Neil Malloch — S.F. historian preserved details of city’s past
Neil Malloch, a California historianatlarge and one of the last of a dwindling supply of San Francisco eccentrics, was found dead in an isolated canyon near Death Valley on June 21 after setting off alone in midday tripledigit heat in search of an abandoned gold mine. He was 85.
Malloch, who never learned to use a computer or a cell phone, did all of his research the old way, in libraries and by landline, mostly on behalf of the California Heritage Council, where he served as volunteer historian from 1965 until his death. If there was a proclamation to be written about an important but forgotten moment in San Francisco history, Malloch was the person who wrote it. If there was a wreath to be laid at a solemn ceremony, Malloch was the person who laid it.
“One of the things Neil loved to do was go into City Hall and get a formal proclamation from the mayor for the anniversary of historic events,” said Dianne Rowe, executive director of the California Heritage Council, which works to save historic buildings and sites. “Nothing escaped Neil and he didn’t want these events to pass by without the public knowing about them.”
Malloch was able to endure extreme temperatures. He once fell off a boat he was living on and into San Francisco Bay, where he survived for an hour and 45 minutes before he was noticed missing and pulled from the cold water.
He also spent a summer in a metal National Park Service trailer in Death Valley in an attempt to measure and record the hottest day in California history. He recorded 127 degrees, seven shy of the record.
So it was no surprise that he would set off hiking alone in the Panamint Valley at 2:30 p.m. on June 21, in spite of his age and in spite of warnings by a camping partner not to go. When he did not return, he was reported missing at the Lone Pine Sheriff ’s Substation. It took two days and an aerial search to locate his body in Thompson Canyon and to retrieve it by lowering a hoist from a helicopter.
A graduate of Stanford University, Malloch never had much of a paying career and bounced from room to room and also lived in a warehouse and on boats. But he always made sure his vast collection of documents was properly cared for. He kept multiple storage lockers, and among their contents are a 70ton topographical map of California, which included 6,000 buildings, dams and other structures. It is divided into 230 crates. Also in his possession was the regal carryingchair of General Tom Thumb, a dwarf circus performer who died in 1883.
“He was extremely frugal and was more interested in ideas than he was in consumerism,” said his half brother Tom Dreyer of Mill Valley. “I once asked him if he had a photographic memory and he downplayed it. Meanwhile, he could recite from a book he’d read 35 years ago.”
Malloch was born June 3, 1934, at the old Hoover Pavilion at Stanford University, the son of Rolph Malloch and Silvia Cowell. His grandparents built and owned 1360 Montgomery St., an Art Moderne apartment building on Telegraph Hill.
The Mallochs lived in the penthouse and, as a child, Malloch watched the filming of “Dark Passage” with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall on the property.
After graduating from Marina Middle School and George Washington High, class of 1952, Malloch entered Stanford, and once there he did not want to leave. It took him seven years to finish his degree.
“He would go off on a tangent and get lost in some historic topic,” Dreyer said. “He couldn’t stop himself from collecting articles and books.”
This pursuit only intensified after his reluctant graduation. After serving a hitch in the U.S. Navy, Malloch found work as a substitute high school teacher in San Francisco and Oakland, but his grasp of history was perhaps underappreciated in that milieu.
“His main motivation in life was the rescue and safeguarding of arcane information related to San Francisco and California,” Dreyer said. “This included maps, newspapers and outofprint books.”
In the 1960s, 1360 Montgomery was sold and Malloch received a share of the proceeds. He left on a world tour, visiting 125 countries, many of them unsafe to Americans at that point in time.
This expanded his horizon. “Ethiopia came up once and he went on a 20minute oration about Haile Selassie,” Dreyer said. “He knew all of the crucial events, both social and political, from the Middle Ages to the present.”
Malloch found like kind at the California Heritage Council. From 1965 until his death he served as a volunteer under the title historic researcher.
Under this authority, Malloch brought a team of bagpipers to Portsmouth Square to honor the 100th anniversary of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson, an event noted by Herb Caen in his San Francisco Chronicle column. He also conducted a ceremony at Lands End to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the return of the San Francisco, the decorated heavy cruiser from World War II.
“Neil was a marvelous public speaker, and people would crowd around him afterward asking him questions,” said Dr. Herbert Konkoff, a retired urologist and former president of the Heritage Council.
Perpetually disheveled, Malloch always carried under his arm a stack of old newspapers. He liked to hang around with the vets at the VA hospital at Fort Miley in the Outer Richmond, deep in a conversation about something that happened 100 years ago when dinner service would come around. Malloch never minded hospital food and would often cadge a lunch and stay on for dinner, delighting in the conversation inbetween.
During his final years, his own lodging was, appropriately, in the Stanford hotel, a rooming house for formerly homeless veterans operated by Swords to Plowshares.
“He was the Emperor Norton of our generation,” said local real estate agent and family friend Mark Ritchie.
Malloch was never married and leaves no direct descendants. A memorial service is pending. Survivors include half siblings Jonathan, Tom and Geoffrey Dreyer, all of Mill Valley, Christian Dreyer of Salinas, and Julia Brigden of Santa Rosa.