Audrey Berman arrived in Santa Barbara from the East Coast already tempest-tossed through several eras. She could remember as a little girl the chaos of the Great Depression, and as a teenager the fears of the WWII years, when her Jewish parents changed their name and instructed Audrey to tell schoolmates she was Protestant. At the age of 19, in 1954, she married an upwardly mobile attorney, and then she lived the life of a homemaker, giving dinner parties, spending summers at Fire Island, playing a lot of tennis, reading a lot, and raising two excellent children.
Audrey took a secretarial job in the late 1960s at New York’s iconic weekly, the Village Voice. She rose to become its managing editor under editor in chief Marianne Partridge, who discovered Audrey the way Hollywood stars are sometimes discovered. Audrey went on to work as managing editor for two more publications before re-joining Marianne, who had just purchased a weekly paper in Santa Barbara.
She found Marianne surrounded by a tiny editorial crew, including some brilliant, idealistic young people (among them Nick Welsh), who’d struggled to keep the worker-owned News & Review afloat and stayed on after selling it to her. Soon thereafter, the N&R and a rival publication dissolved themselves to be reborn in 1986 as The Santa Barbara Independent. Audrey brought into the mix a certain cool sophistication, a loving nature, and iron-clad journalistic standards with which she helped Marianne guide the paper for the next two decades.
