Renowned town crier O’Connell dies
Known as Redmond O’Colonies, he was national champion
MARTINEZ » Michael Redmond O’Connell was known to be a gregarious man, quick to offer to buy you a beer or host a spur-of-themoment party. Or he would come to your party, quite likely in a George Washington-inspired ensemble complete with elaborate jacket, vest, knickers, buckled shoes and three-cornered hat, unfurl his scroll and start “crying,” friends recalled.
It wasn’t sad weeping, mind you, but “crying,” as in “town crier.” O’Connell, using the name Redmond O’Colonies, was a champion crier, taking relish in delivering certain specific cries, tailored to fit various occasions, everything from the opening of the new Martinez Amtrak station and the passage of a man tracing the route of the Pony Express and Bill Gates’ engagement party.
O’Connell died Monday afternoon at John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek; a hospital spokeswoman Tuesday would not provide a cause of death, citing patient confidentiality. He was 66.
Noralea Gipner, a Martinez City Councilwoman and longtime friend of O’Connell, said he had been at the Waterfront Park bocce courts Saturday and fell ill, possibly having suffered a stroke.
A native of Lancashire, England, O’Connell did a little of everything in his youth — he was a sailor, carpenter, taxi driver, stand-up comic, kitchen designer, bartender and musician. He spent a few years each in Canada and Mexico, but always came back to Martinez.
Gipner remembers meeting him. “He just walked into my (hair) salon one day, hung out, entertaining all the ladies,” she said. “He was just fun.”
Former Martinez Councilman Tim Farley, who described O’Connell as a “minimalist,” said he owned a house in Martinez, but didn’t spend much time there. Instead, he did house-sitting, and stayed with friends and strangers alike all over the world, often in exchange for performing services for them.
He sometimes slept in his white Chevy Astro van, which had black curtains and a rack on the back. As of Tuesday morning, the van was missing, Gipner said. (Anyone who knows its whereabouts is asked to call the Martinez police.)
For O’Connell, the town crier persona had its start at a 1992 rally to stop a planned hazardous waste incinerator near Interstate 680 in Martinez. He joined the rally as a “town crier” exhorting then-plant owner Rhone Poulenc to put the brakes on the project. Not long after, he approached the Martinez City Council, asking them to make him the official town crier.
“It was whimsical,” said Farley, saying all the council members already knew who O’Connell was. “He wasn’t asking for a stipend, or for anything.” In 1994, O’Connell, from the city hall steps, “cried” the news of the birth of Farley’s son Vincent.
“It was street theater,” O’Connell told the East Bay Times in 2015. And the public square, in its various modern guises, was his stage.
He was one of a small worldwide fraternity of fewer than 500, 30 to 40 of them in the United States. And he was a top crier — the top in 2001, when he won the American Guild of Town Criers national championship.
In 2015, at the Central Otago World Town Crier Tournament in New Zealand, he was judged the 11th best crier in the world.
He was asked to appear at some events, but more often chose where and when he wanted to “cry”; for several years he read the Declaration of Independence at the city’s Fourth of July celebration. He said he only had one official civic “assignment,” though — the dedication of Martinez’s downtown clock in 2003.
He did other performances, too, things along the lines of a deliberately, and comically, nightmarish temp worker hired to give his would-be boss a momentary headache.
Farley said O’Connell was a true character, in or out of character. “He enhanced Martinez’s quirky reputation, and we certainly embraced that.”