By Bruce B. Brugmann
Okay, okay, after getting a note from my Contra Costa source who follows Singleton news coverage for me in the East Bay, I realized I better explain what happened to me after the Clint Reilly press conference Wednesday morning. My source said he saw my whacked up face in the blog below and “thought Phil Bronstein was up to his old tricks.”
This was a reference to the famous incident in l993 when Reilly, then a political consultant, was invited to the old Hearst Examiner by then publisher Will Hearst to advise the Examiner on how to grow its circulation.
As the three sat in the Hearst conference room, an argument ensued between Bronstein and Riley and Reilly was soon taken out of the Examiner on a stretcher with a broken ankle. He sued the Examiner for assault and battery and collected a reported $600,000 in an out of court settlement. |Guess what: Hearst/Examiner/Bronstein have had it in for Riley ever since and have treated him shabbily in their news and editorial columns.
No, no, I explained to my source. I am a Ft.Carson-trained advanced infantryman and a Korea veteran (cold war), and I could handle Bronstein. I explained that I was walking back to the parking garage from the Merchants Exchange Building, where Reilly held the press conference, with my associate Paula Connelly and G. W. Schulz, the Guardian reporter on the story. Just as we were approaching the garage, I tripped on a rise in a grate on the sidewalk. I fell ingloriously face first on the hardest and most unyielding sidewalk north of the Tehachapis and whacked both knees and my face and started a nice shiner on my right eye. I must have looked as if I were staggering into the street after a barroom brawl.