The year was 1989, and the newly widowed Barbara Tompkins was in her San Roque home, going through the effects of her late husband, renowned local historian Walker Tompkins.

“A friend of the printer (who had printed some of Tompkins’ books) was here and said, ‘your husband sure was prolific.’”
“Prolific? I don’t know what to do with these,” Barbara recalled saying, as she indicated a copy of an 800-page manuscript “Tommy” had written in the 1960s.

While Barbara only meant she didn’t know where on the shelf to put it, her visitor saw something else entirely.
“He looked at it and said ‘Oh my. This has to be published.’”

So, after gathering dust for about forty years, what could easily be called Walker Tompkins’ masterwork finally saw the printing press. But it didn’t reach the press until it went through an editing process that was a fitting tribute to the man who dedicated himself to passing on Santa Barbara County’s rich history.

“The Yankee Barbareños” was the brainchild of former Signal Oil Company president and UC Regent Sam Mosher, whose interest in Santa Barbara’s history and culture led him to commission a County history.

“Tommy chose to write it on the theme of the Americanization of the county,” said Barbara. The original manuscript was given to the Santa Barbara Public Library, but at the time there were no funds to publish 800 pages worth of history. So for years, the library could only display the work in the reference section. All was not lost however, as the manuscript provided material for many of the other books Tompkins wrote.

Obtaining permission from the Santa Barbara City attorney and the library to publish the manuscript at no cost to the library, yet guaranteeing all net proceeds would go to the library, took all of 1990, Barbara recalled.

The transformation from a manuscript typed on an old Underwood typewriter to “The Yankee Barbareños,” a polished, definitive history of Santa Barbara County, began in September of 1991, when Barbara began retyping every page on a computer, because the hard copy “wouldn’t scan at all.”

“I [knew] some of his little idiosyncrasies with the punctuation. I could clean it up a little bit,” said Barbara, while still preserving Tompkins’ trademark storytelling style honed by 30 years of writing Western fiction. After long hours at the keyboard, Barbara finally finished the job in December of 1992.

The biggest hurdle, however, was not the retyping of 800 pages. It was updating the nearly 40-year old manuscript, acquiring the necessary photos and verifying anecdotes.

“I was in trouble,” said Barbara. Not easily discouraged, however, she decided to contact other local historians, museums, libraries and history buffs for help with the challenge. Much to her delight, these “wonderful people” responded enthusiastically to her call.

“I would send sections of the book out, and I told them that this book was written in the 1960s, and was Tommy’s first real history of the area.

“They were happy to do it,” she said of the 30 or so people involved, many of whom were related to people mentioned in the history. “These people...were giving me corrections to material Tommy got from oral history, when the old timers’ memories were not so good.”

Others jumped into the fray as well. Historian David Myrick, who wrote the book’s forward, also gave her 14 pages worth of editorial suggestions. And local radio announcer Jim Williams was interested as well. “Over a period of months, he read the whole book to me,” she said.

For some, “The Yankee Barbareños” became a family matter. Lt. Cmdr. Austin Rudnicki, a friend of Walker Tompkins’ and a fellow ham radio operator, provided information on ham radio operations during the time of the 1925 earthquake, as well as photographs of the wreck of a U.S. Navy ship off Point Conception. Rudnicki’s daughter Nancy was one of several people who gave the book the editorial once (or twice) over. Nancy, her sister Sue, and Barbara handled the promotion for the book, while Sue’s husband Dana came up with the cover design.

With so many eager editors involved, Barbara Tompkins’ major concern was that her husband’s writing style not be diminished. “He had an easygoing, easy to read style that attracted a lot of people and interested them in history,” she said.

Even the printer was an eager participant in the process. Paul Fletcher, formerly of Schauer Printing (since closed), had been waiting since about 1993 to put the manuscript to bed. “We were just putting him off, we weren’t ready,” said Barbara. Eventually Fletcher had to put his resources to work on other projects, and ten years later, when the manuscript was finally ready, he wasn’t able to take it on. Barbara and company felt it proper to wait the year it took until he was in a position to move forward.

“I felt that it was a very generous and wonderful offer for Paul to use his own money and wait for returns later. He said he cared so much about Tommy, he considered him like his father. In fact, when Tommy passed away, I got a phone call from this man I didn’t know, Paul Fletcher, [who said] ‘I just want you to know, that if there is anything I can do for you, I am here.’”

And so a history book that took a year to write and about 15 years to make it to the presses, finally got there in 2005. And it’s an impressive feat for a woman who said, before she met Walker Tompkins, that she had no interest whatsoever in history. Barbara fondly remembers when they met - she, a writer for the radio station KTMS, and he a history columnist for the Santa Barbara News-Press.

“It was a mutual attraction,” she said. Shortly after they began seeing each other, they married, by mutual agreement but unspoken consent.

“After we got married I said, ‘You know, you never really did ask me to marry you.’

“’No,’ he said, ‘I was afraid you’d say no.’”

The final delivery of the manuscript was bittersweet for Barbara Tompkins. “I recognized that I was clinging to the book because I was clinging to [Tommy],” she said. In retrospect, she feels that he was present, not only in the words in print but also during other aspects of the manuscript’s journey. “He was always there...if I did something he didn’t like, I knew it, I’d fix it, and he’d be smiling.”

COURTESY PHOTO

Caption: Barbara Tompkins shepherded "Yankee Barbareños" to publication.