San Francisco Irish

The Carlins of West Portal ran three blue collar saloons in  San Francisco from the late 1930s through the early 60s .   There was a Denny’s Barrel House on the Embarcadero, on Dolores in the Mission , and in the rough, untamed heart of the Fillmore.   Peak drinking hours were mid-day from 11 to 3.   That was the drinking life in the era of union labor and ports and factories.   Mr. Dennis Carlin the son, now 77 resides in the house where his Irish parents raised him and his three sisters, middle aged children and young grandchildren in the main still reside in the City.   Carlin’s father, Denny Senior, came here from a remote township in County Tyrone in 1910, and his mother came from Sligo in 1920.  “She wanted us all to be musicians” he says.  They were called “far-downs” in the SF Irish community because they did not come from Cork or Kerry.   Denny Senior and his identical twin brother did not receive any formal education growing up in Ireland, alone among all of their

Emeritus State Senator John Francis Foran grew up in the humble precincts of Saint Mary's Park neighborhood in the outer Mission District, near the antique twin spires of Saint John's Catholic Church.    These were Depression blocks with Irish house parties and Italian homemade wine, where relatives and neighbors took in children without a home when their parents were sick or had no money or disappeared to drink.   His career in government, in partnership with his wife, Mrs. Constanza Ilacqua Foran, spanned the three decades from 1963 to 1986. His life began in San Francisco before they built the bridges, in the days of the now vanished urban villages of Mission Irish, Italians, Germans, and Mexicans; he launched his career in the great mid-Century era of progressive, far-sighted California government, and was deeply involved in policies that continue to have profound influence on for the future of our own rich and vastly complicated society of the 21st century. Foran

Jazz , n ., a name given to African-American music; excitement, passion, enthusiasm Teas ( pron . j’ass, chass), n ., heat, passion, excitement, ardor, enthusiasm We lost Danny Cassidy to cancer a few weeks ago.   There were tantalizing details in his obituary.   You might not have guessed that this guy, this jazzbo ( Teasbach , a person of animal spirits, exuberance) had an Ivy League education, or that he had spent years as a professional musician, or that he had produced an Emmy-nominated documentary on the Troubles.   His cronies ( Comh-roghna,   fellow chosen-ones) came out to pay him high tribute for his life’s work teaching, writing, and organizing in the Mission District.   Jazz was perhaps his favorite word.   “Jazz!”   he enunciated like a preacher or a hustler, and you got the word, you knew it, as he riffed his way through the history and context, its derivation in the Irish language, about how it jumped around the sandlots of the Mission District of the 1910s