B.T. Collins--a Gentle Side to the Bluster

The first time I met B.T. Collins we were sitting at a bar and he was threatening to run his hook up my nose. He was drinking and not smiling. It was something about my being a reporter.

A “scumbag.”

I said I’d get a lawyer and it would cost him his hook and his artificial leg. We sat there for a long while sizing up each other, boozing, yakking, surrounded by Capitol cohorts. And we began a 16-year friendship.

B.T. became everybody’s friend who got to know him, and they his. People were attracted by the bluster, the outrageous behavior, the provocative comments. But they stuck around for other reasons--his honesty, loyalty, spirit and, most of all, because he genuinely cared about people and constantly showed it.

My introduction to him at David’s Brass Rail--a hole in the wall that many of us back then considered the most important meeting place in Sacramento--revealed the side of B.T. that the public knew best. This was the swaggering, former Green Beret captain who would ridicule then-Gov. Jerry Brown’s “disgusting . . . grease(y)” hair just as he was becoming Brown’s chief of staff, and would gulp down diluted malathion to show that the anti-Medfly pesticide was harmless to humans.

A decade later, I saw firsthand the lesser-known, gentle side of Collins. He gave a moving eulogy for my former wife, also a reporter with whom he had dealt professionally. And for years afterward, whenever we talked, B.T. invariably would ask about my three daughters, occasionally dropping an encouraging note to the political activist girl, although her politics usually conflicted with his own.

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Brien Thomas Collins, 52--a Vietnam veteran first and Republican assemblyman a distant second--delivered many eulogies, gave big bucks to a lot of causes and befriended countless people before succumbing Friday night to two massive heart attacks.

Nobody was especially shocked. B.T. had been a heavy drinker and smoker until six years ago when doctors persuaded him to quit both. He had a history of heart trouble and was a diabetic.

His own grenade had torn off an arm and a leg--above the elbow and above the knee--during a Mekong Delta firefight. Few knew of the terrible pain he constantly fought from stump sores rubbing against the prostheses. This alone could have induced liquor, nicotine and a foul mouth.

But it did not deter him from standing for endless hours, day or night, while making speeches and attending receptions for politicians, charities and friends. He was the chief inspiration and fund-raiser for the California Vietnam Memorial in Capitol Park, where his services will be held Wednesday. He crusaded for battered women and, on the night before his death, had pledged to raise $150,000 to help purchase a building to shelter them.

Collins was a truly remarkable man and a very unconventional politician.

He admired civil servants--”I like being around state workers because everybody else treats them like ----,” he recently told me--but never shied away from bucking institutional bureaucracy. His pride and joy was the youth California Conservation Corps, which he shaped into a model for the nation under Jerry Brown. “Hard work, low pay, miserable conditions” was Collins’ motto, which still is painted in large letters on the CCC’s headquarters.

Consequently, it was not shocking that B.T.’s death generated such an emotional outpouring. Scores of friends kept a vigil at the hospital as doctors fought to save his life before finally surrendering to the inevitable and turning off the life support system. Local television stations interrupted network programs with bulletins of his death. The Sacramento Bee ran the story across the top of Page 1. People began trooping to the Vietnam memorial, leaving flowers and notes.

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B.T. was one of those people you just liked to drop in on occasionally to see how he was doing. He was outrageously funny, street-smart and plain-spoken, qualities not easily found in the Capitol. And anybody possessing them should be checked on periodically.

So I did call on him a few days ago. We talked for a while and later I followed him to a school, where he stood for 2 1/2 hours in a drab multipurpose room happily answering questions from 50 constituents.

B.T. seemed more relaxed--perhaps more at peace with himself--than I could remember. But there was no change in his wit, irreverence and delightful profanity.

Therefore, last Friday I sat down to write another version of this column and had just keyboarded that “B.T., it can be reported, is doing quite well.”

Then he went out and did another outrageous thing. And this one wasn’t a bit funny.