The race for Newport Beach City Council: Steve Bromberg

Mathis Winkler

NEWPORT BEACH--Twice in his life, District 5 council candidate Steve

Bromberg has encountered situations he said were simply “meant to be.”

The first came in 1978, when he and his wife, Ronnie, saw a house

going up on Little Balboa Island. The couple, both Los Angeles natives,

had been vacationing on the island for almost a decade and fell in love

with the geometrically shaped cottage.

They held out another seven years until one day when Ronnie came back

from the market to their vacation rental.

“The house is for sale,” Bromberg remembers her saying. That’s all the

couple needed to know.

After a stretched out sale--the house fell in and out of escrow three

times before the couple finally called it their own--and a fair amount of

remodeling, the Brombergs have lived there ever since.

“The house is half the size of what we lived in in L.A.,” Bromberg

said, sitting on a sofa in his living room. “But the only regret is that

we didn’t do it 20 years earlier.”

One thing Bromberg has had to give up is his passion for

black-and-white photography. There wasn’t enough space for a darkroom in

the new home.

“If I can’t do it right, I’m not going to do it,” he said. A wall now

covered with some of his work reminds him of his hobby.

All of the pictures contain people because “it adds warmth and

meaning,” Bromberg said. “It makes that image interesting.”

A portrait of a homeless woman and her four-legged companion that

Bromberg encountered on a San Francisco street corner remains his

favorite shot.

“The dog was giving me a defiant look [like] ‘What are you doing?’ ”

he said. “But the woman smiled. This is her home. Her life is this corner

and her dog.”

Living on the island, where life moves along at a mellow pace and

there is less of a need to “sweat the small stuff,” also prepared

Bromberg for his life’s second decisive moment. In 1995, he was diagnosed

with bladder cancer.

The cancer was “quite invasive,” Bromberg said. “But I just knew that

I was going to recover. I wasn’t worried about it. I just knew that I was

going to recover.”

Bromberg did, and recent checkups have shown that he also overcame a

second, smaller bout of cancer last year.

“To a lot of people, there’s nothing more devastating than when you

have cancer,” he said, adding that he now helps other victims of the

disease to overcome their fears. “But it doesn’t have to be as

devastating as it sounds. I probably have more energy than I’ve ever

had.”

Sitting across from her husband, Ronnie agrees that his candidacy for

City Council has not caused any problems.

“We’re a team,” she said. “I’m not worried at all.”