As was announced on Page 5B of the Las Vegas Review-Journal's Nevada and the West section, Steven Drew Hampton, a local Trotskyist activist, died of natural causes(unspecified in the article)at his Las Vegas apartment on 2nd June of this year.

Hampton, who had resided in the Las Vegas area since 1996 or 1997, was a licensed member of the Nevada State Bar since October, 1997, a contributing poet to the various poetry readings at the now-defunct Cafe Espresso Roma, and had been part of the local Left since his arrival in Las Vegas.

He had burnt small American flags in public on 4th July and 11th September of 2003, and again on 11th September, 2004, for which latter offence he was arrested and detained on a misdemeanour "Interrupting a public meeting" charge by Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officers.

Hampton, whose trial on that charge was scheduled for 4th August of this year, planned to call Mayor Oscar Goodman, who was making a speech dedicating the new Las Vegas Fire Department station where Hampton was arrested, as a witness.

According to the R-J article, the Clark County Coroner's Office was engaged in searching for Hampton's next-of-kin, as of the time when the article was published.

There were no details on when and where a memorial service for Mr. Hampton would be held, if any were to be held, nor were there any details on the exact cause or causes of Mr. Hampton's death in the article.

Hampton was fifty-two years old at the time of his death.

All that said, please allow to indulge myself here by adding a personal note or two to this article.

I cannot say that I liked, nor even cared for, everything that Mr. Hampton said or did in life.

In many regards, I felt, as I still feel, that very often, he shot himself in the foot with much of the way in which he expressed himself.

But, for the record, it also has to be said that he indeed had the guts to take a very un-popular set of stands in one of the more conservative cities in the US, well before the emergence of Indy Media Las Vegas, much of the current day local Left and its organisations, and the '99 Seattle WTO protests that began the re-emergence of the American Left.

He was not an easy man to like, nor with whom to work, but, he was also one of the first of us here to stand up and express a left-wing viewpoint in a rather right-wing town.

That said, it's unclear if he has left any sort of real legacy for the Nevadan Left at this present time.

Only time will tell.

Still, at the very least, he was one of the first activists on the current Nevadan Left, and that alone should merit a mention, however brief, in any future history of the Nevadan Left, however small.