Clint Eastwood and the Ice Cream Wars of Carmel

In nineteen eighty-five, national television news declared that the city of Carmel had banned ice cream cones. This was not quite accurate but was not entirely inaccurate either, and the distinction says everything about this town.

The actual ordinance banned unpackaged take-out food in general, not ice cream specifically. But the "Scrooge City" label stuck, and for a brief period Carmel was famous across the country as the place where you could not eat an ice cream cone on the street.

Clint Eastwood, who was living in Carmel at the time and had spent eighteen months fighting city hall over building permits for his own property, announced his candidacy for mayor in January nineteen eighty-six. He did not run on a platform of great civic vision. He ran because the building permit process had made him angry and because the ice cream ordinance had made the city look ridiculous and because, as he told it, he thought he could fix both problems.

He won by more than two to one: two thousand one hundred sixty-six votes against the incumbent Charlotte Townsend's seven hundred ninety-nine. One of his first acts as mayor was allowing a shop called Chocolate Dreams to sell gelato for take-away consumption. He served one two-year term and did not seek re-election.

The episode is funnier than it sounds and more revealing than it appears. A town so committed to its own idea of itself, its village atmosphere, its anti-commercial ordinances, its founding aesthetic program, that it banned street food and required a Hollywood actor to come in and put things right, is a town that takes itself very seriously. Carmel has always taken itself very seriously. It is part of the charm and part of the absurdity, sometimes simultaneously.