Quick Take:
Bruce McPherson is retiring after 50 years in the public spotlight in Santa Cruz County, as a newspaper editor, state representative, and county supervisor. But his retirement also means that the McPherson family legacy, dating back to the Civil War, is eclipsing as well.
On Tuesday, Jan. 7, Bruce McPherson will turn 81. That day will also be his first full day of retirement after 12 years on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors and a quarter century in elected office.
But, taking an even longer view, the first week of 2025 also signifies the quiet departure of a generational legacy that goes all the way back to the Civil War. The influence and impact of the McPherson family, a more-or-less constant element in the public affairs of Santa Cruz County for close to 160 years, is coming to an end.
On the day that his successor on the Board of Supervisors, Monica Martinez, was sworn in, I met McPherson in his office overlooking the San Lorenzo River and downtown Santa Cruz. The walls of his office are covered by photos of and references to his ancestors, as well as some of the accomplishments of his own career.
We chatted for two hours about his family’s long shadow in Santa Cruz, the news business, his transition to the political realm, the tragedy that struck him and his wife Mary when their son, Hunter, was killed, and many issues and causes that animated him as a public servant.
“I’ve had a great life,” he said, in a reflective mood. “Yeah, there was a big bump in the road, but you get through it and you live with it. But I still got a lot left. I’m just so fortunate to be healthy and — there were tough times and moments, but don’t we all have our moments? But I’ve been so lucky to have been put in a position to help others.”
Santa Cruz’s favorite Republican
On his own accord, McPherson deserves a retrospective look back at a remarkable career neatly bifurcated between 25 years as a newspaper writer and editor and 25 years as a political figure in local and statewide office.
But he also carries a family name that looms large in Santa Cruz’s history, stretching back to 1864 when his great-grandfather, Duncan McPherson, purchased a half interest in the fledgling newspaper the Santa Cruz Sentinel. From that point, the McPherson family owned the Sentinel and exerted significant control over the county’s political and economic life for more than a century before selling the newspaper to the New York-based Ottaway newspapers chain in 1982. Even then, under Ottaway’s ownership, Bruce McPherson ran the Sentinel newsroom as its editor, while his brother Fred McPherson III oversaw the business side as publisher.
In the 1990s, McPherson, as a Republican, left the Sentinel and embarked on an unlikely political journey, representing strongly Democratic-leaning Santa Cruz County first in the California Assembly, and then the state Senate. He landed the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor (losing the general election in 2002 to incumbent Cruz Bustamante), then served as California’s Secretary of State, before finally representing District 5 on the Board of Supervisors, which includes Scotts Valley and the San Lorenzo Valley. Along the way, he shed the Republican Party affiliation, becoming an independent in 2012.
Throughout his prominent public life, McPherson bucked Republican orthodoxy. Before his tenure at the Sentinel’s editor’s desk, the newspaper had a reputation as not merely a conservative, but a decidedly hard-right voice in a community that had gradually transformed after the arrival of the University of California in the mid 1960s into a progressive stronghold. As editor, he did things that his father, old-line conservative Republican Fred McPherson Jr., would probably have considered blasphemous, including endorsing prominent Democrats like John Laird and Henry Mello.
Dan Haifley, former executive director of Save Our Shores, said McPherson was a stalwart supporter of environmental causes, even as a journalist. “He was, among other things, the first [newspaper editor] to write an editorial in favor of the largest potential boundary of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and I was not expecting it.”
Just a few years later, when the Republican Party was making a methodical Gingrich-inspired turn to the right, McPherson, as a newbie Assemblymember, cast the deciding vote on a bill to ban offshore drilling in California’s coastal waters. The bill won by a single vote, and McPherson was the lone Republican to vote for it. “He took a lot of heat from his colleagues for doing that,” said Haifley. “His style and his environmental leadership was not always comfortable for a member of the Republican Party.”
In both the Assembly and the Senate, McPherson often acted in concert with Democrats. In the Senate, he worked with Fred Keeley, then in the Assembly, to open the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary Exploration Center in Santa Cruz. He was a strong and active supporter of Long’s Marine Lab and the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and the Cotoni-Coast Dairies.
From Santa Cruz High to Sacramento
If Bruce McPherson represents a break toward a more moderate direction from his forebears’ conservative views, he also represents the fulfillment of a family dream. McPherson’s father, in fact, had run for the state Assembly in 1932, losing by about 400 votes. He lived long enough to see his son get the office he sought decades before. The younger McPherson remembers his father’s comment at the time of his election to the Assembly: “It took us 60 years to get this seat, but it’s ours now.”
As a young man, McPherson was an athlete, a star baseball and football player at Santa Cruz High. (Decades later, as a legislator, he was instrumental in establishing new athletic facilities at Santa Cruz High and Harbor High, where his children, Hunter and Torri, went to school). After high school, he attended, briefly, the University of Oregon and then Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo where he met his wife Mary — the two have been married now for 57 years. His father was running the family business, the Sentinel, but his uncle was a popular local doctor and, for a while, Bruce considered becoming a physician.
Even as the sons of the paper’s publisher, Bruce and his brother Fred both began their newspaper careers at the bottom: as paper carriers. Though he gradually moved into the family business as a reporter and later city editor for the Sentinel, McPherson was always interested in politics, gravitating to the California Republican Party, then dominated by figures such as Richard Nixon and Earl Warren.
McPherson’s father Fred Jr., along with the Sentinel’s legendary editor Gordon “Scotchy” Sinclair, was instrumental in helping bring the University of California to Santa Cruz in the mid 1960s. But they weren’t prepared for the profound cultural shift that the UC represented.
In 1982, the McPherson family sold the paper to Ottaway and, as part of the deal, Bruce McPherson stayed on as the paper’s executive editor. It was a challenging job, having to follow in the footsteps of the famed Sinclair, hearing whispers about nepotism, dealing with a new corporate ownership after a century of family ownership, and adapting to an increasingly progressive Santa Cruz city government.
The domino chain that led to McPherson’s entrance into the political realm began with the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992. Clinton tapped long-time Monterey Bay congressman Leon Panetta to work in his administration. That opened a congressional seat, which Democratic Assemblymember Sam Farr jumped at. And Farr’s move to Washington opened a seat in the Assembly.
“I remember telling Mary one day after the kids had left for school,” McPherson remembered, “I said, ‘Mary, I’m going to run for the Assembly.’ She said, ‘You’re going to what? Do you know what you’re doing?’”
Republican registration in Santa Cruz County was less than 30%, and he would be running against the powerful Democratic County Supervisor Gary Patton. To make up for that disadvantage, McPherson turned to the more conservative voters of Monterey County, much of which was in the Assembly district as well. That decision was decisive. He beat Patton and went on to Sacramento.
McPherson’s older brother, Fred, now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Bruce McPherson said that Fred was one of the few people in the beginning who believed he could win the Assembly seat. I called Fred in Santa Fe to ask him about that moment in Bruce’s life.
“I guess I’ll go back to sports to describe it,” said Fred, who watched his younger brother’s early athletic prowess up close. “I mean, as an underdog and a smaller player on the field or the tennis court, he was always like a bulldog. He just wouldn’t give up. I figured [when he announced that he was running for the Assembly] that he’s so driven, he’s probably going to win.”
Touched by tragedy
In 2001, McPherson’s life was forever changed when his 27-year-old son, Hunter, was murdered in a botched robbery on the streets of San Francisco. The killing happened just as McPherson was launching his campaign for California’s number two office, the lieutenant governor. Hunter’s death unmoored his parents and McPherson thought briefly of withdrawing. But his son’s memory goaded him to push on.
“I could always hear Hunter saying, ‘If you quit, I’m pissed. Go for it.’”
McPherson lost that race in 2002, and then he and Mary had to endure the trial of his accused killer. (The conviction was successful). It was during that trial, in fact, when McPherson took a call from the office of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“Pat Cleary, the governor’s chief of staff, called me in a break from the trial,” said McPherson. “He said, ‘Bruce, the governor is going to call you tonight.’”
The offer from Schwarzenegger was to take on the job of Secretary of State, open after the resignation of incumbent Kevin Shelley. McPherson and Schwarzenegger had sparked a friendship. The Governator had been impressed by McPherson’s moderate views and his ability to win in blue districts as a Republican. When Schwarzenegger called him that night, according to McPherson, he said, “Nobody else wants to take this job. Can you please take it?”
McPherson is particularly proud that his confirmation vote in the legislature was unanimous, in both houses. As Secretary of State, he was in charge of overseeing a 500-person department with five offices across the state, charged with managing the state’s election system. In his time in the job, McPherson traveled to all of California’s 58 counties to explain new laws or procedures pertaining to elections.
“I met some really great people,” he said. “I went to some of those counties in the far northeast of the state, and they’d bring me some berry souffle or some darn thing for breakfast. They were excited to see us. So that was very rewarding.”
In 2012, done with state-level politics, McPherson returned home with the aim of replacing Mark Stone as the Fifth District’s county supervisor. In leaving behind Sacramento, he also left behind the GOP. His official political affiliation, he said, is simply “decline to state.” This was three years before Donald Trump descended his escalator and changed the Republican Party forever.
“Yeah, I took some heat for that,” he said. “From Republicans who were saying, ‘Hey, you’re bailing on us,’ and Democrats saying, ‘You’re just doing this to get the Republican thing off your back.’”
In fact, McPherson, increasingly alienated by the Republican Party’s rightward turn, felt that party labels were irrelevant in serving as a county supervisor. “This is just where I’m comfortable,” he said of his no-party status. “This is who I am.”
In 2013, he began his 12-year stint as county supervisor, a stint that included the pandemic, the CZU fire catastrophe, and atmospheric-river disasters. Of his most enduring achievements, he points to the establishment of the Central Coast Community Energy (3CE), a clean-energy provider that now covers the five counties of the Central Coast of California, as well as the building of a new library in Felton, road and water improvements. He called the time spent as county supervisor, “the most rewarding job of my 25-year career in public service.”
When he looks back at his long family line, McPherson doesn’t have too much to say about Duncan McPherson, who crossed the continent as a boy in 1852 and died more than 100 years ago now. When he talks of his family, he mentions his father, Fred Jr., his aunt Lillian McPherson Rouse, a driving force behind the founding of the Museum of Art & History in Santa Cruz, and his uncle Mahlon McPherson, a beloved local physician who used to care for people door-to-door, carrying his black satchel.
“To see the respect that my dad had of everybody in the community and his way of giving to others, I’m just so proud of him and my Aunt Lillian and Uncle Mahlon and for what my forebears did, what they accomplished and the foresight that they had.”
In the time I’ve known Bruce McPherson, I’ve noticed that he’s often a sensitive and emotional man, quick to choke up when addressing certain subjects dear to him. Perhaps that’s a part of his Scottish blood; perhaps it’s what happens naturally when someone loses a beloved son. In a tribute video produced by Santa Cruz County Chamber of Commerce, he talks of the amazing good fortune inherent in living in Santa Cruz County. At one point, he is overcome and unable to continue. “Sorry,” he says reflexively. Then, contradicting himself, he blurts, “No, I’m not.”