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Health & Fitness

Another Look at Darius Anderson

Reading the musings of Ralph Hutchinson has led me out of retirement to offer my thoughts about Darius Anderson who is attempting to build a 59-unit hotel in the city square.

Darius Anderson has come a long way from the pizza-eating college student who drove Capitol Hill folks around the nation's capital to pay his rent. 

When I was a jaded youth living in Washington, D.C., I landed Darius as a Big Brother. This was my third attempt at finding a Big Brother match. My first got the boot from my mother for being ineffective and the second decided he no longer wanted to counsel me so he could focus more on his business.

I was in elementary school when I met Darius. He helped me with spelling words. He took me to my first professional wrestling match. He even helped convince my mother to send me to Mexico for a month at 11-years-old as part of Children's International Summer Village. After Darius graduated from college, he flew me to California pretty much each summer. Those trips out West became a welcome respite from the concrete jungle of Washington, D.C. during its "Murder Capital" days. 

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Darius has been with me through many ups and downs in life. Some of the down times include being kicked out of high school and Slippery Rock University, being hospitalized several times for bipolar manic depression, and most recently the death of my mother. Some of the good moments have included him seeing me appear on Larry King Live as a youth, helping me with establishing a faith-based non-profit in Los Angeles and helping me through my graduation from Howard University, Harvard Divinity School and Hunter School of Social Work. 

Darius' impact on my life has been so grand that my 10-year-old  son was christened Jobe Darius Jennings or J-Dizzle as I call him.

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Today, it's difficult to keep up with a mover and shaker like Darius Anderson -- that's why I'm thankful for Google. My recent Google Alerts about Darius and his exploits have included his "stealth" involvement with helping halt the Sacramento Kings' move to Seattle and the musings of one Ralph Hutchinson who has penned several pieces in an attempt to crush Darius' plans a 59-room hotel site in the Sonoma city square. 

In his arguments, Mr. Hutchinson points to a settlement Darius reached in New York over pension funds, details his community connections to represent that everyone is in his pocket and even hatches "X-Files"-worthy conspiracy theory regarding Darius' contributions to the local Fourth of July fireworks.  

In the world according to Mr. Hutchinson any goodwill projects connected to Darius are solely motivated by a desire to maintain support for "casinos, hotels and other 'elite' projects." 

I must admit the blogs by Mr. Hutchinson and the adjoining comments by Sal Nero and Karen Kay have been entertaining reading. I can't say if the whole of Sonoma has bought into his rants, as the commentary has been limited to this triad primarily. However, Mr. Hutchinson's rants have definitely caught my eye and prompted me to end my 10-year hiatus from newspaper writing. 

I don't live in Sonoma. I don't currently reside in California. I don't even live on the West Coast. I live more than 2,900-plus miles away in the Bronx, N.Y. I don't know if stucco or French design is better for the city. I'm not even offering my opinion on whether concessions such as free gym memberships, discounted hotel rates and culinary internships for locals are good trade-offs for the proposed hotel project.  

I have taken to writing again to tell the good people of Sonoma that I know Darius to genuinely care about Sonoma County and the history of the jurisdiction. I've heard him argue against bulldozing the trees on his property because he wants to preserve "nature in its nakedness." I also know very well that he is obsessively loyal to the city's wine brands. His affinity for "all wine Sonoma" has even rubbed off on me. When I enter a wine store in New York, I always ask for Kunde, to no avail.

Not only does Darius care about Sonoma, he also has a heart for preservation and helping people throughout California and the United States. I personally know about his foundation work in New York and his involvement with gang intervention programs in Los Angeles, and tactics he has used to help raise the profile of book publishers, painters and other artists in the Bay area. 

One thing that really highlights the philanthropic spirit of Darius was his purchase of the Aquarium of the Bay in 2006 to save it from becoming an amusement park. If you ask nicely, he might just tell you also about his ideas of preserving the integrity of Bay research and his efforts to keep the Martin Luther King papers in Atlanta. Perhaps Darius is just as much a humanitarian as he is a business person. 

While this opinion blog won't solve the fight about the 59-unit hotel he seeks to erect, my hope is that it will at least win some to understand that Darius genuinely cares about the city and whether it flourishes and thrives for residents, businesses and "Sonomads", like me. 

 

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