ALBUM ART & THE MUSIC SCENE CALIFORNIA -1969-

John Foran

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. ...

Denny Carlin

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 educ...

Archie Bunker’s Chair – Media Images and Social Realities of Irish America in the Chaos Sixties and Seventies

By Tony Bucher The genesis of this talk was a story published in Salon online magazine on St. Patrick’s Day 2014 by Executive Editor Andrew O’Hehir entitled “How did my fellow Irish-Americans get so disgusting?” O’Hehir presents the image of braying, asinine reactionary media figures like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and their ilk, joined with plastic Paddy bars, schlocky New Age Celtic mysticism, and an intrinsically racist past as the main features of a faded and degenerate Irish American identity. Here’s O’Hehir’s money quote: “ Irishness is a nonspecific global brand of pseudo-old pubs, watered-down Guinness, “Celtic” tattoos and vague New Age spirituality, designed to make white people feel faintly cool without doing any of the hard work of actually learning anything. On the other, it’s Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Pat Buchanan and Rep. Peter King, Long Island’s longtime Republican congressman (and IRA supporter), consistently representing the most ...

San Francisco Irish

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