San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Idealist a keeper of North Beach flame
Tony Ryan never wrote a verse of poetry, but he never missed hearing someone else read one in North Beach, the San Francisco neighborhood that gave life to the Beat scene.
Ryan saved his spoken words for the after-parties, where he carried on about his experiences as a Berkeley radical, People’s Park protester, Communist party member and veteran of the first Venceremos Brigade, which defied the travel embargo to cut Cuban sugarcane for Fidel Castro in 1969.
That job didn’t pay, and neither did his paying job as an online bookseller, working from his personal collection of thousands of volumes.
Nearly every night, Ryan could be found seated at the end of the bar at Specs’ Twelve Adler Museum Cafe, the famed hole-in-the-wall hangout in an alley off Columbus Avenue. If new customers came in, he would rise from his stool and give a tour of the photographs and artifacts on the wall. He’d also bus tables when it got busy.
Ryan didn’t own the place or even work there, but he did live in a room upstairs in his later years. On Dec. 21, he was found dead on his bed surrounded by books piled to the ceiling. The cause of death was heart disease, brought about by a lifetime of heavy cigarette smoking and steady drinking, said his brother Ben Ryan. He was 73.
Tony Ryan, shown attending a North Beach book reading in 2014, was an unwavering progressive activist who spent much of his time in coffeehouses, bookstores and watering holes.
“Tony’s life was very social. He lived in the coffeehouses, the bookstores and the watering holes,” his brother said. “He was an intellectual and passionate about all progressive movements. He was unwavering in his principles and was an activist all of his life. A deep, deep activist.” Though Ryan was a North Beach figure, for most of his life he couldn’t afford to live there. He moved around between cheap apartments in Berkeley and Oakland, but every day he commuted to the city by BART, having never gotten a driver’s license or owned a car. He’d walk up from Montgomery Street Station and commence what was called the Tony Triangle by Agneta Falk, widow of San Francisco poet laureate Jack Hirschman and a close friend of Ryan’s. Specs’ did not open until the late afternoon, so the triangle would start at Caffe Trieste, then move to Vesuvio Cafe.
“He walked from place to place, sometimes stopping to buy cigarettes in between,” Falk said. “I hope he went to eat somewhere, too.” She could not be sure because nobody ever saw Ryan eat along the way to the final stop on the triangle — Specs’.
After a long night of intellectual discourse fueled by vodka and soda, with rum and brandy for variety, he’d somehow make his way back to BART for the last train home. He made this commute until three years ago, when a fire destroyed the apartment house where he lived. Ryan escaped with only his passport, filled with stamps for Havana, which he visited almost annually. He lost an estimated 10,000 collectible books, pamphlets and posters dating to the 1960s.
“Everything that he lived for and worked for was gone,” said his brother, an artist and musician living in Santa Barbara. “He was devastated.”
After that loss, Ryan all but moved into Specs’, taking a 10-by-10-foot single room with access to a downstairs kitchen that he never used, despite an impressive collection of cookbooks on exotic cuisines of Latin America.
“Tony always took an interest in my life, and he was like that with everybody,” said Maralisa Simmons-Cook, who owns Specs’ with her mother, Elly Simmons.
“He wasn’t a poet, but he was one of the key players in preserving the spirit of North Beach. People come to places like Specs’ and Vesuvio to witness or absorb the art and politics and history of the city, and Tony was their tour guide.”
Anthony Bourke Ryan was born on May 25, 1948, in Phoenix. His father, Bill Ryan, was a salesman for Sears Roebuck who was transferred to Caracas, Venezuela, which had a profound impact on Tony, who was fluent in Spanish by the time the family came back to live in Fresno in
the early 1950s.
From there they moved to a ranch in Clovis, an agricultural and rodeo town where Tony was bullied in school on account of his glasses and scrawny physique. This gave him great sympathy for the underclass and the underdog, an outlook that was solidified when the family attended a Martin Luther King Jr. speech at Fresno State in 1964. “Tony had a commitment to social justice early on and bugged my mother to take him to an NAACP meeting,’’ said his other brother, Jordan Ryan, a retired official with the United Nations.
Ryan attended three high schools, including the Woodside Priory, a notoriously rigid boarding school run by Hungarian monks in Portola Valley. One day, he hitchhiked to Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park to meet noted anti-war activist Ira Sandperl, who worked there.
Ryan returned to his dorm with an armload of communist literature and started proselytizing, which was a major factor in getting him kicked out of Priory after less than a year, according to his brother Jordan. From there he was sent to live with an aunt in Cambridge, Mass., so he could attend the famed Cambridge Rindge and Latin School near Harvard Square.
By the time he graduated and got back to California to attend Sonoma State University, he was fully radicalized. He got his bachelor’s in environmental studies and added to it with a degree in library technology at City College of San Francisco. He moved to Berkeley when he took a job as a clerk at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue. He also hung around the informational card tables set up in Sproul Plaza to recruit UC Berkeley undergraduates to the radical cause.
That’s where he met Steve Wasserman, then a Berkeley teenager and now publisher of Heyday, the Berkeley independent nonprofit book publisher. Together, Ryan and Wasserman walked down Telegraph Avenue and into the People’s Park riots of the late 1960s.
“Tony was deeply political and also alive to the avant garde current of politicized poetry that was sweeping through the Bay Area, forming an archipelago of progressivism and bohemianism,” Wasserman said. “Tony almost perfectly straddled the divide between the politicos and the hippies.”
Ryan built his inventory of books by shopping among the street vendors in Berkeley and San Francisco. If he saw something he liked, he’d buy everything the vendor had. He never had a physical store, other than his apartment.
In November 1969, Ryan went to Cuba with about 200 idealistic Westerners who formed the Venceremos Brigade, traveling via Canada to circumvent the embargo.
From that first trip forward, Ryan promoted the Cuban revolution and became a leading importer of Cuban literature. After the travel ban was lifted, Ryan started bringing Cuban poets to San Francisco. He was a great champion of Nancy Morejón, whom he brought to a reading at the Emerald Tablet on Fresno Street in 2014, with a reception after at Specs’.
Ryan landed his only secure job in the late 1980s when he moved to Washington, D.C., to work at the Inter-American Development Bank, which works to reduce poverty in Latin America and the Caribbean. He lasted nearly a decade, Jordan Ryan said, before tangling with management and resigning.
“That was Tony to the very end,” Jordan said. “He was committed, intense, relentless and principled.”
But not humorless. Among the things he liked to laugh at was himself. For his 70th birthday party at Specs’, he asked his old friend Jessica Loos to roast him. He even volunteered to supply her with notes if she was lacking material. She declined his offer, having too much to work with already.
“Tony was more of a caricature of a caricature of himself than anyone I have ever met,” said Loos, who has been on the scene for more than 20 years. “He was a pain in the ass, but a memorable one.”
A memorial service is planned for Ryan’s birthday in May, to be held at Specs’. Survivors include his brothers, Jordan of Atlanta and Ben of Santa Barbara, and his sister, Sally of Atlanta.