William T. Selby; Longtime Attorney

William T. “Bill” Selby, a former Ventura County district attorney and founder of a 60-year-old private practice in downtown Ventura, died Tuesday. He was 94.

A service will be held at 2 p.m. today at the Joseph P. Reardon Funeral Home in Ventura. He will be interred in a private ceremony at Ivy Lawn Memorial Park in Ventura.

Selby was born Sept. 6, 1904, in the former Bard Hospital on Poli Street in Ventura.

His family settled in the Ventura region in the 1880s. Selby’s grandfather was a prominent lawyer and his father also served for a time as the county’s top prosecutor.

As a child, Selby lived on what was then Ventura’s east end at Ash and Meta streets, from where he and his mother would take a trolley to visit Selby’s father’s law office on California Street.

His father’s law office was located just west of a building where Selby’s grandfather had practiced law.

By age 10, Selby’s family had relocated to Los Angeles County. Selby graduated from high school in Whittier and attended UC Berkeley, where he earned a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law in 1927.

He was in private practice for a while before joining the legal department of Safeway Stores Inc., where he met his wife, Millicent, who was his secretary.

The couple married in 1931. They lived in Missouri, where Selby continued to work and oversee Safeway’s legal department. In 1933, Selby transferred again with the company to the San Gabriel Valley.

In 1936, Selby returned to Ventura and took a position as the county’s chief deputy district attorney.

From November 1937 to August 1938, he was the county’s district attorney, after which he opened his own practice in the old downtown Bank of America Building. He later moved his offices to a new building on Santa Clara Street.

Selby never completely retired. Even after he stopped taking cases, he continued to go to his office to handle correspondence and direct the management of his family’s properties, his family said.

In his free time, Selby and his wife traveled extensively and particularly enjoyed going to see the Olympic Games. Selby, an avid golfer, was the oldest member of the Saticoy Country Club.

He was a 65-year member of the Downtown Lions Club and a member of the state Bar Assn. for more than 70 years.

He was preceded in death by Millicent, who died in 1996 at the age of 88.

Selby is survived by four children, 11 grand children and 17 great-grandchildren.