Jim Balderston, a longtime Bay Guardian journalist and the first person I ever hired as a reporter, did in May, I recently learned.
I don’t know the cause of death; there’s a basic obit here.
I met Jim when he was driving a cab in San Francisco and got an internship at the Guardian. He wasn’t a particularly good intern; when we asked him to sort and file the many alternative newspapers we got every week, he’d go into the library and take a nap.
But after a while, he started compiling guides, and I overheard him on the phone, talking to people about what they did and where to find things. I realized he was a natural reporter.
When I, somewhat unexpectedly, became managing editor, I hired Jim as our staff reporter. He wasn’t a great writer at first, although he learned quickly. But he had a knack for finding information that other people couldn’t get or missed.
Within a year, Jim and I won the most prestigious investigative reporting award in the country short of the Pulitzer: The Investigative Reporters and Editors Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting. We exposed a deadly asbestos crisis in the public schools—and the political scandal that had kept it hidden, endangering the lives of students and teachers.
Neither of us knew anything about asbestos, but Jim found an expert who did, and an architect at the school district who was ready to blow the whistle. The architect had documents. All the big news outlets eventually picked up the story, and they all asked me: how did you get all that inside information? I can tell you the secret now: Jim Balderston.
There were other awards, too, and hundreds of big and small stories. Along the way, we became good friends. We’d hang out at the Jay and Bee, the local bar down the street from the Guardian office after (and sometimes during) work. My partner Jean introduced him to the woman who would become his wife and the mother of his son.
We had no cell phones and no Internet in the 1980s, but Jim could work miracles with the tools we had. I remember one late deadline night when I read a story Jim had written about tenant activists suspecting landlord arson in the wake of the Loma Prieta Earthquake. Buildings were burning in the Mission, tenants were displaced, and some said the landlords could make more money torching damaged property for the insurance than paying to repair it. He cited two specific examples, and named the landlords.
But we had no evidence those were even arson fires, and I was about to kill the story when I decided to give Jim a final call. He’d left the office, but I knew where to find him: If he wasn’t at the Rite Spot he was at the Uptown.
I tried the Uptown first, and yeah, Jim was there. I told him we couldn’t run the story without solid evidence that these were not accidental fires. He told me to give him a few minutes.
It took about 10. He called me back with a quote from the fire chief, saying “those were arson fires, and we believe they were landlord arson.” Was that good enough?
Yeah, I said, but how to fuck did you get the fire chief on the phone at 11:30 on a Monday night?
“I made a few calls and found someone with his home number,” Jim said. “He wife answered and said he was in bed, but I chatted her up for a while, and she went and got him.”
This stuff happened on a regular basis.
Jim was an early tech adapter, who helped us build Guardian Online, the first city-specific bulletin-board system that at one point had 10,000 regular users. Eventually, the lure of the emerging industry got to be too much, so he left and became an Internet industry analyst.
Then he and his wife moved to Hadley, Mass. to raise their son, Jake. We kept in touch; he was out in San Francisco fairly often, and we made it to Northwest Mass a couple of times.
Jim devoted his life to Jake. Despite a divorce and other issues, he took care of his son, taking him to his baseball and hockey games, helping him in school … Jake was his world. “I went through a lot of tough family stuff,” he told me once. “But the thing I’m most proud of in my life is I always protected Jake.”
Jim got a job as a private investigator, and his boss was a retired cop. At one point, we were sitting in a bar near Hadley drinking soda water (Jim had been sober for 20 years at that point) and he told me that on his last assignment, he and the cop were going to interview a possibly reluctant witness in a somewhat dangerous area. “My boss asked if I wanted a gun,” Jim said. We both burst out laughing: Balderston never needed a gun. He could talk himself out of any kind of danger.
He made friends everywhere, almost instantly. Case in point: We were in Minneapolis for an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference years ago (many years ago), and Jim and I met a woman from a small town in Texas who was looking for work in a big city.
Investigative reporting conventions in those days were largely male, macho affairs, with guys with huge egos walking around in their Izod shirts and Gucci shoes and Aqua Velva thinking they were important. Women were dismissed (or at worse, seen as someone to pick up).
Jim didn’t even have to try to make it clear that he had no sense of self-importance and wasn’t That Kind of Guy. He wore a ratty T-Shirt, hadn’t shaved in a couple of days, was a working stiff, just like her—and wanted to help her find a job if he could. He told her he would reach out to all his contacts in San Francisco and see if anyone was hiring. And (because he was Jim Balderston) he got her room number. Which turned out to be important.
Jim loved fishing, and was an expert with a fly rod, and his dad at one point had given him a flare gun to use if he ever got stranded and needed help on the water. He kept it in his bag at all times, and somehow it got through security at the airport (not as tight back then).
He also had a wonderful sense of humor—and adventure. Around 1:30am, after a cocktail or seven in the hotel bar, he took the flare gun out of his jacket pocket and decided it would be a good idea “to see if this thing works.” We went outside, and he fired two shots in the air. Instantly, smoke was everywhere and two bright red flares lit up downtown Minneapolis. And yeah, it worked: the cops came, fast.
We ran back into the hotel, and Jim told me to take the stairs to Floor Four, where the woman from Texas had her room. “She’s never going to let two low-life guys hide in her hotel room at this hour on a Sunday morning,” I said. Jim smiled at me. “Of course she is.”
She came to the door half asleep in pajamas and a robe. “The cops are after us,” Jim said. “We need to hide.”
Something about Balderston’s charm always seemed to work. He’d known her for a day, and she was already his pal. The young woman from a conservative little town let us into the room, then told us to get on our knees and bow our heads. She grabbed a copy of the Gideon’s Bible in the room and started reading loudly from the Gospels.
When the cops demanded she open the door, she told them she was fine, “just having an early morning prayer breakfast with two old friends.” Jim raised his bowed head, looked at the cops, and said “Amen.”
Having no clear alternative, the cops closed the door and went away.
Miss you, Balderston. Always.
