There wasn’t a person at City Hall on the evening of Sept. 11 who did not love Dick Brugger, each for reasons as varied and colorful as the old fellow himself.

And even if they tried to limit their praises to the poetry of the former Franciscan priest and later founder of Auburn Youth Resources as his 3-year tenure as Auburn’s first poet laureate draws to a close, other stuff kept bubbling up.

As it always will, as it just can’t help whenever Dick Brugger is the subject.

Like that certain adjective.

“The first time you met Dick, what was the very first word you heard come out of his mouth?” Auburn Mayor Nancy Backus asked the Council Chamber packed with his friends.

“Wicked!” came the unified response.

It was a night to celebrate not only the poetry of “wicked Dick,” as Backus described her long-time friend, but also the art of daughter Jessie Brugger, whose brilliant paintings drew oohs and ahhs in the gallery outside Council Chambers.

In October 2011, City leaders established the position of poet laureate to “recognize achievements in the literary arts as vital to the community of Auburn,” and named Dick Brugger to the post.

Just what he was expected to do as poet laureate, City Arts Coordinator Maija McKnight recalled of her first meeting with Brugger (inset photo), he had no idea. Something about writing poems for City events, she told him, something about doing things for the greater good of the people of Auburn.

It didn’t take long for him to warm to the job.

His work not only has since been read for City events, it has also appeared once a month in the Auburn Reporter’s Poet’s Corner.

His influence has also been felt on other poets in the Auburn community, said Marjorie Rommel, like Brugger, a member of the Striped Water Poets of Auburn.

“Dick Brugger is a happy soul whose charm appeals to every generation, energizing emergent poets to discover for themselves the power and romance of words, who don’t think they can do it. In a time when the art of poetry is often regarded as self-referential and gooey, Dick Brugger is anything but,” Rommel said.

“And he’s more contagious than measles,” Rommel added with a smile.

Josh Brugger talked about his dad and his own place in the Bruggerian cosmos, which in addition to his father, the poet, and his littler sister, includes his artist mother, Lela.

“There are two types of people,” Josh began. “There’s the artists like my dad, my sister and my mom. And then there’s the other group, and that’s the beautiful subjects,” like himself, he said. … “I have one goal in life. I want people to bring their kids to museums, 300 years from now, because when I was a kid going to museums, I was bored out of my mind. … And I want kids, 100 years from now, to be bored, looking at pictures of me.”

Then, gripping a framed portrait of himself painted by Jessie, he set off at a dash, rounding the refreshment table, to the utter delight of the audience.

“I’m also a sculpture,” Josh added after that first romp, to more laughter, as he circled the table again, this time with a fist wrapped around one of Jessie’s animation models of him.

No, Josh said, he doesn’t mind sitting for his sister, is happy to be subject of his dad’s poetry, because, he said, “There’s a chance 100 years from now, some darned kid is going to be bored out of his mind!”

“My son, Josh, is ferocious,” Dick Brugger said, as he took his turn at the microphone to respond to all the kind things that had been said about him.

Ironically, the man who became Auburn’s first poet laureate once knew nothing about poetry, and cared even less, when he, as he described himself then, “an illicit Catholic priest,” first met his wife, a social worker, for dinner, at the top of the Hyatt hotel in Vancouver, B.C., away from prying eyes and possible scandal.

“She said, ‘I’m going to recite some poetry,'” Brugger recalled, “and she did, and she went on and on. And it was beautiful, and all from her head. And she said, ‘Now, why don’t you recite some?’ I said, ‘I don’t know any poetry!’

“I still don’t know too much poetry,” Brugger added, “but I’m the poet laureate of Auburn, and nobody’s going to take that away from me!”

He went on to read several poems, including “Sept. 11 Revisited,” a somber piece about the events that had shaken the nation, 13 years earlier to the day.

Finally, he thanked those who had given him the opportunity three years earlier and were there to celebrate what he did with it.

“They named me poet laureate. I didn’t refuse it, and I want to say thank you to the City of Auburn for the graciousness of everybody, and all these people here. I think I know 98 percent of you. It means friends are friends,” he said.

It was, however, Lela Brugger, who had the final say. Meaning to invite everybody to the Brugger home on Lea Hill afterward for fireballs, she invited them instead for “hot flashes.” She flushed and tried to recover herself, but her words were drowned out by laughter.

9/11 Revisited

“When the demonstration of Pearl Harbor occurred, I was a little boy, on our back porch in Pennsylvania,

President Roosevelt was on the radio, I recall his strong words. Even as a little boy, I recall the numbing impact.

It was my son, Josh, calling from Atlantic City, New Jersey, stating that 9/11 had occurred.

‘Josh, you’ve gotten it wrong, that could not have happened, you’ve gotten it wrong.’

Unfortunately, he did not. It was sickeningly pernicious — suicide bombers of our own commercial air flights,

Thousands annihilated, reducing our twin trade towers to nothing.

I’m still not over it. Scarily, I realize now anything can happen.

Also, I realize we can come back, a people, a city, a country, our USA.”