Rocky Anderson sits in the shadowed, book-lined study of his home. He looks down at the hardwood floors, covered with bright throw rugs, remembering Craig Perkes.
He can't speak. He lifts his heavy, round glasses from his nose. "This is hard. I'm sorry."He's recalling that summer day when he was just 15. He was swimming with his best friend in the cold, dark-blue waters of Pineview Reservoir above Ogden. Craig slipped below the surface.
"I couldn't save him. I tried." Anderson pauses to collect himself.
He calls the tragedy a defining moment in his life.
"I always thought (after the drowning) I had to do enough good for two of us."
Now Anderson, 48, wants to be mayor of Salt Lake City to do good for residents of Utah's capital. He finished first in the Oct. 5 mayoral primary -- a showing that surprised some -- and faces fellow Democrat Stuart Reid in the Nov. 2 final election.
You'd be hard-pressed to say that Anderson hasn't tried to do some good since his friend's death. He's worked on the boards of Utah Common Cause for campaign and election reform; on Planned Parenthood for responsible family planning; for the American Civil Liberties Union for human rights; at the Guadalupe School for quality education for low-income minority students.
While some candidates or even officeholders talk about doing well in the community, "I've done it," says Anderson.
The youngest of three children (older sister Kristen is helping to run Anderson's campaign), Anderson was born in Logan, where his father worked in the family's Anderson Lumber Co. The family briefly moved to Holladay when Anderson was young while his father ran the Anderson outlet there. Then they moved to Ogden, home base of the family lumber business, when his father was named firm president. Anderson graduated from Ogden High School and went off to the University of Utah to study philosophy.
He joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, worked up to three part-time jobs at a time, graduated in four years and was accepted to graduate school in philosophy. But after a year of grad school, Anderson felt lost. He took several months off, traveled Europe, staying in hostels, working odd jobs that included taking care of animals at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin.
He returned to America "refreshed" and decided to become a lawyer -- putting "philosophy to work" as he likes to say. Accepted at George Washington Law School in Washington, D.C., he again worked odd jobs to support himself, returning to Utah upon graduation to begin a law practice. He worked in several firms, leaving a partnership this spring to dedicate his time and several thousands of his own money to the mayor's race.
He says the campaign is worth the sacrifice.
"I have sought public office in order to serve -- to help improve the quality of life for those in our city and for the generations that follow," Anderson wrote, prefacing his answers to a Deseret News questionnaire.
The mayor's race is Anderson's second attempt at an elective office. He failed in a run for Congress in 1996. Anderson won the Democratic nomination in the 2nd Congressional District but lost the final election to Republican Merrill Cook. That was actually good, Anderson says now. "I'm much better suited to be a mayor."
If you measure a man by his friends, Anderson has many loyal ones. He still hikes in the mountains with a retired octogenarian foreign service officer in whose basement apartment he lived while attending law school in the 1970s.
He can be quixotic -- spontaneously advancing lofty ideals, explaining how philosophical principles can be applied to everyday problems. At times, people listening to him are left with the thought of "where did that idea come from" or "what's he up to now."
An example of his commitment to ideals occurred in the 1980s, when Anderson spent his own money to twice travel to Nicaragua to find out for himself what was going on with the Sandinistas and then-President Ronald Reagan's Iran-Contra dealings. No apparent gain for him, just a desire to get on the ground where U.S. foreign policy was being played out.
But while Anderson has a soft, sympathetic side, he's also a tough, tenacious trial attorney.
That pit-bull determination angered Salt Lake police administrators after Anderson doggedly pursued the killer of three Salt Lake women. When city police wouldn't act "on clear evidence," Anderson says, he went to county officials. A county grand jury indicted a Utah prison inmate, who was eventually convicted. Anderson, who took no pay for his work, was praised by the victims' families.
In addition to being determined, Anderson is a man whose word you can trust, says fellow attorney George Haley. Haley and Anderson worked on the huge, complicated Utah thrift settlement case of the late 1980s. "Time and again we'd shake hands on an issue. Rocky's word was his bond, he never broke it. You can't find a smarter, more tenacious, shrewd, honest, aggressive lawyer out there."
Haley says it was Anderson who pored over mounds of state paperwork to find a letter from a banking regulator to then-Gov. Norm Bangerter that became "the smoking gun" that pointed to state liability in the debacle. Thousands of depositors got 95 cents on the $1 of their savings -- around $100 million -- because "Rocky got the documents that blew the state away," Haley said.
"He's a no-bull guy. He tells you want he thinks -- has the highest integrity -- pretty rare in a politician these days," Haley adds.
That's not to say that Anderson can't be fooled. At least when he was young.
Recalls older brother Bob Anderson, 13 years Rocky's senior: "I'd just bought a small hovel of a house in Sandy. It had a white rail fence out front. My wife got Rocky to paint it one day, not paying him much." But then the card-wise Mrs. Anderson got Rocky into a gin game after the work was done "and won back all the money she'd paid him. We all laughed about that for years."
Anderson, twice divorced and now unmarried, lives in a restored two-story house just below the University of Utah on the city's east side. But he's not alone. Seventeen-year-old son Luke spends two weeks with his father and two weeks with his mother. (The coupled divorced after eight years of marriage.)
Becoming a father was apparently another watershed moment in Anderson's life. While the candidate answered most of the questions in the Deseret News survey, he declined to answer several surrounding his life before Luke was born. Anderson said talking about his life during the time he was a parent "should provide a good measure of what kind of person I am."
He doesn't belong to an organized religion but considers himself a spiritual man dedicated to serving those down on their luck or who simply need a hand.
Currently, a new U. basketball player is living temporarily in his house, as is a friend who needs a place to crash and is helping Anderson raise funds. While Anderson is talking to the Deseret News, the friend leaves a voice mail on Anderson's machine saying he'd just squeezed $1,000 from a supporter for the campaign
"I love messages like that," Anderson jokes.