My lifelong friend Danny Hallinan died in early August and the realisation that I can no longer talk to him is something that will take me a long time to get used to. Not only have I known him since I was five years old, but we have communicated by email a lot over the years and he, his wife Wendy and their three kids have visited us in London many times.
The last time we were in California, Danny and Wendy threw a barbecue at their place in Berkeley. My wife Clare, our daughter Billie and son Harry were there as well as Danny and Wendy’s kids, Nat, Morghan, and Kate. Several grandchildren and Danny’s brother Ringo with his wife Anne, were also in attendance. It was a fabulous occasion.
On the left: Brother Ringo chats while Danny barbecues. On the right: Ringo, Anne, Kate, Wendy and granddaughter Clementine.
On the left: Morghan, Harry, Billie. Middle: Kate and daughter Clementine with Clare in the background. On the right: Danny, Ringo, Anne.
I first met Danny in 1952 at a similar party in Homestead Valley, thrown for the Myers family, literally, as we drove into Mill Valley for the first time, on the last leg of our journey across the country from the east coast. My father, Blackie Myers, a seaman by trade, had been a vice president of the once radical National Maritime Union. He was an early target of the federal government in the red scare and was now seriously blacklisted. The reason we came west was the possibility of work on the San Francisco waterfront. The longshore union, the ILWU, was headed by Blackie’s trade union colleague Harry Bridges.
We were deep into the McCarthy era and all of the people at this party in Homestead Valley were considered dangerous radicals by the government. Harry Bridges, Lou Goldblatt, Bob Robertson, whose house we were at, Babbie and Barney Dreyfus, Tommy and Gracie Cox and the Hallinan family. All these people had their kids with them and the Hallinans were no exception.
Vincent Hallinan was a famous criminal lawyer who had only recently served a 6 month sentence in federal prison for contempt of court, having defended Harry Bridges in his deportation trial and he was running for President on the Progressive Party ticket.
On the left is Vin with Harry Bridges in court at his trial in 1949.
The Hallinans were wealthy and lived a lifestyle that most people dream about. Because of radical political associations, their snooty neighbours in Ross wouldn’t let their kids play with Danny and, that’s the reason my brother and I spent so many weekends sleeping over at their mansion because Danny and Jimmy were the same age. It was fun and scary in equal measure. All Danny’s brothers, who were so much older than him, were serious, tough guys and being out and about in their company was always something that made me nervous. Danger was always a possibility with the Hallinan boys.
Vin was, in Ringo’s words: a jock. He had been a college football star player and he looked after himself. He never smoked or drank alcohol and taught the boys to swim, box and play football. There were six sons and he gave each a nickname as they came along. The eldest, Patrick was Butch. Terence was Kayo. Michael was Tuffy and Matthew was Dynamite. He gave Conn the nickname Flash but that didn’t stick. “I felt more like the Pillsbury Dough Boy than Flash,” said Ringo. So seeing John Wayne in John Ford’s Stagecoach as the Ringo Kid, he settled on Ringo as his monicker. Vin also named Danny Dangerous but that didn’t stick either.
Vivian’s book My Wild Irish Rogues. Note Ringo and Danny in the clover leaf on the right both named as Flash and Dangerous.
A 1952 photo of Vin, Vivian and Danny at the Ross polling station and on the right how it appeared on the front page of the Independent Journal. In the caption Danny is named as Dangerous.
Over lunch one day, Ringo told me how he and his brothers could erupt into violent fights over nothing and were never inhibited by wherever they happened to be. Dynamite recalls a trip to the zoo with their mother Vivian under the strict condition that they promise not to fight: “We made it all the way until we pulled up in front of the house and then Butch, Kayo and Tuffy went at it. Mom ran into the house yelling for Vin to come out and stop the battle. I think that was the last time she was willing to take all of us anywhere without Vin to keep the peace.”
We Myers kids went with Vivian and the boys to Fleischacker Zoo one day and on the way home, as we were climbing the hill towards the toll booths on the Golden Gate Bridge, a fight broke out between Ringo in the front seat and Tuffy in the back seat. The fight immediately interfered with Vivian’s ability to control the car. “Stop it!” She screamed. “You’re going to kill us all!” The car began rolling backwards down the hill and I remember thinking, that we were going to die. We didn’t but only just. Both of the combatants were totally oblivious to the dangerous situation their fight caused. The Hallinan boys played rough. I remember a pillow fight with Danny where, again, I thought I would die if he didn’t remove the pillow from my face. I was panicked and thrashing about wildly. He did remove it, but only just.
In addition to being star athletes, with the exception of Danny, all the boys were academically excellent students. Danny, like his brothers was a strong swimmer and a good student but team sports held no interest for him.
On the left a family photo of the Hallinans from the early 1960s and on the right, the brothers gather at Ringo and Anne’s wedding. L to R: Dynamite, Butch, Kayo, Danny, Ringo
One of the many benefits of being a Hallinan was world travel. I didn’t leave the United States until I was eighteen but Danny was a seasoned globe trotter throughout his childhood and would regale Jimmy and I with tales of his adventures in far away places. Being interrogated at gunpoint by Polish police on a train journey with Kayo, shaking hands with Che Guevara in Cuba or even just describing a cup of coffee in a London Soho cafe, Danny could tell a story with panache.
Danny with his kids at various fabulous locations.
From left: Danny very young, Danny with mother Vivian, and again with Vivian somewhere exotic.
Left: Danny and Ringo with a picture of Lenin, Danny at the Taj Mahal and Danny and Wendy with granddaughter Clementine in Umbertide, Italy.
In the early 1960s Vin and Vivian took all the boys to the Soviet Union and Danny brought back a gramophone record which he played for us. It was called Moscow Nights and had a haunting melody. In March of 1961 a disc playing the same tune, but re-titled as: Midnight in Moscow came into the American charts at number 2 in the hit parade. It was by British trumpeter Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen.
Because Vivian was very well connected with people in the movie business, Danny would reel off all the Hollywood gossip whenever Jim and I visited. Who was gay (he told us about Rock Hudson), who was right wing, who was left wing, who was liberal.
On one of our weekend visits during the summer of 1955, Ringo took Danny, Jimmy and I to see This Island Earth at the Rafael. Vivian drove us to San Rafael in early evening and we would walk back to Ross after the film. Unlike many of the Sci-Fi/Horror films of the 1950s, This Island Earth was in full colour and the special effects were amazing. Having studied the newspaper ads in the Chronicle I was thrilled to see the Metalunan Mutant but was slightly disappointed that there was only one unlike the several that decorated the poster outside the theatre. My brother Jim liked it but didn’t share the passion for these movies that Danny, Ringo and I did. Both these Hallinans would give me graphic descriptions of movies they had seen such as: The Thing, Them! or The Day The Earth Stood Still. I had never seen any of these movies and hung on their descriptions like someone listening to a suspenseful radio programme.
Ringo took Danny to many of these films and then he, in turn, would tell me about them. His descriptions of Ray Harryhausen’s The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms lived in my soul throughout my childhood, adolescence and teenage years. I didn’t actually see it until I was 22 years old and when I did, I found that Danny’s descriptions had been totally accurate. He also described in great detail another Harryhausen epic: It Came From Beneath The Sea about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. Years later he told me how strange it was, for a young boy, to ride home across the very Golden Gate Bridge he’d seen destroyed in the movie.
The thrill of being frightened in the darkness of a cinema entranced the three of us, but the reality of the political climate we were growing up in was much more frightening than a scary movie. Had Vin Hallinan played safe and refused to defend Harry Bridges in court, then the federal government might not have come after him. But come after him they did. After he served his six month sentence for contempt of court, the FBI turned over their findings to the government and both Vin and Vivian were indicted for income tax evasion. I remember my mother Beth saying: “If they can’t get you on anything else, they can always get you on income tax.” In the end, Vivian was found not guilty but Vin got a guilty verdict and served the best part of an eighteen month stretch in federal prison.
So this was the backdrop to our collective childhood. The Myers family didn’t live anything like the Hallinan family but we were in the same boat politically.
And Danny took tremendous pride in being a Hallinan. As one of our weekends in Ross was drawing to a close, he would sit Jimmy and I down on a sofa and take us through the scrapbook which contained newspaper clippings involving the Hallinan family. Most were about Vin and famous legal cases but many involved Butch and Kayo who had earned a fearsome reputation in Marin County with their fists. Whatever the clipping was about, Danny would go into great detail, proudly telling us about what really happened.
That sense of pride didn’t make it into his adult years. I met Danny again as a grown up, having been living in London for many years, and he was different. For starters he was critical of his father Vin, which he had never been as a youngster. He was married to Wendy and he was a father. He had a humility about himself which hadn’t been present in his childhood. And he was funny. Danny was a wonderful story teller.
Sometime in the mid-1960s, a bunch of us went to the Palace Theatre in North Beach to see a double bill of A Hard Day’s Night and Gerry Marsden in Ferry Cross The Mersey. There was a scene in the Mersey film which featured a silent movie Keystone Cops chase and as a load of policemen ran left to right across the screen, one officer stopped and faced front. A silent movie dialogue card appeared which read: “Look! A camera. It’s my big chance!” The fellow then began tap dancing on the spot. I only remember this because Danny howled with laughter and couldn’t stop laughing about it.
After high school, life’s adventures took me away to sea and when I returned to the bay area the hippie era had begun. Danny’s older brother Tuffy was, after being stabbed in San Francisco, a victim of mental health problems. My own mental problems coincided with Tuffy’s as I went off the rails on a psychedelic substance in the summer of 1967 and wound up in a psychiatric hospital and when I came down I suffered a nervous breakdown.
I eventually moved to London and didn’t return for a visit until 1979 when I met Danny again. He and Wendy had run a very successful seafood restaurant in the city called Squids and the fact that he was a Hallinan only came up occasionally. He’d also been a teacher.
I met Danny again in 1995 at a memorial for the late Babbie Dreyfus in Mill Valley. He was there with Ringo, Dynamite and Vivian. They were all very friendly and I visited with Danny in Berkeley. He was running a travel agency from his garage for people with children. Eventually he and Wendy visited us in London and we got to know Nat, Morghan and Kate. One thing I became aware of was just what an impact Wendy had on him. When we were kids, of the six Hallinan boys, three had loud voices and three were softly spoken. Danny was one of the loud ones. My wife Clare and I were dining with Wendy and Danny in London during the time of the IRA bombings and Danny was talking with considerable volume about that subject when she gently touched his arm. He whispered: “Was I talking too loud?” Such a thought would never have occurred to him when we were kids.
In writing these columns about our childhood in Marin County, I had come to rely on Danny as a source of information about our shared experiences. He had the ability to access learned information whenever he needed it and his command of language coupled with his ever expanding knowledge of the world made him a gifted writer like his brother Ringo.
When my daughter Billie learned of Danny’s death, she described him as a great big personality and it is true that Danny’s perspective was huge, taking in the world politically, culturally and philosophically. His intellect was so diverse and his interests ever expanding for he was constantly learning new things. For all his criticisms of Vin, his father gave him and all his brothers a hunger for education.
I could carry on writing this piece forever but feel I have to wrap it up. There is so much to say about Danny and I know I’ll return to him many times in the future. A long list of adventures we had as kids. Happily he leaves behind a loving and growing family.
Danny and Wendy’s big family. Back row from left: Kate’s husband Lamonte, Kate, Morghan’s husband Parvis, Morghan, Danny, Wendy (holding granddaughter Kiana), granddaughter Maeve, Nat’s wife Maureen. Front row: granddaughters Delilah and Clementine-grandson Desmond on Nat’s knee.
So you haven’t heard the last of Danny Hallinan.
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