Adam Harper was the angriest young man I ever hired. Or ever worked with. And probably the weirdest, too, though he has a lot more competition for that title.

Rage simmered below the surface of his personality at all times and percolated to the surface frequently … usually directed at the great amorphous (yet eternally inviting) target: The Man.

I couldn’t be anything but The Man in his cosmology. I hired him. I scheduled his hours. I did his performance reviews. He may well have hated me then, and now.

But I don’t think he did. If only because the newsroom setting’s slow moments allowed him to go off on some interesting rants, and gave him room to talk about Big Topics with adults who didn’t always tell him to shut up. As his teachers at school probably did.

Plus, yes, there was that moment in the early evening of April 29, 1992 … when I let Adam Harper leave work to go join the mob in that great Los Angeles upheaval eventually known as … the Rodney King Riots.

Adam Harper may have been born ticked off. At any rate, he clearly was severely alienated from mainstream society by the time I hired him, along about 1991.

He was a senior at Fontana High School, and we had enjoyed some success bringing in Fohi kids. Chuck Hickey, for example. They tended to be blue-collar teens, dogged workers and thankful to have a job that didn’t involve flipping burgers.

Adam did well enough on the tests we gave him. He could handle the language adequately, he knew sports and he behaved well enough through the interview process to prompt me to offer him a job as one of our 25-hour agate clerks.

It wasn’t long before the Angry Young Man began to emerge.

He loved the hip-hop music genre, and would often jump in, uninvited, when someone made a reference to “rap” when they really meant, Adam would insist, “hip-hop.” Very different.

OK.

He said he came from a home where music was important and marijuana a constant. He also liked the Dodgers and Lakers.

He was a product of his high school environment, as well. He wasn’t a popular kid, by his own telling. He wasn’t a handsome kid. He wasn’t an athlete. But he wasn’t dumb, either, and he knew where he stood. On the outside. Which only fueled his anger and alienation, in my view.

He was a fan of Malcolm X and of all things African-American. His heritage was, as I recall, Anglo and Latino, but he clearly identified with black America. Which isn’t unheard of, among kids who outwardly appear to be Anglo, but certainly wasn’t common in schools that are not majority black — and Fontana High School certainly was not.

Adam had some interesting views. He often told us he used “only 10 percent” of his brain. That is, he was much smarter than his OK-but-nothing-special work would indicate. African-Americans, he said, not only weren’t intellectually inferior to whites, they were superior because selective breeding by slave masters and the pitiless nature of slavery had produced an especially hardy, resourceful and intelligent race.

He would get angry if the newspaper did a story about the death of an athlete or cheerleader, or any high school student who appeared to “excel”, arguing that their deaths were no greater loss to humanity than those of otherwise unremarkable students. (As it turns out, one of his co-workers, at the time, was a former Fohi cheerleader whom Adam invariably referred to by the nickname “Clueless.”)

Now, he didn’t walk in glowering, every day. He could be perfectly polite.

But he loved to argue. It gave him a chance to sharpen his views, and the idea of some sort of “manifesto” (verbal or otherwise) seemed important to him.

His contentiousness also served as an outlet. He was maybe 17, 18, in a room where nearly everyone else was 10 years or more his senior. And until one of them asked him to please, shut the hell up or (more likely) to kindly answer the phone … he could tell us about the enormous potential of his intellect, etc., and talk about music with veteran staffer Mike Davis … and the old folks would just smile and shake their heads.

Then came The Riots.

Rodney King was a career screw-up and petty criminal who led L.A. Police Department officers on a high-speed chase in 1991. When they finally caught up to him, on foot, four of them severely beat King with their night sticks as other officers stood by, doing nothing.

The episode was caught on videotape. Four officers went to trial.

On April 29, 1992, a jury in Simi Valley found three of the LAPD members innocent and couldn’t decide on the guilt of a fourth. Despite the seemingly damning videotape.

Many members of the African-American community were enraged. Some took to the streets. The flash point for what turned into four days of riots that led to 55 deaths and an estimated $1 billion in property damage was the televised beating of white truck driver Reginald Denny, pulled from the cab of his big-rig in the intersection of Florence and Normandie. Denny nearly was killed.

Events quickly spiraled out of control, and for the next 24-plus hours the authorities seemed helpless before the marauding mobs. Or revolutionaries, in Adam Harper’s world.

It was about 7 p.m. on the first day. We had the one sports department TV on … perhaps intending to watch a ballgame but drawn to the big breaking news story.

Adam Harper’s work station was right below the television. I could see and hear him become more agitated as the hours wore on. He was muttering “fuck the cops! Fuck ’em!”

It clearly was going to be a weird night. The news side was going to need late deadlines, sports would have to get out of the way, around deadline, and we probably wouldn’t have time to compile a complete agate package.

Plus, I did not want to listen to Adam Harper raving at the cops all night. I just didn’t. So in what fairly easily was the most irresponsible decision of my management career, I said to him, “Adam, would you like to leave?” Knowing full well he would get in his car and drive the 60-plus miles to wherever the rioting was going on.

He said yes, he would like to leave, and bolted from the office.

As the night went on, others in sports made a sort of dark joke of it. “Anybody seen Adam yet? Is that him carrying a TV from that store?”

We never actually saw him, of course. The “uprising”, as participants preferred to call it, was huge, involving tens of thousands of people, eventually sucking in those who seemed more interested in looting than in making any sort of political statement.

By the time Adam came back to work, maybe two days later, he proudly told us he had joined the rioting, yes, and had thrown a rock (or was it a brick?) through the window of a Bank of America branch in downtown L.A. He didn’t admit to any looting. For him, at least, it was about politics and oppression and he had, at least, attacked a big, obvious symbol of The Ruling Class. The B of A office.

Adam stuck around another year or so. He may have taken some classes at Chaffey College. My recollection is that he went to work for some shady financial institution that was involved in, essentially, a Ponzi scheme, if I understood his description of it.

Later, he worked as a delivery man for a company and was seriously injured when the truck he was driving suffered a mechanical breakdown — at speed, on the freeway. He suffered serious head injuries, he said. There was a settlement, I believe.

From time to time, thereafter, Adam would call up and ask for me. Just to talk. And we would. He would ask if anyone he knew still worked there, and would ask me to say hello to them. He would give me an update on his life. He had a child or three. I’m not sure if he ever was married. We talked about the Dodgers.

The last time he called, earlier this year, he told me was devoting most of his time and energy to a website he had created through “myspace” — HiphopPhilosophy.com … on which he claims to have created “the world’s first 24/7 hip-hop radio station/format.”

If you can muddle through the text (and how much is The Sun responsible for his writing?), Adam seems mostly interested in excoriating those whose music doesn’t meet his “hard-core modern-day funk/soul/hip-hop” standards. And promoting/praising those who do.

He also claims to be a “DJ, artist, producer, clothing-designer, radio-station owner/founder/program director and promoter. I am also the undisputed mixed-tape king of the continent.”

When describing his bona fides, Adam tell us that … “The hip-hop that came from my spirit provided me with the direction I needed to get me through, and broke me from the mental, physical, financial and spiritual slavery that came from normal brain-washing that was robbing me of my potential happiness, mentally and physically.”

Ohh-kay (version 2.0).

One thing I must give Adam Harper: He was a kid who early on wanted to develop a world-view. He wasn’t interested in this or that individual fact. For him, everything needed to fit into an over-arching theme. That made him unusual for kids of his generation. He was thinking Big Thoughts … or sure as hell was trying to. I admired him for that. Even if I hoped that someday he would turn his curiosity toward areas that I considered beneficial to society.

And I can’t say I ever disliked him. He was a nutty kid just trying to figure out his place in the world.

Perhaps that is what at times amused me and interested me. I disagreed with nearly everything he said, but that he believed it all so fervently … fascinated me. (When it didn’t alarm me.) It was as if he had become one of those maximum-security prison philosophes … with ideas both interesting and half-baked.

Before our last conversation ended, he wanted to broach a topic with me. He is concerned, deeply, he said, about “jet contrails.”

Yes, jet contrails. You know, when you look up in the sky and see those exhaust plumes left behind by, in particular, military jets. Adam is concerned at how long those contrails seem to linger, in the air. And then he wonders what sort of environmental damage they might do. The government doesn’t care about the people, of course.

He meant it as a compliment when he told me that he thought I was “someone who could check this out, get to the bottom of it,” because of my career in journalism. He thought there might be a big story there.

A month later, I was out of the business. Someone else is going to have to check out jet contrails.

Meanwhile, Adam Harper is out doing his thing. At least it appears to be non-violent. I mean, aside from that brick through the window of the Bank of America.