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Bruce Buschel is a Temple graduate. Well, sorta.

He went to the school in the 1960s and even wrote for The Temple News, but left before he got the cap and gown.

In his book that came out last year, entitled “Walking Broad: Looking for the Heart of Brotherly Love” ($23, Simon & Schuster, Inc.), Buschel notes that he is still in need of “a few science courses to graduate.

But from the very onset, the book, which chronicles a weekend he spent walking the 13 miles of Broad Street, from Olney to the Naval Yard, has all the wit and insight of work from the most educated of minds.

Buschel was born and raised in this town. He worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and wrote for Philadelphia magazine, all before high-tailing it out to the Big Apple, where he wrote for the New York Times Magazine, GQ, Rolling Stone and other mags.

He was drawn to come back and that return, some twenty years later, is what we’re left with.

To open, Buschel begins his acknowledgments with a note from his son Marin, after he read a draft of the book.

Personally, it helped clear up a few things. I always thought you fucked up my life because you were raised in an orphanage. Now I know it’s because the orphanage was in Philadelphia.

Throughout, “Walking Broad” is just that, painfully funny, with a great deal of pain.

Considering the prominent place Temple has on North Broad, Buschel can’t ignore his old haunts, including The Temple News.

He writes at length on Tom Ferrick, Jr., Class of 1968 and former editor-in-chief. Ferrick, also a lifelong Philadelphian, was editor at The Temple News when Buschel was writing there.

Ferrick was always mature. Too mature for me. We weren’t the best of friends, but I should stop by to see ol’ Tom when I get downtown, talk about the passage of time and walking B. Street. That’ll be nice. That he hasn’t traveled very far since college is no surprise; that’s the Philadelphia dance of life – a straight path that somehow leads back to where it started.

That Ferrick began his professional reporting career in Harrisburg and that Ferrick has gone from TTN newsroom to become the most respected columnist at one of the twenty largest newspapers in the country doesn’t seem to come into Buschel’s equation.

It is difficult to determine if Buschel is self-righteous in his leaving Philly or simply damning every one of the city’s 1.47 million inhabitants, in addition to anyone who was born, lived or ever visited the cradle of liberty. That is the book’s draw. His pain seems startlingly parallel to the pain that lies somewhere within each and every Philadelphian.

He seems to confuse his own want to leave Philly – to leave a fatherless childhood stuffed with sexual abuse and drug abuse – with the destinies of others.

…After a few LSD trips that seemed to last longer than my first marriage, I can remember Donna Deb’s lips in the darkened fire escape, Joan Horvath’s lips on the bright roof of The Temple News, and Chuck Newman’s journalism class… That’s the accumulated knowledge retained from four years at university.

He is equally stubborn in his memories of Temple. It is clear he hasn’t been back. It is clear he is pained. His pain just happens to come out irresistibly funny.

Temple is like a great lovable state-sponsored hooker: cheap, easy to enter, amenable to any course of study, and always available on Broad Street. All you have to do is give up on football and meals from any place without wheels.

He mentions the Owl’s Nest Pizza on North Broad Street, where he used to kill time like Temple students do today. He finds a lot that Buschel says hasn’t changed.

But, in an interview with the Inquirer late last year, he was more open to Philly changing, noting a “new feel,” but the book is full of Philadelphian sentiment, the pained and negative and broken.

His pen is as fluid and funny as anyone.

Philly is a union town, always has been. The carpenters who built Carpenter’s Hall in 1770 went out on strike in 1797. It is a working-class city with an underdog’s mentality, and the collar around the dog’s neck is blue. Having once been the center for industry and railroads, unions have long been an essential part of Philly life; having lost most of its industry and its status, Philadelphians carry around a chip on their shoulders so large it requires scaffolding. You need union guys for that. [c. 10, p. 134]

See it on Google Books