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Adriel Hampton, he fell in love with a
Japanese on the dance floor, on a group date with another woman.
Hampton's designated girl was a bad dancer. He kept thinking that
and hating himself for it. But the music was now and this little
piece of jet and alabaster from the world's largest city was the
real gem. So he danced with her. Hampton was sweating beads of
drunken wheat sweat, breathing a refinery, but he didn't care and
she didn't care, this was love.
They've got two dogs and his elbow pops after hammering too long
at the keyboard. He's working up a novel, Red Dixon: A Pizza Man,
about those days back in the Central Valley, bullshitting and
drinking beer, running pizzas for Round Table and Eddie's for tips
and short hours. His first junior college was far too small, so
he'd headed down to the city where he could study fencing and golf
for $13 a unit.
Delivery is no career, so he started writing sports and traded
that up for editing before he headed west for higher education.
At San Francisco City Hall, the flacks and the pols, they want to
hire Hampton because he knows them, knows and hardly judges. They
all want to be mayor, maybe president. Hampton, he just likes to
take it all in.
His jogging buddy h. brown, an online columnist and weedhead,
watches every meeting on the local government channels, reruns
even. h. calls regularly, frantic and angry over what he's just
seen on the tube or about some neighborhood nuisance.
"I'll handle it, h.," Hampton always tells him.
h. sleeps in a storage unit in the basement, wired up with DSL to
e-mail out his political satire.
Hampton writes stories about crazy protest kids and thinks life
goes so fast. In quiet moments, he wonders how a love for the
counter cultured ebbed into hour-long commutes. He watches DVDs,
not TV.
Three trips to Japan and what he remembers most clearly are the
teary poems of survivors written on the walls at the Hiroshima
National Museum and the multimedia displays documenting dead
children. One boy was recreated on a wicker frame, his school
uniform stitched back together using remnants from the bodies of
several classmates.
How home-schooled Hampton became a political junkie, a reader, a
writer, he can't always say. Sometimes a motive rolls out easy,
sometimes the story is different, strained. Those missionary days
with hippie parents in Papua New Guinea had something to do with
it. Married at 20, born again at 21, front page editing in his
junior year at Cal for his third daily. Sometimes things just
flow.
He fights for us
"Newspapering is the profession of the poverty-stricken
intellectual", Adriel Hampton gathered from some corner or
another. He loves that definition, like if he came into money he'd
wander off and write and debate. As long as he gets paid to wander
and write, that too will do. He'd wanted to be a lawyer -
intellectual property - or an international businessman. Sometimes
the profession chooses you.
One journalism class led to another at Delta College, a big
two-year school in Stockton, Ca. Just five months after the core
class Hampton was managing editor of the weekly rag, chasing
around school administrators and cozying up to the Academic
Senate. He poured his guts into it, lived in the newsroom, pumping
out pages and coaching the even greener staff of 30. Next up was
the editor-in-chief job, with a weekly editorial, a column and the
occasional depth news piece. He won little awards and liked it. He
earned a spot at a nearby daily after hounding the managing editor
every week for two months, e-mails, letters, phone calls and
personal visits. He applied to be a copy editor, then a business
reporter, finally landing a sports job.
He wrote and copy edited for three years of nights to make it
through school, putting mandatory bylines on wire stories after
noticing that Israelis and Palestinians working for the Associated
Press rarely tell a story about the Middle East the same. Neither
do an Afghan man and a European woman, though they might share a
dateline.
At one of the tightest chain papers in America, he learned from
young people on the rise who stayed only months, jumping on to
dot-coms, and from chain smokers and drunks who'd die with ink on
their hands.
From his page-one editor position at The San Francisco Examiner,
he can still smell the 9/11 adrenaline, hear the barks and laughs
of newspaper men and women under intense pressure and high on
tragedy.
Their "Bastards!" deadline caught the nation's eye.
He learned that papers are like people, with little quirks that
make them who they are. He learned that objectivity is never pure
and made fairness a doctrine.
His editor asked him what he wanted to do, edit, write columns,
what?
Somewhere he got a bug to write for the New York Times Sunday
Magazine.
"Get out of here, skip the LA Times, get to New York, you're
ready," the editor said.
Oh, he wanted to be, but that's a load to bear, so he plunged into
the local desk at the Ex, having had enough of the screaming
headlines and hours buried in the wires.
Now, he loves giving voice to the little guys, working as a force
not in concert with other societal pressures. For Hampton, the
newspaper is beauty.
On the trail
Covering a beat is much more than phone calls, Rolodexes and hot
tips. It's about making the rounds, talking up everybody and
sticking around after the pack of reporters has wandered off the
big story.
At City Hall, it's earning the trust of the neighborhood folks,
without letting them think they call the shots. It's learning
which staffers do the real work and hitting them up for their
opinions and thoughts.
In San Francisco, everybody thinks I work out of City Hall, maybe
even live there. I don't, but I cover that place better than
anyone who works out of the press room. Offices two doors down
from the legislative chambers mean nothing if you're just watching
the proceedings from a desk TV. I'm in there, leaning over the
rail for quotes.
I get to know the volunteer staff, I joke with the secretaries and
aides. The pols know that I'm going to do the little story to get
the big story. I earn their trust through fairness. If I break a
story the day of a press conference, I still go to the press
conference. For events out of the mainstream, sometimes I'm the
only one who shows - but I get more.
I develop an arcane knowledge of the minutia, the biographical
details of the various electeds and their positions on resolutions
that could later develop into reelection platforms. If I don't
have a story, I talk up the newsmakers until they hand over three.
If a controversial project is going into a neighborhood I visits
the area, meet the activists then leave them to walk around and
gaze.
I comb through citizen letters to the officials, looking for any
angles. I read all the filings, the planning documents and the
health reports on jail kitchens. I account for patterns and know
when they make a story. I hit the stories that people want to read
and the facts people need to know, not what other reporters think
will make the front pages.
On the campaign trail, I gather in all the gossip, check the most
minor facts and ask the little questions. I get out to watch the
candidates at stump speeches and follow them around as they sweat
through neighborhood walks and lengthy forums. They see me
everywhere.
I do make the phone calls, once a week, twice a week, monthly. I'm
around, interested.
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