“I had a migraine, and it was literally like the heart was ripped out of me.” “I didn’t even come to my office for two days after that,” Manley says as he leans back in his desk chair a couple of weeks after the vote. The council voted 4-0 with one recusal in favor of taking on the property and keeping it an executive 18-hole course. He had already retreated to the Yard House restaurant in downtown Brea when his phone started lighting up with text messages. Manley left certain there wouldn’t be so much as even a vote on Birch Hills, as he had met with two council members over the issue that morning. “I used to walk that golf course licked golf balls as a child. “You’re basically taking on Three Mile Island in the middle of Brea,” Manley warned the council. Later, Manley saw himself as just such a luminary in opposing Brea acquiring Birch Hills Golf Course, deeming it a toxic dumpsite, as Jackson looked on from a few rows back. “We ask Brea to be that light in darkness.” After a quick, understated “amen,” he shuffled back to his seat. “We turn to each other, not on each other,” said Jackson. The reverend followed with brief words of prayer in the name of reconciliation everywhere. “He wanted me to see this marvelous City Council in Brea.” “I’m really here as a friend of Dwight,” Jackson said. In the area to celebrate his 78th birthday, the subject of 1980s “Run Jesse Run!” fever gave an unscheduled invocation at the start of the meeting. 1 at the invitation of Dwight Manley, a businessman who owns much of the city’s downtown. and who later ran “Rainbow Coalition” campaigns for president in the 1980s, showed up before the Brea City Council on Oct. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, once a young apprentice of Dr. Dwight Manley: The Brea King? Illustration by Paul Nagel.
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