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Saturday, January 29, 2000 Page: 8A
To work 41 years at the same place for the same people, you’ve got to love
your job.
Judge Bernard C. Brominski clearly loved serving the taxpayers of Luzerne
County.
“Being elected judge is my most honored treasure,” Brominski told a
reporter when he reached mandatory retirement age in 1992. “If it wasn’t for
the Constitution requiring me to retire at 70, I wouldn’t retire. I like what
I’m doing.”
So he kept on doing it. Right through Tuesday, the last full day of his
life, Brominski continued presiding as a senior judge at the county
courthouse. He is said to be the longest-serving county judge in state
history.
His career and life were singular ones.
Brominski was the son of a breaker boy who had worked his way through
private school, college and dental school, fought as a middleweight under the
name “Battling Gates” and later served as mayor of Swoyersville.
The younger Brominski fought in the Navy in World War II, attended
Dickinson and was named to the county bench at 36, the youngest judge ever in
Luzerne County. County residents would vote to retain him four times. He
served as president judge from 1968 to 1991.
Brominski joined the bench at a pivotal time, just before the Knox Mine
Disaster flooded Wyoming Valley’s anthracite mines, killing 12 miners and the
coal industry. His first big case was the involuntary manslaughter trial of
two Knox Coal Co. supervisors accused of contributing to the disaster by
allowing miners to work too close to the Susquehanna River bed, which
collapsed into the mines. They were acquitted.
In another high-profile case, in 1969, he denied a Massachusetts
prosecutor’s request to exhume the body of Mary Jo Kopechne from a Larksville
cemetery. Kopechne, a county native, drowned in the waters off Chappaquiddick
Island in Massachusetts in a car that had been driven off a bridge by U.S.
Sen. Edward Kennedy.
In both of those cases, and in hundreds of smaller ones, Brominski earned a
reputation for dispassionately applying the rule of the law without regard to
publicity or public sentiment and for treating lawyers who appeared before him
with fairness, consistency and respect.
Brominski was remembered this week by friends and fellow officers of the
court as man who was committed to his family and to the public he had served
for more than four decades.
We offer our condolences to both for their great loss.