Clint Eastwood, the Mayor of Carmel

In the mid nineteen eighties this village of fewer than thirty two hundred people elected a movie star to run it. Clint Eastwood, the man with no name, the Dirty Harry of the big screen, announced his run for mayor and won in April of nineteen eighty six, taking more than two thousand votes to the incumbent's roughly eight hundred. What pushed him into politics was a long fight with City Hall over his own building permits, sharpened by the embarrassment of the ice cream cone flap.

Carmel's strict rules on take out food had blocked a shop from selling cones to be eaten while walking, and the fight earned the town the mocking nickname Scrooge City. Eastwood ran, won, and swept the restriction away, along with adding public restrooms on the beach and a new library annex. He already owned the Hog's Breath Inn on San Carlos Street.

That same year, nineteen eighty six, he bought the historic Mission Ranch, a nineteenth century dairy that was rotted, termite ridden, and slated to become condominiums, and he paid millions to save it and restore it board by board. He served a single two year term. Carmel, he insisted, was not Clint-ville.

But his fingerprints are still on the town.