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Talking Story  by Polo

Kara Adams (left), mother of Portland mayoral candidate Sam Adams.

From The Asian Reporter, V18, #19 (May 6, 2008), page 7.

Please note: The Asian Reporter does not endorse candidates for political office. Our responsibility is engaging our readers in democracy. Loen Dozono discussed her relationship with Portland mayoral candidate Sho Dozono and her ideas about our

Growing up in Salem, Oregon was good and bad. Growing up as one of 10 cousins, nine brown boys, one girl, all rice-pickers, was hard. Real hard. So our elders advised us on many-many things. We had a thousand do dis directives — we had a thousand don’t do dats.

And, of course, we didn’t listen. Wha’do dey know, us smart-aleck American teenagers said. Quietly of course.

One parental imperative we heard again and again was: Hati-hati, beware of the company you keep. People will judge you by your friends.

And, of course, again our elders were right. It’s fair to judge you by who you hang with. As a matter of empirically verifiable social science: in many ways we become the company we keep.

With this old maxim in mind, we figured it’s fair to look at those closest to Portland’s two top mayoral candidates. The company they keep. So, I asked to coffee the woman most likely to know the most about City Commissioner Sam Adams. I asked her two kinds of questions: first, what do you want us to know about your big guy’s family life; then, tell us what you want for Portland. For our city.

"Would you tell us," I asked southeast Portland architect and Sam Adams’ mom, "about your son, about him growing up in your house." Kara Adams’ eyes went out of focus, went where mothers’ gazes go when they lean back into memory. Hers went to Newport, to Oregon’s moody coast, to the little house her four kids grew up in — "where some of life’s most important things were free."

Those most important things, and her kids’ most free times, she says, were between public library shelves and on the forested floor of a ravine running next to their home. Sam was five, in the middle of her four kids, when their family moved to that place from Richland, Washington.

According to Commissioner Adams, "My friends and I always wanted to be fishing or crabbing off Newport’s fish canary docks or digging for clams in the mudflats."

"The only thing that would bring him inside," smiles Ms. Adams, "was food."

For eight years, Kara Adams raised her two older girls and two younger boys in that little house in a world of so many free opportunities to play and learn. "I think this is where Sam got his curiosity in life," she says, leaning forward again, returning to our Starbucks back table, "This is where he got his interest in so many things. From exploration in this very open-ended way of growing up."

Sam’s mother and father divorced when Sam was 13. She took her kids to Eugene and she got herself back to school. Lean times followed. Ms. Adams was a working and studying single mom. That family chapter, both Kara and Sam Adams will tell you, probably made the second-biggest impression on his formative years.

Ms. Adams remembers Sam getting very busy with the high school newspaper, with the U.N. Club, with his track team. "His interest in government was becoming obvious at that time." And so too was her son’s growing sensitivity to others’ needs. Particularly the vulnerable. Ms. Adams recalls Sam as "the kid I could depend on, to be there. He’s always had that clear sight. He can see both sides of an issue, so that everyone has a say. Not all have to agree, but he has that way of bringing everyone together."

Kara Adams’ son remembers those post-divorce Eugene years as tough times, when their family got by because of "subsidized student housing, student loans, food stamps, and my mother’s amazing strength."

Both mother and son now conclude that Commissioner Adams’ easy identification with Portland’s struggling families, his belief in a mix of ambition and hard work and good government came straight from these hard years.

And she’ll tell you, this is how he is in public office. "Sam is a good person. Considerate. Compassionate and interested in those around him."

Those long lean years produced, among other things, one professional Portland architect and one Portland policy leader. Mom set up shop in the southeast sector of town. Her son took his place next to former Speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives, and former Portland Mayor, Vera Katz. Later, he took his own office on Old City Hall’s first floor. And he gets to all those high places, everyone will tell you, on his big ugly yellow bike.

Kara Adams is a believer in the city’s neighborhood associations, each working for Portland’s many little commercial and civic cores as "villages within an urban context," as she puts it. All of them plugged into Portland’s energetic political process. She admires most the efforts of the Woodstock Neighborhood Association, and volunteers on specific projects.

Ms. Adams becomes especially animated when she discusses conserving the city’s green spaces, in preserving that openness to natural exploration and inevitable learning that so benefitted her children in small-town Oregon. She points with pride to Portland’s extraordinary Forest Park, the nation’s vastest wild place inside a single city’s limits.

"It all exists here, it’s happening here," she says with some certitude. "And it can grow."

Listening to her I’m thinking, where have I heard that same tone, that same personal commitment to civil places and wild spaces? Then I remember, she’s the other Adams’ mom. And as anyone can see, she did a good job of it.