Sunday, July 20, 2003
15 Under 30
These Bay Area 20-somethings are movin' and shakin'
Celebrating fifteen Bay Area 20-somethings who have already made a name for themselves.
Tamara Keith, NPR Reporter
When she was 15, Tamara Keith wrote a letter to three well-known personalities at National Public Radio, asking them for advice about how to work in radio someday.
Cokie Roberts left a voicemail telling her not to major in communications at college.
Scott Simon invited her family to his Washington, D.C., apartment.
And Liane Hansen, host of NPR's "Weekend Edition Sunday," handed Keith's letter to a senior producer, who promptly hired Keith to be the program's "teen essayist."
That's how Keith, 23, ended up on the radio before she had even learned to drive.
Seven years after she recorded her first radio essay - about the trials of picking out an outfit for the first day of school - Keith is a full-time reporter covering the Central Valley for KQED, San Francisco's NPR affiliate.
Keith reports from Fresno, educating Bay Area listeners on topics such as agriculture, growth and the region's deteriorating air quality. It is a job, Keith said, that is about as "close to my dream job" as any 23-year-old could hope to get.
"It seems more real here," said Keith, who moved to the Central Valley town of Hanford when she was 8. "You drive out to these teeny tiny towns, and it's a completely different world. Trailers are homes, there are chickens and dogs everywhere, and even clean water isn't a guarantee."
Keith didn't just work her way up quickly in the radio world.
A former child actress, she got her first job modeling for an ad when she was 6 months old. By 8 she'd been in 30 magazine ads and a TV commercial that aired during the Super Bowl.
Once a teen, Keith dashed through school. She finished high school at 16, then received her bachelor's in philosophy from UC Berkeley in three years.
In 1999, she became the youngest person to ever enroll in the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Her first day, professor William Drummond tried to send her to a bar to find a story. She had to tell him she was just 19, and couldn't get in.
"She is very mature, and amazingly experienced for someone so young," said Drummond. "What's she going to do when she's 25?"
For now, Keith said her age is an advantage for her reporting, even if it is frustrating to be asked "Is this for a school project?" when she shows up at an interview.
"I am not intimidating at all, not one bit," Keith said. "Older sources treat me like a daughter, and younger sources can identify with me. Since I can't change my age, I might as well work with it."
-- Kelly St. John
Full article
