The San Francisco Bay Guardian

After 40 years as the publisher of America’s largest, independently operated weekly newspaper, Bruce B. Brugmann still thrives on the battle against the “big boys” who run San Francisco.

I

t’s 11 o’clock on a Wednesday morning in June, and Bruce Brugmann (B.A., ’57) has just risen up in righteous fury against the belching smokestack that looms outside his office window.

Bruce B. Brugmann – who often refers to himself simply as “B3” – is utterly outraged once again.

And the former UNL student-journalist is enjoying every minute of it.

“Look at that damn power plant,” roars the 71-year-old Brugmann, the publisher since 1966 of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, which has been battling the local private utility company – Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) – day in and day out for nearly 40 years. “Look at that damn thing, spewing poisons into the air every single minute of every day.”

Standing at the window of the cluttered office, he glares in white-bearded outrage at the distant smokestack, which soars above a spaghetti-tangle of congested freeways. “That’s a symbol of the biggest scandal in American history involving a city,” he growls as he points toward the

hulking behemoth, “and it’s a scandal brought to you courtesy of PG&E, which has taken hundreds of millions of dollars out of our regional economy by privately selling power that ought to be public.

“We’ve been fighting PG&E since the late 1960s, and we have no intention of giving up. And we’re gonna win some day, you wait and see. I don’t care how long it takes. I’m 71 years old, and when people ask me if I plan to retire anytime soon, I tell ’em: ‘I’m not gonna retire until ten years after I die ... or at least, not until we finally kick PG&E out of City Hall and bring public power to all of San Francisco!’”

Scowling and muttering, he leads the way back to his desk at the Guardian – the “largest continuously and independently owned, stand-alone, alternative weekly newspaper” in America today – where he falls into a battered wooden chair and

By Tom Nugent resumes what will turn out to be a virtually uninterrupted four-hour monologue on the horrors perpetrated daily by the “corporate-controlled, absentee-run media monopolies,” the “big development interests that want to drive the low-income folks out of San Francisco,” and the “PG&E octopus that has had a hammerlock on City Hall for decades.”

Wow! Spend a few hours with B3 at the nerve center of his humming alternative weekly newspaper (his masthead vows to “Print the news and raise hell!”) – located on Mississippi Street in a drab industrial section of the city – and you’ll soon find that you’re in the presence of nothing less than a force of nature. Standing 6 feet, 5 inches tall, and graced with a thickly curling, snow-white beard that gives him the look of an enraged ocean deity about to unleash a howling maelstrom, Brugmann vibrates with journalistic fervor as he vows to bring down the “power structure” and the “well-connected Chamber of Commerce types” who are endlessly conspiring to victimize his beloved city.

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Blowing The Lid Off The City By The Bay …

Guardian’s Front-Page Exposés Rip ‘Power Structure’ In San Francisco Ask Bruce B. Brugmann to define journalism, and he responds in the blink of an eye: “Our job is to print the news and raise hell.”

Here are five recent San Francisco Bay Guardian blockbusters that caused consternation throughout the City by the Bay. 1. THE CASE FOR IMPEACHMENT: It’s Not Just For Radicals Anymore. (Jan. 25, 2006) Accompanied by a giant front-page photo of a finger-wagging George W. Bush and a smug-looking Dick Cheney, this barnburner began as follows: “We’ve been here before, twice. The first time it came up, back in 1973, there was a guy named Richard M. Nixon in the Oval Office. … ” 2. WHY SF COPS CAN’T SHOOT (OR GET THEIR STORIES) STRAIGHT. (June 7, 2006) This front-page scorcher kicked off by asking the burning question: “Why is Asa Sullivan dead? After two weeks, the San Francisco Police Department still can’t get its story straight – but the questions are mounting.”

3. A STREETCAR NAMED DISPLACEMENT: Million-Dollar Condos Are Rolling Down Third Street, Threatening The Future Of Southeast San Francisco. (Oct. 19, 2005) This package of articles detailed how the “big developers” of San Francisco are steamrolling their way through local neighborhoods – as the “Manhattanization” of the city drives out lower-income residents via “gentrification.”

4. THE NONPROFIT GOLD RUSH. (March 9, 2005) A massive exposé of how bureaucratic mismanagement among city relief agencies is wasting millions, this cluster-bomb exploded on the front page: “San Francisco spends half a billion dollars a year paying nonprofit agencies to deliver public services.

Why can’t anyone track that money?”

5. THE SHAME OF HEARST, By Bruce B. Brugmann. (Nov. 14, 2001) This no-holdsbarred blaster ripped the legendary Hearst newspaper chain and its San Francisco Chronicle for failing to report the “ongoing scandal” of PG&E’s “continuing theft of public power” in northern California.

Raged Brugmann: “How can the Chronicle ever be a world-class newspaper if it continues to black out the PG&E scandal?”

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After 40 years of rock’emsock’em journalism in a town famous for it (Mark Twain got his start here, remember – to say nothing of giants like Jack London and Ambrose Bierce), the towering Brugmann has become nothing less than a local legend, while publishing a popular weekly (current circulation, about 120,000 – compared to the market-leading San Francisco Chronicle, at about 400,000).

Praised by colleagues such as Chronicle Publisher and President Frank J. Vega (“Bruce is a passionate journalist who’s never stopped fighting the good fight”) and blasted by enemies such as writer-editor Michael Lacey of the competing SF Weekly (“He’s an American gasbag of epic proportions”), the Iowa-born Brugmann long ago became a contentious icon of press freedom in San Francisco, often considered to be the most liberal-minded and tolerant city in America.

“In my line of work, you’re gonna create immutable enemies,” says the San Fran gadfly with a grin of sheer delight. “That’s a direct quote from my very first journalism teacher at the University of Nebraska, Nathan Blumberg, way back in 1953. He told us that on the first day of class, and he was absolutely right. To be a good journalist, you’ve gotta have the right enemies.

“In San Francisco, that means you gotta have PG&E as an enemy, along with the big developers and the sell-out politicians – both Republicans and Democrats – who are always trying to rip off the system. To make things better, you better be willing to take on the big boys, with all their money and all their PR people and all their attorneys.

“But don’t expect to find that kind of courage – or integrity – at our two dailies, here in San Francisco. As long as I can remember, both the Chronicle and the Examiner have puppy-dogged right along behind the power structure, and especially behind PG&E. There’s something wrong with the Hearst organization, that’s what I tell people – and it goes all the way back to WR, himself (the legendary William Randolph Hearst, longtime owner of the Examiner and many other U.S. newspapers).

“You can’t have a great newspaper if you’re covering up local scandals, and that’s what the Hearst folks have been doing in this town for decades. Well, we have a different idea of journalism at the Guardian. We think you oughta get out there on the street and dig up the real news and just plain raise some hell.”

He was born and raised in small-town Iowa (Rock Rapids; Pop. 3,800), and he grew up working in his family’s downtown drugstore, Brugmann’s, where he sold “peanuts and stamps” and “learned about old-fashioned American values and integrity” by watching both his grandfather (C.C. Brugmann) and his father (C.B. Brugmann) treat customers honestly and fairly over their lifetimes of patient, dedicated service.

By the time he reached his junior year at Rock Rapids High, the 6-5 Bruce B. had already become a star basketball center with “a pretty mean left-handed hook shot.” Recruited by the late Cornhuskers’ basketball coach Harry Good, B3 arrived on the Lincoln campus back in the fall of 1953 ... with dreams of someday becoming a major force in Big Seven Conference basketball.

But those plans were interrupted, he says, by the arrival of a basketball-playing phenom who dwarfed even Bruce Brugmann.

“Wilt Chamberlain (a national legend while playing at the University of Kansas in the 1950s) ended my career,” says Brugmann with a bark of nostalgic laughter, while recalling the awesome power of the Jayhawk center.

“Wilt was 7-2 and 250 pounds.

And he was fast. I knew that was the end of my career, right then. I knew I couldn’t play against somebody like that, so I quit basketball and went to work on the Rag (the Nebraskan, the daily campus paper), instead.”

Inspired by Journalism Professor Blumberg, Brugmann soon became the enfant terrible of UNL journalism. While living in a single cramped room at the Alpha Tau Omega House – “directly across from the Student Union” – he began spending all his free time at the campus paper, on the lookout for juicy stories.

“I was kind of different because I was a liberal,” he recalls today. “This was the tail end of the McCarthy Era, don’t forget, and

you could kinda feel that atmosphere at the university. It was a pretty conservative environment, to say the least.”

Named editor of the paper during his junior year, Brugmann was sitting in his office one morning in April of 1956, when an “anonymous source” walked in and dropped a bombshell in his lap.

The “anonymous source” (Brugmann says he still can’t reveal the identity of the Lincoln Deep Throat, even 50 years later, because “that interview was off the record”) was a student in the agricultural economics department ... and the story he told Bruce was scary enough to send shivers down the spine of any American who loved the First Amendment.

“He told me that the dean of the College of Agriculture was about to fire Professor C. Clyde Mitchell as chairman of the agricultural economics department – and that the dirty deed would be done because

the next day, and the whole place just went absolutely crazy. The dean was furious, and the chancellor was upset – and they called the (Lincoln) Journal and denied everything, and then the Journal ran a story saying that the university had ‘scotched the rumors’ of Mitchell’s impending firing.”

Brugmann’s story led the Nebraskan on Friday the 13th of April, 1956, right under the masthead, and featured a boldface headline in 36-point type:

Mitchell had dared to write some articles that criticized farm subsidies in the U.S. “What a story! As you can imagine, I got fired up right away. I called some professors who’d been at the meeting (where the firing decision was made), and they were scared to death to talk to me.

But I pinned it down; I nailed it. So we wrote the story and the Guardian ... whoops, I mean the Rag ... there’s a Freudian slip, hah – the Rag went with it

The decision was made known at a meeting of staff members of the agricultural economics department held shortly before spring vacation. William Lambert, dean of the College of Agriculture, presided at the meeting.

The story caused a campus-wide explosion ... but when the Lincoln Journal followed with its own story about the “rumors” being “scotched,” the staff at the Rag was enraged. Incensed by the attack on his accuracy, Brugmann redoubled his reporting

AG EC Chairman Mitchell Said Relieved Of Post ... “Outside Pressures” Termed Cause C. Clyde Mitchell, chairman of the department of ricultural economics temporarily on leave in Italy, may be unable to retain his department chairmanship when he returns to the University in July.

efforts ... and soon came up with additional information that proved the firing had been approved by the dean and his henchmen, beyond any reasonable doubt. “The administration was getting madder and madder,” he remembers with a gleeful laugh, “and they kept denying everything.

They were like squids, you know – they’d scoot backwards and shoot a cloud of ink at you, every time you asked ’em a question.

“But we nailed it. We did. We ran a series of stories in the Rag ... and in the end, both the (Lincoln) Journal and the Star were forced to run stories confirming what we’d already reported.”

Another highlight of the tumultuous saga occurred soon afterwards, says Brugmann, when an anonymous prankster from the Law College erected a “tombstone” in front of the Love Memorial Library. “It read, ‘Here Lies Academic Freedom!’ and it gave the dates, showing that Freedom had died that same year in Lincoln, and everybody thought we’d done it. But we hadn’t ... and many years later, I got a call from Phil Sorenson, the brother of (historian and JFK speechwriter) Ted Sorenson, who became the lieutenant governor of Nebraska ... and Phil came to town, and we had dinner, and he confessed: He was the culprit who’d put up the tombstone.”

Describing the tumult and the shouting of the Mitchell affair, Bruce Brugmann lit up like Candlestick Park for a night game.

Eyes flashing, jumbo-sized hands rapping a nearby table, he positively glowed with the memory of his youthful triumph: “Really, that whole thing was just unforgettable ... and I also figured it was a pretty good start to my journalism career.”

But nailing down this “huge scoop” wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to B3 during his years in Lincoln – because he also met a history major named Jean Dibble (B.A., ’57) there. An outstanding student who would later earn an MBA in the Harvard-Radcliffe Program of Business Administration, Dibble would go on to become (after their 1960 marriage) the financial wizard who brought Bruce’s dream of launching a weekly paper in San Francisco into vivid – and solvent – reality.

During their 46 years of marriage, Bruce and Jean raised a son and daughter, both of whom now live in California with their own families ... even as the indefatigable husband-wife duo was building an independent-minded newspaper that long ago became a familiar landmark on the landscape of contemporary San Francisco.

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Brugmann’s Best Barbs

A Brief Anthology of Zingers From The Embattled Publisher …

On San Francisco’s continued reliance on private rather than public utility power: “The big boys who run PG&E (Pacific Gas & Electric) and their friends downtown have managed to prevent the citizens of San Francisco from getting public power, decade after decade. And we still don’t have it, after all these years – because of corruption and extortion and bribery and every trick known to man. PG&E is still here, and their damn power plants are still choking us to death.”

On the quality of San Francisco’s two daily newspapers: “The Chronicle and the Examiner are conservative papers in the last stages of arterial sclerosis. To be a good newspaper in this city, you have to be willing to take on the Chamber of Commerce and the big guys downtown. You can’t do it if you’re flacking for the private power monopoly all the time.”

On what it means to be a “liberal” in today’s American society: “People ask me: ‘What are you?’ And I say: ‘Well, I’m a Rock Rapids, Iowa, liberal.’ And they say: ‘Jesus, what’s that?’ And I say: ‘If you’re a Rock Rapids liberal, your idea is to make things better. Make the farms better, make the town better.’ But in a city like San Francisco, being a liberal also means you gotta fight. You gotta battle the special interests, the folks who want to build million-dollar housing in our city neighborhoods for the (affluent) folks.”

On a key requirement for good newspaper publishing: “I always say, if you aren’t continually involved in two lawsuits for access to public records and two libel lawsuits, you aren’t doing your job as a publisher.”

On the Guardian’s editorial mission: “Believe it or not, San Francisco isn’t really that liberal a city. What you really have here is a continuing battle between the neighborhoods and the money-boys downtown – the big developers. It’s a daily struggle between the grassroots interests and the real estate interests. And that’s where the Guardian comes in. The Chronicle and the Examiner look at the city from the top of the Transamerica Pyramid (downtown skyscraper and center of financial power), and we look at it from the bottom of the Pyramid.”

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Ask Bruce Brugmann’s colleagues to describe his remarkable career as one of America’s most enduring alternative-press publishers, along with his current role as the eminence grise of independent, noncorporate journalism in northern California, and they’ll all underline one key point: Whether you love B3 or hate him, you have to admit that he’s utterly dedicated to his vision of tell-it-like-it-is newspapering.

“It’s obvious that he’s an incredibly passionate journalist,” says San Francisco Chronicle publisher Frank Vega. “I’ve read his editorials, and you can see that he’s got lots of fire. A lot of people might not agree with him, but they read him. And as a newspaper guy, I want people to read the papers.

“I definitely think there’s a place for Bruce and his paper in our market.”

But some of B3’s critics – and there are plenty – insist that his approach to journalism is more than merely “passionate.” They contend that his decadeslong campaign for public power in San Francisco has crossed the line between “tenacious” and “obsessive” ... and that his endless railing against PG&E now borders on the outright “wacky.”

Writing recently in the competing SF Weekly – an alternative paper now being sued by the Guardian for “predatory pricing practices” – writer-editor Michael Lacey pulled no punches, while fuming: “It is no secret in our industry, or anywhere in the greater Bay Area, that Brugmann is bull-goose loony. Consequently, sane people desert any room that Brugmann is sucking the oxygen out of.”

But Guardian executive editor Tim Redmond, one of about 55 full- and part-

time staffers who put out the paper each week, scoffs at the criticism from the competing paper down the street. “I really enjoy working with Bruce,” says Redmond, “because he has such a passion for what he does. He’s not an absentee publisher sitting out on a verandah somewhere drinking gin and tonic. He’s right there in the room with you, fighting the battle right at your side.”

Regardless of the praise and the criticism, however, Bruce Brugmann will tell you that he intends to go right on publishing the paper his way. “I’m gonna keep on calling the shots as I see them,” he says with his trademark growl, “and I’m gonna continue publishing a newspaper that can’t be bribed or threatened into selling out to the powers that be – the forces that seek to degrade and destroy this community by wringing every last dollar out of it.

“You know, every once in a while, I get a call from a broker in New York City or somewhere, and he tells me that he’s got a client who’s interested in buying the Guardian. And you know what I do? I cut him off, right there, and I just say no.

“That’s what I do. Really, I jump right in, and I tell the broker I’m not interested, and that saves everybody a whole lot of time.

Because I’ll never sell this paper, and I’ll never retire. How could I? “Hey, we’re in a battle, here at the Guardian. We’re in the fight of our lives.

We gotta find a way to bring public power to San Francisco.” n To read the Guardian and Bruce’s weekly blog online: www.sfbg.com.