San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Farewell to a friend — and old-school S.F.
It was a chilly day on the edge of winter, but the words were warm at the funeral of Michael Hardeman the other morning.
St. Cecilia’s church at 17th Avenue and Vicente Street was packed for the occasion. No surprise, because Hardeman had a thousand friends at least, maybe a million.
He was an old-time San Franciscan, a man with a big smile, who always remembered your name and was always glad to see you. He had served the city for years, on the Human Rights Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Port Commission and the Fire Commission.
A fire engine, a hook and ladder truck, and an ambulance were parked outside the church, and half the department’s brass were inside wearing their dress blues. “A fire in the Sunset today wouldn’t have a chance,” one mourner quipped. “The firefighters are all here.”
Hardeman was a union man who believed in hard work. Things like the stock market didn’t interest him, speakers at his funeral said. He believed in physical labor. He started working as a bottler in local breweries right out of Balboa High School, then became a sign painter. He worked on billboards when they used men on big ladders to set them up and paint them. It was commercial art, the stuff of everyday life. His work lined every highway. Later his union set up big trade shows and conventions.
He also made posters and banners for political campaigns, high school sports and signs for his own family. It was like having your own personal billboard. Once, when I won an award, he made a big sign for me. I have it in my basement. A man working on my house saw it: “Wow,” he said, “You must be famous.” “No,” I said. “I just know Mike Hardeman.”
Hardeman joined the Sign and Display Local Union 510 as a young man and served as an officer in the union for 34 years. He believed unions helped working people, and he wanted unions to have a voice in the political process, so he was on he city’s boards and commissions for years and years. He was labor’s voice, and he was in for the long run. He served on the San Francisco Labor Council’s executive board for 30 years.
He loved politics, unions, sports and all things San Francisco. He was born in the city on the Fourth of July 1943, and died on Dec. 7. He was 79.
“He was an old-school gentleman in the best sense of the term, a class act,” said Joanne HayesWhite, who spoke at the funeral. She was fire chief when Hardeman was on the Fire Commission.
In a way, the funeral Mass with its prayers and rituals, a gathering of old friends on a wintry day near the end of the year, helped mark the slow passing of old-school San Francisco.
Hardeman was a political leader out of another generation, and that generation is of a certain age. Willie Brown, San Francisco’s mayor emeritus, is 89. So is Dianne Feinstein, California’s senior senator. Nancy Pelosi is 82, her term is up in two years, and younger politicians are on alert.
After the funeral, many of us went to a reception at the Irish Cultural Center out on 45th Avenue. We talked about what we had in common: affection for Mike Hardeman and San Francisco.
Afterward, I took a ride, out on the Great Highway, with the ocean on the left, the city on the right, and Mount Tamalpais up ahead. Then up Lincoln Way, past Golden Gate Park, right on Seventh Avenue and up past Laguna Honda and over the hill to where I could see the towers of the Financial District glittering in the early afternoon sun. A San Francisco kind of ride.
Those big skyscrapers meant jobs and prosperity in Hardeman’s time. Now they are mostly empty. And there are many other serious problems. San Francisco will have to reinvent itself.
I took a turn down Fourth Street, past the glass towers of Mission Bay. When Hardeman was on the Port Commission he had a hand in locating the ballpark on port land.
The ballpark was the catalyst to the development of a San Francisco neighborhood so new that it doesn’t look like San Francisco at all.
Hardeman and people like him helped shape the city. And now it’s a new city, for better or worse, in the hands of a new generation of San Franciscans.