I am no sure what rock I was under when Outrageous Hero: The B.T. Collins Story came out last year.  When a friend mentioned the book to me I knew it was going to move to the front of the line of books I needed to read.

I was a young Capitol staffer when Collins died of a heart attack in March 1992.   i talked to him a few times but don’t pretend that I knew the man.  He was a legend.

This is a man that grew up in New York, joined the Army during Vietnam and spent two tours there.  On June 20, 1967 as an Army Captain he lost an arm and a leg to a grenade.  This one day defined his life to a degree but did not stop him from going on to Santa Clara Law School, becoming a staff member for Governor Jerry Brown, running the California Conservation Corps, serving as Chief of Staff to Governor Brown, running the California Youth Authority for Governor Wilson, and then winning a special election for the Assembly and getting re-elected before suffering a massive heart attack while in office.

I ran over the items above so quickly because that is not what the book is about.  It is about the attitude of this man.  He got his chance to live life again after surviving the grenade and made the most of it.  Collins was clearly a riot.  He has a urinal at Santa Clara Law School named after him — something we should all strive for.  He said things that no other person in appointed or elected office could get away with and he made some things happen that clearly would not have without him like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Capitol Park in Sacramento.

The author of the book is Maureen Collins Baker, B.T.’s sister.  She can be forgiven for giving her brother the benefit of the doubt at every turn – because the book is a good one.

The problem for me with this book happened in the final chapters.  Baker tells the reader how a father from Milwaukee had written a letter the New York Times in 1991 after his son in the Marine Corps was put on active duty during the conflict in Kuwait.  The father said that his son had signed up for college money.  B.T. responded with an open letter to the editor of the Times that said exactly what I think every time i see Cindy Sheehan on television talking about her Marine son. 

"So, i hope you realize that you have humiliated your son with your presumptive threat not to forgive the President if he dies.  Your son is a 21-year old Marine.  He’s a warrior not a boy, who will do things he’s been trained to do, break things and kill people.  It’s your son’s forgiveness you should ask for."

At this point in the book I am ready to write my own letter to Cindy Sheehan and steal these words.

The problem for me comes just a few pages later when the author seems to have taken exactly the same kind of whining approach as the father from Milwaukee.  She complains that Collins’ atheism became an issue during his campaign for the Assembly.  The guy i just spent 230 pages reading about would have said that he chose to enter the political world by his own free will — just like Marines choose to be warriors.  Suck it up.

All in all a great read but that one inconsistency will still be my lasting memory from an otherwise enjoyable experience.  If that would have happened in the first ten pages I would have stopped reading.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.