Remembrance: Bruce Bratton was always part of the Santa Cruz conversation

On Friday morning, Dec. 6, Bruce Bratton, from his regular perch as part of the “Bushwhacker’s Breakfast Club” show on KZSC (88.1 FM), made a big announcement. He was retiring — from his stint on the radio reviewing films, and from his weekly newsletter, Bratton Online.

Five days later, he was gone.

Commentator, provocateur, pundit, activist, troublemaker, connoisseur of the arts, inveterate lover of cinema, Bratton died on Dec. 11 at the age of 90. 

When he had done a live interview with his longtime on-air partner “Dangerous Dan” Orange the Friday before, Bratton gave no indication that he thought it would be his last public utterance. The final posting of his online blog and newsletter, Bratton Online, dated Dec. 4-10, gave no hint that it was his last stand. 

On KZSC, he suggested that he was done with seeing new movies because the film industry had changed irrevocably. “It’s burnout, for one thing,” Bratton said, “but it’s also just a lack of interest. I haven’t seen a really good film — one that you would want to go back and talk about like the old classics — [in a long time].”

But those close to him also said that Bratton had been in declining health for years, particularly in recent months after a fall limited his mobility. His health, said friends, prevented him from maintaining his blog to the standards that he had established. Bratton Online was Bratton’s distinctly curated forum on which he gave his opinions on films and other cultural artifacts, passed along scuttlebutt, gave an often jaundiced look at local politics, and shared his space with others who shared his worldview.

“He just didn’t have the energy to keep doing what he needed to do for Bratton Online,” said former county supervisor and friend Gary Patton. “He told everybody connected to Bratton Online that he just had to lay it down.”

In his own way, Bratton was emblematic of a specific Santa Cruz progressive orientation and a generation of unconventional cultural firebrands that is gradually passing from the scene. He first came to Santa Cruz more than 50 years ago, from Berkeley, establishing himself as one of the high-profile activists known collectively as Operation Wilder. Their goal was to stop a planned development that would have nearly doubled Santa Cruz’s population on a vast tract of land north of town. The open spaces of the county’s North Coast and the existence of Wilder Ranch State Park speak to Operation Wilder’s success.

As a writer, Bratton liked to say that he worked at (and was eventually fired from) every publication in town, including the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Good Times, the Metro, the Santa Cruz Express and others. The rise of the internet offered him a way to exercise his free speech as a wag and gossipmonger, and he maintained the weekly Bratton Online for more than 20 years, in recent years giving a regular platform to other high-profile community voices such as Patton, Becky Steinbruner, cartoonist Tim Eagan and many others. He was also a constant presence on the region’s radio waves, on his shows “Universal Grapevine” and “Bushwhacker’s Breakfast Club,” interviewing local newsmakers and giving his viewpoint on matters both political and cultural.

“He was a sweetheart,” said Patton. “He was not afraid to take on things he did not approve of. And, in the way that he chose to express himself, he could be curmudgeon-like or cranky. But, what I felt is that he helped kick off that idea that ordinary folks — the citizens of Santa Cruz city and county — they could make things be the way they wanted them to be.”

Former Santa Cruz mayor Christopher Krohn, a longtime friend, said, “‘Curmudgeon’ isn’t the right word, because that suggests someone who is stingy too, and Bruce was not stingy. He could be ornery, but he was a good soul to the heart.”

I knew Bratton largely through his all-consuming love of movies. We were part of a small confederacy of film reviewers, along with Lisa Jensen of Good Times and Cabrillo College’s Morton Marcus, who would gather each week to watch morning screenings of new arthouse movies at the Nickelodeon Theatre. 

As much as he was often a contrarian and troublemaker in the political realm, he was also a fervent aesthete in the cultural realm. Bratton was originally from upstate New York and after serving in the U.S. Army’s K-9 corps, he landed at UC Berkeley, and went on to host radio shows at KGO-AM and other stations. All the while, he was a musician, playing the washtub bass in the trio Goodtime Washboard 3, who in 1967 landed on Bing Crosby’s TV show, and who later scored a regional hit with “Oakland.”

Bratton also nursed a great love of opera. “That was really huge for him,” said Krohn. “My sister-in-law is an opera singer, and he came to one of her operas once and he was just so delighted that I had opera in the family.”

But central to his love of the arts were movies, hundreds and hundreds of movies that he consumed like a whale consumes krill. His deep love for movies, he would say in conversation, stemmed largely from “The Wizard of Oz.” On the “Bushwhacker’s” radio show, where he was known as Bruce “B-Movie” Bratton, he said, “I also got to know Ray Bolger, the scarecrow [in ‘The Wizard of Oz’]. He came down to Santa Cruz and made a movie, and we became friends.”

Conversations with Bratton would often fall casually into encounters with folks he had known over the years, from famed film critic Pauline Kael to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein to the musical saw player immortalized with a statue out front of Bookshop Santa Cruz, Tom Scribner. 

In the political realm, he sprang out of the Operation Wilder experience with a passion for open government and accountability, often mocking office-holders for their positions. “I think he was prone to calling out that the emperor had no clothes and talking about how governments should be out in the open and against secret meetings,” said Krohn.

“He was very outspoken,” said 40-year friend John Sandidge. “If he didn’t want to do something, or if he didn’t like something, he didn’t waste any time telling you about it and sometimes not in a very polite way. But there was another side of him. He was funny. He was talented and he was so knowledgeable about movies.”

For decades, Bratton was consistent — in his love of movies, in his restless pursuit of being a local observer and writer, and in his staunch, preservationist, anti-growth political stances, even when those stances changed character over the years, from heroic progressivism to callous NIMBY-ism. For 50 years of a wild cultural and political roller-coaster ride in Santa Cruz County, Bratton was always around, always part of the conversation.

“I would call him the ultimate participator in the cultural life and political life of the city,” said his friend Denise Holbert. “I mean, he was there for you if you needed an emcee for an event. He was there for you if you needed him to serve on a board. He really did the work. I’ll always think of him as someone who was always willing to participate in the daily life of the city.”

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FOR THE RECORD: This story has been updated to correct Bruce Bratton’s age at the time of his death; he was 90.

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