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.

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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. NEBRASKAMAGAZINE

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