The witty Erin Graffy de Garcia died Monday night after a battle with cancer during the past half-year. She grew up in Santa Barbara and was the daughter of Jeanne Graffy, a Santa Barbara city councilmember and 2nd District county supervisor, and was married to James Garcia. Graffy, whose brother Neal is also a well-known historian, expanded on her knowledge of the city as an author and historian, writing a number of the S.B. Historical Museum’s Las Noticias quarterly magazines, exploring subjects like the Visiting Nurses Association, portrait painter Clarence Mattei, the Yacht Club, and the city’s Italian Renaissance style.
She served on many nonprofit boards locally and expressed her love of the city and its traditions by volunteering on the board of Old Spanish Days and acting as its historian. Graffy seemed to know just about everyone in Santa Barbara. Under her Society Lady hat, which she wore for many years as a columnist for the Santa Barbara Independent, Graffy wrote an instructive series of books called How to Santa Barbara — with her tongue firmly in her cheek — for anyone finding it difficult to understand why the sun in Santa Barbara rose in the south and set in the north.
Her book Old Spanish Days, celebrating the city’s public art, won a regional nonfiction book award for excellence. She and artist Tom Mielko won a silver medal in the Benjamin Franklin Book Awards for Animalia, which paired Mielko’s gorgeous pencil drawings with Graffy’s poems written under the influence of Edward Lear.
Graffy wrote across all of Santa Barbara’s highly competitive media over the years, most recently publishing her “The Talk of the Town” column at Noozhawk. Kind and gracious, Graffy seldom turned down a request to share her deep knowledge of Santa Barbara history for an article. She was, however, reluctant to divulge her age, which was somewhere in her sixth decade at her death.
