Examiner profile of Supervisor Eric Mar

This ran in yesterday’s Examiner and is a thorough, personal profile of our Richmond District Supervisor, Eric Mar. Enjoy the read!

Sarah B.

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ERIC MAR IS PAVING HIS OWN PARENTING PATH
By: Mike Aldax | Examiner Staff Writer | 06/20/09

Shivering on a Richmond district street, Eric Mar was wearing nothing but underwear as he watched 20 years of his life burn to rubble.

Meanwhile, 15 blocks away, Jade Mar, his newborn daughter, was safe with his wife at the Kaiser hospital on Geary Boulevard. Except now they had no home to return to, and the many gifts that were meant to welcome Jade into the world were in ashes.

It was the early morning of April 6, 2000. Mar — the cool-headed San Francisco supervisor who was then a professor at San Francisco State University — said he was startled awake following a dream in which he was engulfed in smoke.

But the dream was actually reality.

His bed was on fire (apparently, the frayed wire of an electric blanket ignited it), and the blaze was swiftly growing out of control. He ran from his flat in his skivvies, coaxing his 80-year-old mother along with him. They survived without injury — even Mar’s cats escaped unscathed.

What perished, however, were the gifts and the room Mar and his wife had carefully prepared for Jade, as well as his classic comics, his book collection, his trumpet case and most of the photographs he cherished. He lost almost everything, except his underwear.

“It was really traumatic,” Mar said. “I was on a high about being a father, but there was a feeling of tremendous loss.”

Losing all those things was not what hurt, he said. And it wasn’t that those possessions would be expensive to replace.

“Luckily, we had renter’s insurance,” he said.

What hurt was that all that had been stored in the flat, where he and his wife had resided since 1984, was a history of two decades of his life. He had planned to show Jade those comics. He wanted to read to her from those old books. He had hoped to give her more than just stories.

More than nine years later — a week before Father’s Day — Mar recalled the story of the fire from his City Hall office. It remains difficult to discuss, he said. He sighed while recalling the blaze’s aftermath.

“And then to see it in a street in a pile,” he said. “But you start over. And with the new kid, it made it OK.”

>> Read the rest of the story on Examiner.com