JET AGE 

 Sam has journalism in his blood: his late mother, Barbara Burleigh Howe, was the editor of the Boston Herald-Traveler's "Sunday Good Sport" page in the   1950s. Sam has been reporting and writing for newspapers since high school, and he was editor-in-chief of The Stanford Daily during college. After graduation he was hired by New York Times columnist and editor James Reston for a one-year “clerkship” to serve as Mr. Reston’s assistant in the Washington bureau. He also worked as a reporter for the Asahi Evening News in Tokyo and as a journalism teacher in Beijing before returning to The New York Times as a metro reporter in New York. He was the Bronx bureau chief and a reporter in Albany before becoming a national correspondent for the Times in 1993, covering Texas as Houston bureau chief. From 1998 to 2002 he was the Seattle bureau chief, covering the Pacific Northwest. In 2002 he joined the Los Angeles Times as a Seattle-based national correspondent, and also worked for the paper as foreign correspondent in the Middle East and in Shanghai. His reporting career has taken him all over the five boroughs of New York City; to all 50 states of the United States; to five continents, covering stories as far-flung as riots in India, a coup in Fiji, the rise of China and the war in Iraq; and to hangars in the Mojave Desert and outside of Houston where entrepreneurs are building the rocket ships that will take "space tourists" into orbit and explorers to Mars. He is currently at work on a book about baseball in the Dominican Republic during the Trujillo era.