Of all the things Kevin Fagan worries about, clothes are not high on the list.
“I dress like this every day, whether I’m seeing Mayor Newsom or a crack addict on Jones Street,” said the veteran San Francisco Chronicle reporter of his checkered sports shirt, blue jeans and hiking boots.
In fact, glimpses of various photos of Fagan indicate that he really does seem to wear a checkered shirt every day — as well as a ubiquitous smile. And while he’s completely objective in his choice of attire for an interview with San Francisco’s glamorous mayor or the city’s most hard-up denizens, one gets the feeling that Fagan would much rather be toting his notebook through the gritty streets than cooling his heels beneath the glorious City Hall rotunda. He’s certainly had more practice with the former.
Between 2003 and 2006, Fagan, 49, became perhaps the first journalist to cover homelessness exclusively as his beat; you may recall the Chronicle’s “Shame of the City” series featuring Fagan’s evocative prose and Brant Ward’s heartrending photography.
“The trouble with most homeless reporting is it treats homeless people as cutout characters. They’re either lousy bums or pitiful folks who are just down on their luck. But I thought that getting to the core of why they were on the street and how they could truly get off them was more important than anything else,” he said.
Fagan will speak at 10:30 a.m. Nov. 17 at Los Altos Hills’ Congregation Beth Am. His topic: “Reporting With Heart in a Cynical World.”
“I approached [the stories] with the very strong aim of spotlighting solutions and making the homeless into fully three-dimensional humans for people to see.”
Fagan’s path to journalism traces a hardscrabble course more befitting a 19th-century reporter than one of the present day.
His family grew up poor in a number of California and Nevada cities, surviving off the wages his father earned as a graduate student in English. When his parents’ marriage broke up, Fagan immersed himself in his studies, graduated from Livermore High at age 16 and put himself through San Jose State.
While taking classes and toiling at the Daily Spartan during the day, he “worked every crummy job you could imagine” at nights — pumping gas, washing dishes, temping in offices and cleaning houses into the wee hours. At one point he lived in a garage, made his own furniture out of discarded wood and supplemented his diet of beans by gleaning potatoes from a nearby field (“very Irish of me”).
He broke into professional journalism while traveling around Europe and New Zealand, where he paid his way as a street musician. As Fagan sees it, the jobs weren’t as divergent as one might think: Both involve interacting with people and telling a story to the public.
Throughout Fagan’s journalistic career he’s served as a bureau chief and an editor and could easily do so again — but that’s not what he wants. He’d rather be out on the street as a general assignment reporter, talking with people and exposing the public to sides of life they wouldn’t otherwise know.
Fagan himself was exposed to a new side of life during his days at the Oakland Tribune in the 1980s. He fell in love with his colleague, Carolyn Newbergh, and the two married seven years later. Although Fagan grew up as a Unitarian, the two never doubted that they’d raise their daughter, Molly, as a Jew.
But that turned out not to be enough for Fagan. When Molly, the only Jew in her class, asked why she “couldn’t be a Christian like Daddy,” Fagan decided it was time to focus his ever-present yet amorphous sense of spirituality.
He approached Rabbi Roberto Graetz, the spiritual leader at Lafayette’s Temple Isaiah, where the Fagans are members. “I said, ‘How do I become a Jew?’ And in typically Jewish fashion, he said, ‘Well, it’s not easy,'” recalled Fagan with a laugh.
Fagan gained a rabbi — and an editor. Graetz met with Fagan weekly, asked him to read the Torah from end to end and assigned him a pair of papers on Jewish topics. Fagan wrote one on biblical Jewish laws regarding the death penalty; this dovetailed with his work at the Chronicle, for whom he has witnessed seven executions at San Quentin.
His two-year conversion process was completed in 1999, and he reports that, surprisingly, there have been few “Fagan the Jew” jokes made since.
As a Jew, “tikkun olam gives a structure and a name to what I have always considered a very important part of my journalism. Writing, at your best, is performing tikkun olam,” Fagan said.
“Being an objective journalist does not mean you can’t infuse your love for humanity into your reporting.”