He was the dean of local journalists, the Boswell of the environmental movement. But Bob Sollen, the Santa Barbara News-Press reporter who covered the 1969 oil spill in the Channel — a disaster that blackened local beaches from Goleta to Ventura and was dubbed “the environmental shot heard ’round the world” — never took much credit for his pioneering work.
“I never dug out any information,” he told me once, in his unassuming way. “It just flowed into my desk faster than I could report it.”
Sollen worked at the News-Press from 1963 to 1985, a period of rising prestige and influence at the paper. He started out as a copy editor, but after taking part in a Vietnam War protest and being quoted in print, he was transferred to a “low-profile” job covering offshore oil.