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A life built upon all the right trappings

By HOWARD TROXLER, Times Columnist
Published September 9, 2007

It seems easier to start with the public life of John Bryan.

There have not been many people who wanted so badly, and so specifically, to be a member of the St. Petersburg City Council.

Bryan thought about the council years in advance. He arranged his life accordingly, shutting down his business to make time, touring other cities to observe their workings.

He spent dutiful years on various city committees. He tried to get appointed to a vacant seat in 1998, and was finally elected in 2001.

In 2005, even against a long-shot opponent, Bryan was consumed by the prospect of not being re-elected.

"The fear of losing eats me up," Bryan told a reporter then. "I love this city and I love my job and I don't want to take any chance of losing it."

So I wonder what was going through his mind on Aug. 20, the first date on his letter of resignation from the job that was so much of his identity.

I wonder if he knew then how it would end. He certainly gave no sign of it. A reporter had an hourlong talk with him Wednesday, two days before he killed himself, and he was full of energy and ideas and banter.

Of all the council members, he was usually described as the one most in lockstep with the city's mayor, Rick Baker. In his campaigns Bryan was a booster of the city's downtown development.

On the other hand, he had a knack for unusual ideas and shaking the applecart. He never got a waterfront boardwalk. But he got the Sunday blue laws changed, so people could have a mimosa at brunch or buy beer at Publix before a Bucs kickoff.

He was not a wallflower. As a member of the county's bus board, he tried to get that agency's entrenched director canned, and defiantly ended up on the losing end of a 10-1 vote. He was a city-versus-county combatant, too, sometimes too much so.

I always watched him for signs he was taking himself seriously, a big frog in a small pond playing king. He did fancy that he might be a kingmaker, reaching into other council district elections to take sides. Maybe he thought he could be mayor himself, or advance to some other office.

But then he'd make a perceptive joke about himself and say something disarming, and I would like him more than I thought I did.

I do not praise him because he is dead, or minimize what led to his death.

- - -

There was something awful and unthinkable in Bryan's private life. It exploded into public view on Friday after a hearing in family court. It was bizarre to see it unfold in public -- the investigation confirmed, his adopted daughters identified by the court spokesman as the potential victims.

It is the worst thing that any family can go through, any family on any street. For it to be the family of a public person, all dragged out before the world, is beyond imagination.

He based his life on his family and his public role. I wonder if he sought all the external trappings of his life to convince himself, or those around him, of his worth. When he lost all that, the future became unbearable.

But it is never the future by which we destroy ourselves. It is what we do in the present, which in the next heartbeat becomes an unchangeable past. In making our choices each of us, in our own way, is inspired by the better part of our nature, but tortured by the dark.

[Last modified September 8, 2007, 23:40:04]