Gary Bell was the first person in his family to go to college, a star football player, and the youngest city council member ever elected in his hometown of Wichita, Kansas. But don’t ask the Richmond City Council candidate about his defeats. “Did you just use the defeated word with me?” he asks, his eyebrows arched incredulously.

In the summer of 1975, Richmond Councilman Nat Bates received a call from Ben Brown, a Democratic campaign organizer in Atlanta. Brown needed Bates’ support rallying African American voters behind his candidate, Jimmy Carter, a little known peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia who had just finished his term as governor and was seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination.

In March 1970, Tom Butt, fresh out of serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Vietnam, chose to be discharged there. He mainly wanted to visit Angkor Wat, an architectural wonder in nearby Cambodia. Butt then continued a long “odyssey” back to the United States through Southeast Asia, across the Trans-Siberian Railway in the former Soviet Union, and through Europe.

Eduardo Martinez sits at the front desk of the Richmond Progressive Alliance hunched over a pile of donor thank-you letters. It’s midday and the quiet of the office is punctuated by the hum of vehicles that pass by on Macdonald Avenue and the occasional police siren in the distance. As Martinez picks up the letters and shuffles them a bit, several stray postcards—decorated with antique cars and a family of raccoons and littered throughout the pile—pop out.

Eleanor Thompson is known in the Iron Triangle neighborhood as an advocate for youth and their safety. What’s less known is that she is motivated to work for the young people of Richmond by her own childhood experience. Thompson was born in Arkansas but moved to Arizona when she was six. By the time she was 14, she had lost both her parents and entered a foster home with her two younger sisters, then 13 and 12. Despite being the oldest, Thompson said she was the shy and reserved one who was often teased and bullied. It was her younger sister, she said, who was “aggressive” and stood up for her when she couldn’t get on the swing at school.

There’s one outcome for the City Council election that Bea Roberson says she can’t let happen, and it’s the reason the first-time candidate decided to put her name on the ballot to begin with. “We cannot let the [Richmond Progressive Alliance] win again,” Roberson said, standing near the dais in the city chambers after a council meeting. She said if she can make it out of the election with her sanity, she doesn’t plan on running for any other political office.

Armed with a Ziploc bag full of bookmarks and a compliment, Mike (Ali) Raccoon Eyes Kinney moves quickly from house to house “slinging paper.” As an experienced precinct walker, he gives himself 15 seconds to assess each porch before he decides whether to deliver the thin strip of paper emblazoned with a “WE LIKE MIKE!” slogan, his picture and the words “Candidate for Richmond City Council 2012.” If the doorstep is too cluttered, he won’t go near. There might be a dog hiding in there. Apartments? They’re low-vote. Opposing political signage? Forget it.

The real Marilyn Langlois, walking her bike along the Richmond Bay Trail, is not a giant. She’s normal-sized, dressed in a blue windbreaker over a white turtleneck and a scarf, wearing glasses and abalone earrings. She is not, by height, breadth, or demeanor, the least bit frightening.

There wasn’t anything unusual or exciting about the white shirt, gray slacks, black shoes or the red, diamond patterned tie that Jael P. Myrick wore. Even the way he blended in with people didn’t make him seem out of the ordinary.

Richmond native Anthony Green spent 13 years in the Air Force – first as an Aerospace Ground Equipment mechanic, then as a loadmaster for the C-5 airplane, which he told me was one of the best jobs he ever had. “I still got to fly around everywhere,” he said. “I just wasn’t flying the plane.”

Mark Wassberg finishes the knot with his teeth and steps back from the chain-link fence. He stands quietly for a moment and inspects his work as a wave of cars passes by. It’s a warm cloudless afternoon a month before Election Day and two posters emblazoned with the message MARK WASSBERG 4 CITY COUNCIL gleam in the sun.