Can you quite believe it? This
coming week marks 32 years since Clint was elected Mayor of Carmel, California.
It’s a story that always sticks with me as it all happened on my birthday. On April 8, 1986, Clint Eastwood defeated incumbent Charlotte Townsend to become mayor of Carmel, a small seaside city in his home state of California. With just 4500 residents and one square mile of land, the town was a perfect fit for the actor, who professed no grand ambitions to run for office for anything larger.
It’s a story that always sticks with me as it all happened on my birthday. On April 8, 1986, Clint Eastwood defeated incumbent Charlotte Townsend to become mayor of Carmel, a small seaside city in his home state of California. With just 4500 residents and one square mile of land, the town was a perfect fit for the actor, who professed no grand ambitions to run for office for anything larger.
But why did Eastwood, who was still
churning out hit movies more than 30 years after beginning his career as a
screen actor—choose to run at all? In 1985, Carmel’s city council gave him what
he alleged to be an extraordinary amount of grief over plans to erect office
buildings on property he owned within city limits. Eastwood was so aggrieved he
sued the council, and won an out-of-court settlement; the settlement allowed
for permission to build if he used more wood than glass.
Carmel had long been a city
inoculated against any kind of radical development: There weren't even street
signs. (All mail went to a central post office.) A 1929 zoning law, which was
still in effect, even banned ice cream cones from being sold.
Eastwood felt that residents were
divided between a devotion to keeping the area modest and those who felt new
business would be economically beneficial. On January 30, 1986—just hours
before the deadline—he decided to run for office.
He called two-term Mayor Townsend
a “litigious” official and vowed to ease the tension between factions. While
his celebrity as a performer helped, the town also felt indebted to him for
rescuing a historic animal sanctuary, the Mission Ranch, from being bulldozed
by condo developers. When city officials couldn’t buy it back, Eastwood spent
almost $5 million of his own money to keep it standing.
Unable to stir that kind of
sentiment, Townsend sniped that Eastwood, who owned a home within city limits,
had an unlisted telephone number in the phone directory, whereas she took calls
from residents any time. (Eastwood vowed to get an answering machine.)
The day of the election, Eastwood
received 2166 votes to Townsend’s 799. He was sworn in the following week. City
Hall, a tiny piece of real estate, quickly gave way to a local women’s club
that could fit 200 people for his weekly town council meetings. As one of his
first acts in office, Eastwood tossed out the planning board that had vetoed an
ice cream prohibition repeal; men, women, and children could enjoy cones, and
proprietors could sell them.
Despite the landslide victory,
not everyone was pleased with Eastwood’s new role. Tourism increased markedly,
with fistfights over the few available parking spaces and traffic that choked
Ocean Avenue, the main artery in the city. A "Clintsville" gift shop
popped up, along with a nearby Hyatt Regency that used the slogan “Make My
Stay.” Eastwood, residents said, had attracted "two-hour tourists" to
their quiet hamlet.
Still, Eastwood’s rule proved
productive. During his first year in office, he installed more public toilets,
added more stairways leading to the beach, and expanded the offerings of the
local library. If he was shooting a movie, he’d fly back for the weekly council
meetings.
Eastwood even penned a regular column in the town’s paper, The Carmel
Pine Cone, and used one instalment to compare Councilman James Wright to a
“spoiled child” for not showing up to meetings.
Eastwood did not seek re-election,
telling journalists in February 1988 that he felt it was time to devote more
attention to his children. The $200 salary he drew every month was donated to a
local youth centre.
A reminder: The Archive does have
a dedicated page covering the Carmel Election and Clint’s term as Mayor and can
be found here. It contains a great deal of my collection, but there is still a
lot of Newspaper reports to be scanned and other pieces such as T-shirts which have to be photographed, eventually…
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