This issue includes an insightful article, “Power Surge (p. 24),” by our colleague and friend Robert Bryce, who left the Chronicle last month after a 13-year run that began with a Feb. 12, 1988 profile of choreographer Yoshiko Chuma. Bryce began as a dance and theatre critic, but before his first year ended he was writing about environmental issues. As a Politics staff writer, he provided most of the Chronicle‘s reportorial coverage of the fight to protect water quality in the Barton Creek watershed. He doggedly covered the twists and turns of FM Properties’ development in Austin, and the curiously parallel operations of Freeport McMoRan’s (and Freeport CEO Jim Bob Moffett’s) environmental and political depredations at the Grasberg gold mine in Irian Jaya, Indonesia.
With extraordinary tenacity and energy, Robert has also covered the Legislature, the Bush campaign, the still-unresolved Bush Funeral Services Commission scandal that has come to be known — thanks to Robert — as “Funeralgate,” the FBI assault on the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, and the disappearance of Madalyn Murray O’Hair and her family, among other things. He leaves the Chronicle, much to our regret but with our best wishes, to work as a senior writer at Interactive Week.
We wish Robert all future success, and — although we’ll continue to do our best — it is obvious to the politics staff that he will be impossible to replace. — The Politics Staff
This article appears in February 9 • 2001.