident. 

When her mother died, it was a terrible tragedy. And it was very shocking in the community because her mom was crushed in the family garage, by her father, because he probably put his foot on the accelerator rather than the brake. 

Wow.  It was devastating for the family. Pearl’s mother had been raising the money for the rebuild of Cottage Hospital in 1913. She was very well-known and she was a very talented woman. It was a horrible, terrible tragedy when she died. That’s when Pearl decided, “I will take care of my father for the rest of his life.” That was in 1913, and I think she didn’t think he was gonna live as long as he did. He lived until 1951. 

She never married?  She never married, but had many suitors.

It sounds like you learned a lot writing this book.  Yes, and a lot of things happened. UCSB had cataloged a lot of the information, and I knew more about Santa Barbara and Pearl, so I was able to be more targeted in what I wanted to research. I had several topic areas that were very important to me, and then fun things like the Scorpio Club (she had a group of women in Santa Barbara, including Lutah Maria Riggs, who were all born in November and got together annually).

There’s no better example than what happened where Alice Keck Park Memorial Garden is. In the book, I call it the last battle and really detail about how that happened. They saved the city from two nine-story condominiums. … Can you imagine how different the city would be if they had allowed that?

It would be so different.  One of the things that was important to me was to have stories that reveal who she was as a person. She was a huge conservationist before the idea of environmentalists came to be. … She was involved in National Park issues. …  She had this idea of outdoor good manners, which I delineate in the book, because I think it’s really important to see how ahead of her time she was. She created curriculum for our schools, and pamphlets that are unbelievable and still valid today. She was this remarkable woman. … I feel a certain amount of privilege to have gone through her papers.

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The launch event with an author talk and book signing for A String of Pearls: Pearl Chase of Santa Barbara takes place at Chaucer’s Books (3321 State Street) on Wednesday, November 8, at 6 p.m. See chaucersbooks.com.

There will also be a party to celebrate the book, support the Pearl Chase Society, and honor Pearl Chase’s 135th birthday on Saturday, November 18, from noon to 4 p.m. at The Santa Barbara Company (214 E. Victoria St.) See pearlchasesociety.org.