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THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CONN HALLINAN, 1942–2024  
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Charles Idelson
June 26, 2024
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_ Son of legendary San Franciscans left luminaries, Vincent and
Vivian Hallinan, Conn, popularly known to multitude of friends as
“Ringo,” carved his own reputation as an activist, journalist,
prolific columnist on world affairs, educator, and novelist _

Conn “Ringo” Hallinan,

 

One of the warmest lights from San Francisco’s most storied left
family, Conn Malachi Hallinan, died June 19, at his home in Berkeley
after a long fight with cancer. He was 81.

A son of legendary San Franciscans left luminaries, Vincent and Vivian
Hallinan, Conn, popularly known to his multitude of friends as
“Ringo,” carved his own reputation as an activist, journalist,
prolific columnist on world affairs, educator, and in later life a
novelist.

After earning a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California,
Berkeley, Conn, or Ringo as we’ll call him here, commenced a
brilliant 40-year journalism career, including churning out hundreds
of columns over five decades for Foreign Policy in Focus, which were
often reprinted in multiple main-stream as well as left leaning
publications, and internationally in Europe, India, and Australia. He
spent 23 years overseeing the University of California Santa Cruz
(UCSC) journalism program where he mentored several generations of
journalism students and won three UCSC awards for Distinguished
Teaching, Innovations in Teaching, and Excellence in Teaching, and
acted as Provost of Kresge College at UCSC from 2001–2004.

Conn’s political moorings were doubtless a Hallinan inheritance.
A grandfather, Patrick
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reputedly a member of The Invincibles, an Irish revolutionary
organization. After fleeing to San Francisco, he became a leader of
a 1901waterfront strike
[[link removed]]. Patrick’s
son, Vincent, who grew up poor in a house demolished by the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake, was a successful amateur boxer and crusading
defense attorney, taking on “unpopular” causes
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prominent defendants.

 
Vincent Hallinan, left, with Harry Bridges, SF Memory photo
The most notable was working class giant Harry Bridges, leader of the
1934 San Francisco general strike and president of the International
Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union, whom he defended against the
U.S. government’s push to deport Bridges for his left politics.
Vincent also ran for President in 1952 as the candidate of the
Progressive Party.

Matriarch Vivian Moore Hallinan, who chronicled family lore in _My
Wild Irish Rogues_
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was also a social and political activist. As the _Los Angeles
Times_ later noted
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she “marched against the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, went to jail for
supporting civil rights, (and) was targeted by the FBI and was gassed
during an anti-Pinochet rally in Chile.” Through canny investments
in San Francisco apartment houses_, _Vivian provided critical
financial solidarity support to groups resisting President Reagan’s
interventionist proxy wars in Central America, especially Nicaragua.

After Vivian and Vincent moved from San Francisco to Marin County, she
witnessed the sharp contrast between low-income Marin City and posh
Ross, where they now lived. Vivian would tell artist Pele de Lappe,
later Ringo’s colleague at the _People’s World_ newspaper, “it
seemed to me that the leaders of our country, instead of spending
their energies cursing those with different systems and shaking their
fists at them, would do better to reform the social and political
injustices at home.”

They raised six sons, all of whom would carry on their political
upbringing. Regularly confronted by neighbors where, Vivian observed,
“even a reactionary Democrat was considered a ‘Red’,” they
fought back. Vincent hired former welterweight champion Tony
“Frisco” Curro to teach them boxing skills, even, son Matthew
relates, building a gym with a boxing ring after oldest son Patrick
was attacked by soldiers who broke his arm during the Korean war at
the height of the Red scare.

The Hallinan boys gained not only pugilist training but also
fisticuffs nicknames, in age order: Patrick (Butch), who became a high
profile criminal defense attorney; Terence (Kayo), a San Francisco
Supervisor and District Attorney (ultimately losing to Kamala Harris
in her inaugural political campaign); Michael (Tuffy); Matthew
(Dynamite), a lifelong political activist who ultimately ran the
family business; Conn (Ringo, after briefly being called Flash), and
Danny (Dangerous, but a nickname he was never called). Only Matthew
and Danny survive.

 
Ringo’s family with, from left, David, Antonio, Sean, Anne, and
Brian
Their Ross home was a political magnet for other left and progressive
icons. Danny remembers legendary Black scholar/historian W.E.B. DuBois
living in their Ross home for a month in 1959. Vivian was close to
the DuBois family
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especially his wife, Shirley Graham, often vacationing with them in
Barbados. Years later, Vincent and Vivian hauled all six sons to
Washington for the March for Jobs and Freedom led by Dr. Martin Luther
King in August 1963, after which Ringo and Danny accompanied Vivian to
DuBois’ funeral in Accra, Ghana. where he had lived his last few
years in exile.

Political activism was never far away. At 17, while a senior at
Redwood High School in Larkspur, Ringo inspired 200 fellow seniors to
stage a two-hour car procession around Marin County to protest the
execution at nearby San Quentin prison of Caryl Chessman in May 1960.
Ringo climbed on top of his car and urged fellow seniors to act.

After graduation, Ringo, and Terence spent 10 months in London. In
April 1961, then joined by brother Danny, the three Hallinans took
part in one of the famous Aldermaston ban the bomb Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament actions
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“We marched around the nuclear plant at Aldermaston, and then with
thousands for 52-miles over 4-days to London. It was very comradely,
thousands of people marching and singing peace songs,” Danny
recalls.

That fall, Ringo enrolled at San Francisco State University, playing
football for the Gators as an offensive lineman, building on his love
of the sport he had played in high school on a team that won the
Northern California championship. With most of his brothers, he was
soon engaged in protests and civil disobedience in a burgeoning San
Francisco and Bay Area left and student uprising, inspired by the
Civil Rights Movement. The Berkeley campus, Ringo later noted
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already a center of political activity. Berkeley’s progressive
student organization, SLATE, helped chase the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) out of San Francisco in 1960, and Cal
students had joined demonstrations challenging the racist hiring
practices of San Francisco’s hotels and car agencies.”

“I first met Ringo around 1963 as the DuBois Clubs were beginning to
grow,” relates his lifelong friend, writer and organizer Michael
Myerson (now living in Brooklyn). “We — the DuBois Clubs and the
Ad Hoc Committee Against Discrimination — were conducting
non-violent action campaigns against large employers who would not
hire (or place in anything but menial positions) Black workers. We
started with the Mel’s Drive-In restaurant chain in Berkeley,
Oakland and San Francisco; then moved on to the San Francisco hotel
industry and the automobile sales industry.” Ringo led the DuBois
San Francisco State chapter. Most of his family was also soon
involved.

“We were all watching what was happening in the South, and wondering
what can we do,” recalls Matthew. “We got the word from a Black
employee at Mel’s Drive-In that Black employees were only allowed to
wait tables and were not hired in almost all of them. We decided
let’s integrate Mel’s Drive In,” using the sit-in campaigns in
the South as a model.

By March 1964, Vivian and the five older sons had lots of company as
mammoth crowds challenged the hiring bans, at the swanky
Sheraton-Palace Hotel and a Cadillac dealership on the city’s Van
Ness Avenue auto row, shaming San Francisco’s liberal image. “The
Cadillac agency sold lots of Cadillacs to black people, but there were
no black car salesmen,” Terence told the _San Francisco Chronicle_
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years later. “Thousands of us were arrested, including most of the
Hallinan brothers. After one of the arrests, I shared a jail cell with
Tuffy,” notes Myerson. “Did it make a difference? Sure, it did. It
made a huge difference,” Terence told the _Chronicle_, noting he
was arrested with three of his brothers, including Ringo, and Vivian
too. He got 60 days in jail, Vivian got 30 days. “This,” she said
dryly at the time, said Terence, “is not a Caribbean holiday.”

Future California Assembly member/Los Angeles Council member Jackie
Goldberg recalled in the film “Berkeley in the Sixties”
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demonstrations, especially mass Sheraton arrests, produced the first
major civil rights victory of its kind in the North between the hotel
industry and Ad Hoc Committee “to end discrimination and hire
minority individuals at all levels of employment, including
management. It really pumped us all up to think, my god, we really
could have an effect on history.” Other San Francisco businesses
secretly decided to end their segregation policies too, Matthew notes.

The involvement of Berkeley students produced a backlash by the
administration, banning student tables and other political activism.
It led directly to the eruption of Berkeley’s historic Free Speech
Movement in the fall of 1964, also inspired by the Mississippi Freedom
Summer in 1964 where several Berkeley students who led the Free Speech
Movement had just returned. As the battle raged in late November,
Ringo, who had transferred to Berkeley that fall, was among 800 fellow
arrestees at UC Berkeley’s Sproul Hall in December 1964
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along with brothers, Matthew Patrick, and prominent free speech
leaders Mario Savio, Bettina Aptheker, Jackie Goldberg, and Jack
Weinberg.

By 1965, the East Bay was a hotbed of protests against the U.S. war in
Vietnam. “When I first met him, he was just becoming chairman of the
Berkeley DuBois Club,” recalls Ringo’s longtime friend Jack Radey.
Ringo was also a leader of the Vietnam Day Committee
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in the Spring of 1965 led anti-war teach-ins on campus. That fall the
fight escalated. The Vietnam Day Committee organized actions to try to
stop “troop trains” carrying soldiers off to the war and led
marches to the Oakland Induction Center in West Oakland seeking to
discourage inductees.

After a night march in mid-October 1965 was turned back due to heavy
police presence and the threat of police violence, thousands of
marchers joined a mass mobilization the next day. Ringo, Radey, and
Jack Kurzweil, another longtime friend, were part of march security.
When they reached the Oakland city line, they were confronted by a
massive row of Oakland police standing shoulder to shoulder, Kurzweil
recalls. Beyond them stood a group of Hells Angels, an often-violent
motorcycle gang. The Oakland police suddenly opened their ranks to
allow the Hells Angels to rush through to attack the student marchers.

Radey says he and Ringo, a security captain, were at the front, with
most of the marchers well behind. He says Ringo directed him to cover
an area that “I only realized later he was putting me out of
harm’s way.” The Hells Angels attacked, as shown in the
film _Berkeley in the _’60s, 
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leader, Sonny Barger. “Ringo, scowling, wearing a wooden-toggled
wool coat, crew cut and freckled with dark rimmed glasses, looking
very collegiate. Sonny must have thought so too. Bad mistake. Ringo
(well trained) dropped him like a bad habit.”

Some more sedate years followed. Ringo worked on his graduate studies,
parented the first of his four sons, and helped, as chapter vice
president, form the first UC Berkeley union of graduate teaching
assistants, a chapter of the American Federation of Teachers. Though
it did not have official UC recognition, “it won a grievance
procedure, to everyone’s surprise,” and engaged in other actions,
Radey remembers.

Ringo met Carl Bloice in 1961 and they were friends until Carl’s
death in 2014. Carl had been one of the DuBois Clubs founders, a
veteran of the Vietnam protests, and one of the first Northern
reporters to go into the deep South to chronicle the Civil Rights
Movement, an especially perilous role for a Black journalist like
Bloice. By the early 1970s, Bloice was editor of the
weekly _People’s World, _a West Coast Communist Party-affiliated
publication, which had originated as a leading voice of the San
Francisco waterfront battles of the 1930s.

Bloice hired Ringo first to write about class struggles and sports, he
told Patrick Knowles in a 2004 _City of the Hill_, UCSC’s student
paper, profile. “Soon he was doing all kinds of reporting. His
thoroughness stood out and he never took things lightly, which was
invaluable. But I think the main thing was that he was always thinking
— he was one step ahead… Out of all the things I value in this
life, it is people who are willing to ask the question ‘why’ and
try to answer it. That is the way Conn has always approached work.”
As Bloice left to cover the spiraling Watergate scandal, Ringo became
the PW’s managing editor.

 
The People’s World staff, 1980s, Pele de Lappe, Mark Allen, and
Carl Bloice, from left, back row, William “Billy” Allan, fourth
from right, Ringo second from right
The _PW_ had a remarkable crew. In addition to Bloice and Hallinan,
there was William Allan, veteran labor reporter who had been one of
the few reporters inside the auto workers GM sit-down strike of the
1930s, and the aforementioned Pele de Lappe, a talented social
realist, print and paint artist, and friend of the Mexican titans
Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera.

“He welcomed me, a very young and very headstrong activist, with
open arms,” recalls Mark Allen, who also joined the PW around this
time becoming one of its most facile, multi-faceted writers. “He was
crucial to the functioning of the very best collective I was fortunate
enough to be a part of. We worked together for 13 years and were
friends and comrades ever since. Anyone who knew Ringo knew he was a
talker, a talker about a lot of things. He had boundless curiosity,
and a broad knowledge he wasn’t bashful about sharing, particularly
after a glass of wine or a couple of pints of Guinness.”

“Ringo worked hard at understanding the world and provided
thoughtful insight on the questions of war and peace,” Allen
continues. “And of course, any discussion of British imperialism and
its “unique” colonial experiment with Ireland could always get him
to raise his voice and rise out of his seat. But even more uniquely,
Ringo always listened, and he had a way of always making you feel
heard. And that more than his encyclopedic knowledge made him the
great teacher he was, both in and out of the halls of academia.”

“Til this day,” Bloice said in 2004, “when I am having trouble
finding out what is going on in this world, I will call him up because
I can be reasonably sure he knows what he is talking about.”

At the _PW_, Ringo became a go-to expert on all things military, from
hardware and conflicts to excess spending, budget boondoggles and the
human cost of war. Radey, himself an even more focused analyst on
military matters, consulted regularly with Ringo on militarism topics
and praised his knowledge and study. “He knew and read a great
deal,” Radey says.

Ringo’s knowledge was especially expansive on his Irish heritage and
its tortured legacy, global politics and world history. He was as
comfortable writing about ancient Rome as he was about Soviet/Russian
and Chinese policy, the wars of India and Pakistan, and unpacking the
complex and painful lurches and turmoil in Israel, Palestine and the
entire Middle East, all of which would become even more evident in his
later column writings.

In 1979, Myerson became executive director of the U.S. Peace Council,
an affiliate of the World Peace Council based in Helsinki, which
worked to promote disarmament and global de-escalation of tensions and
war. “I called on Ringo to write different pieces on the U.S.-Soviet
nuclear arms race.” In 1985, “we were invited to send a couple of
delegates to Khabarovsk in the Soviet Far East to ceremonies
commemorating the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War
and the victory over fascism. (Khabarovsk also included one of the
USSR’s Jewish autonomous regions.) Who better to send than the
distinguished Conn Hallinan, PhD, who knew more about not only the Red
Army’s role in defeating the Third Reich, but also about Pershing
missiles, ICBMs and the galaxy of contemporary US weapons of mass
destruction.”

In 1982, Ringo began a new chapter in his life when he was hired to
run the journalism program at UCSC and serve as “an inspiration to
thousands of students., as his former student Patrick Knowles wrote in
the 2004 _City on a Hill_ profile upon Ringo’s retirement from UC
Santa Cruz.

“Ringo’s pedagogy was infused with his politics,” relates Roz
Spafford, former chair of the UCSC Writing Program. “He honored each
student’s voice in the classroom and used his power as a faculty
member and as a journalist to open doors for students who might not
even know those doors were there. He also helped his students flourish
by believing in them — not with generalized support or pep talks but
with a very particular understanding of each student’s promise.
Decades after they took his courses, he was still teaching them.”

In 2018, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press reporter and
author Martha Mendoza reflected on
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guidance, what she called a “life-changing moment” in her career.
“My pivot moment came when I landed in Conn Hallinan’s journalism
class. He was lively and engaging, and as angry as I was about the
wrongs of the world. For the first time, I saw work I could do that
had real meaning. Conn told me 30 years ago that I had enormous
potential as a professional journalist. No one had ever said anything
like that to me. I believed him, and still work to live up to his
belief in me.”

“He was a remarkable teacher who inspired us to not just report and
write about campus affairs and happenings, but also state, national
and international stories that impacted us and our communities,”
relates Kelly Whalen, a former UCSC student. “So many of us found
ourselves, our voices and power, in his classroom and in the student
paper he advised. He taught us how to report and write, but most
importantly instilled in us that what we produced could shape our
collective future.” In a letter to Ringo for his 80th birthday,
Whalen described a special gift he gave her when she graduated, the
book _How the Irish Became White_. It was inscribed “it’s time
for you to spend a while with your roots (or tubers.)” This read,
she said “would prove to be an important one, as I deepened my sense
of identity and set out to make films that challenged the legacy of
racism.”

Another former student Ian Sherr says, “his influence is in
everything I write. Every time you read a nut graf in my stories, it
should be in his voice. He taught me to constantly consider context
and history, and to explore the endless ways they weave together. That
passion for understanding has driven me to pursue the most important
stories I’ve been fortunate enough to tell.”

After his UC retirement, Ringo devoted his knowledge and global
curiosity to producing volumes of columns for _Foreign Policy in
Focus_, [[link removed]] and his own
collection titled _Dispatches from the Edge_
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dozens of other publications. To read his voluminous writing catalog
is to marvel at his creativity with the written word, the volume of
his output, and the breath of his knowledge and expertise at such a
diverse field of global topics.

In his later years, Ringo also employed his writing skills to fiction.
“Even while he was very ill,” notes Roz Spafford, “Ringo wrote
the last two novels in his _Middle Empire’_
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of five volumes. Set in 249 AD, when the Romans occupied Spain, the
books immerse you in the history, politics and even the romances of
the time, all in Ringo’s unmistakable voice.”

Rick Ayers, University of San Francisco professor emeritus of
education, recalls meeting Ringo while teaching journalism at Berkeley
High in 1995 and learning from him. “Ringo took on all of this work
with us out of his own ethical core as a teacher and activist. He
taught me the radical possibilities of writing instruction and popular
journalism. Beyond that, he was always enthusiastically regaling me
with stories about the Roman legions (the invention of the
non-commissioned officers), the folly of American foreign policy, and
the legendary Hallinan family histories, including the longshoremen
who provided security on the way to school for Ringo and his siblings.
Yes, I’ve remembered all the stories and learned from Ringo’s
example, his constant enthusiasm, his unlimited love for Anne and the
family, and his curiosity, humor, and loyalty. I have been honored to
call him a friend and comrade.”

Radey remembers Ringo as a “fantastic cook” and “a world class
story teller with a fine collection of stories. We’ve all known
leaders at some point in our lives. A lot of them have a problem. They
look in the mirror in the morning, and go, “Wow! That’s
impressive!” They are addicted to the microphone, and the mirror.
They don’t listen, they talk. They have deep admiration, for
themselves, and thinly veiled contempt for most of the rest of the
world. This was never Ringo.”

“Of the many, many times I’ve been with Ringo over the years, I
can think of few during which I didn’t learn something new,” says
Myerson. “Want to know the best way to throw a punch? How about
picking out vegetables at the Berkeley Bowl? What Yosemite teaches us
about archeology? Ringo’s your go-to source. He can learn you about
why Robert E. Lee was not only not a great general but was in fact a
terrible one. He’ll explain how Marshall Georgy Zhukov and the Red
Army wiped out Hitler best divisions which in turn allowed the British
and U.S. D-Day invasion to be successful. Curious about what’s going
on in Turkey? Brazil? India? Long-ago arms control negotiations? Ask
him. And of course, the thousand-year struggle of the Irish against
British colonialism will require a few meals and bottles of wine.”

Matthew describes Ringo’s “generosity, and a strong moral sense of
right and wrong. You could trust Ringo to always consider your
interest in whatever relationships you had. With Ringo, I always knew
if I had a problem, he would do what he could to help me.”

 
Yosemite, 1980s, Matthew, Ringo, with their children, and a stubborn
mule
I, too, worked with Ringo at the _PW_, writing and editing copy, and
was another recipient of his political mentoring and brotherly gifts,
including invited along on a couple of hearty Yosemite backpacking
excursions, especially a memorable 30 mile, 5,000 foot hike down from
White Wolf to Pate Valley and back up to Tuolumne Meadow. I remember
cold rivers, rattlesnakes, a stubborn mule, and a night in beautiful
Glen Aulin, where he artfully found a way to position our food high in
the sky between trees where even hungry, frustrated bears who paid us
a visit in the dark could not reach. We heard them trying.

One other memory from that trip. On hiking out, we were alerted by a
family member to a report of a woman who had been injured far back
down the trail. Ringo retraced our trail back down several thousand
feet to Waterwheel Falls, hoisted her on his back, and carried her
back up the trail to 8,000-foot Tuolumne Meadow to get medical help.
As Matthew, who helped organize the trip and was also there,
remembers, “he had a powerful moral sense of helping people who
needed help. It was a guiding thing in his life, he always wanted to
do the right thing.”

Who does that? Someone who always cares about others and is willing to
put them first. Someone not steeped in “rugged individualism” and
the “you’re on your own” mentality that is so intrinsic to the
politics and plague of Trumpism today. Someone who believes in the
notion of a commons, a shared obligation to others, not just
ourselves. What I will most miss about Ringo is his humanity, his
approach to young people and colleagues, to nurture, not torture, his
empathy not disdain, encouragement not condescension, humility not
arrogance, and always promoting the collective in pursuit of social
justice for all.

Ringo is survived by his wife, Anne, sons Sean, Antonio, Brian, and
David, and four grandchildren, Tyler, Vance, Mia, and Milo.

* Conn Hallinan
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* activists
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* Journalists
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* People's World
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* Bay Area
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* Berkeley
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* San Francisco
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* W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs
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* Du Bois Clubs
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* civil rights movement
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* FPIF
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* Foreign Policy in Focus
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