Bon Voyage

After 33 years as controller at the Santa Barbara Polo Club, Debby Bernal is riding off into the sunset.

Debby, who is being replaced by Susie Banda-Avila, was presented with an undisclosed check to be used for her forthcoming world travels by club manager, David Sigman, at the recent Fire and Ice gala.

Storied Pasts

To Casa Dorinda, celebrating its centenary, where former News-Press society scribe Beverley Jackson and yours truly spoke to a packed room about our colorful lives as journalists.

I regaled the audience with some of the many fetes I have attended around the world, including the late New York publisher Malcolm Forbes’s 70th legendary three-day birthday party in 1989 for 800 bold-faced named guests, including Elizabeth Taylor, at his Palais Mendoub in Tangier, Morocco, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar, when we were flown in on a chartered Air France Concorde and a Royal Air Maroc Boeing 747.

Beverley, a longtime friend who just celebrated her 90th birthday, spoke about our rarefied enclave’s glory days with society grand dames and great estates, and the visit by Queen Elizabeth in 1983 to visit President Ronald Reagan.

I wrapped up my part of the lecture with my memorable stay on the late President Fidel Castro’s private island, Cayo Piedra, in Cuba, when I sailed into Havana’s Marina Hemingway on the 153ft. schooner of Prince Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, one of the world’s wealthiest men.

Colorful lives to be sure…