ALLAN BARAHAL
Ukiah man, 103, has lived an interesting life
Ukiah resident Allan Barahal, now 103, was born on Aug. 31, 1920, in Toledo, Ohio, but soon moved to Detroit where he grew up very poor, during the Depression, living above a Kroger's Grocery Store in the heart of the city, in the Jewish section of town.
He had a tough childhood. “People came begging at our door but we were so poor, we weren't able to help. At times there was not enough for us to eat and others would bring us food. When we came back to our apartment at night and turned on the lights, the floor would be covered with cockroaches.
“It was very cold in Detroit — we were close to the Canadian border — and I would go out into the snow to look for cardboard boxes, to put pieces of it in my shoes for warmth. I'd put a piece in each shoe and a dry piece in my pocket to take home. We couldn't afford to repair our shoes. I'll never forget that.”
He attended Detroit Central High; his father worked at Ford Motor Company as a truck driver and was a member of the United Auto Workers.
Growing up, he watched Diego Rivera paint the Detroit Industry Murals; worked as an usher and escorted Henry Ford to his seat; and was a ball boy collecting fly balls in a bucket from the bleachers where he saw Babe Ruth strike out three times.
He attended Wayne State University and a couple of years in graduate school at Harvard University working toward his Ph.D.
Serving as a Merchant Marine during World War II, he was on the ships that brought food and supplies to Russia and other ally countries.
“We were trying to get to Russia with supplies through the Black Sea but the Germans had blocked the Bosporus.”
So, they had to backtrack west back through the Mediterranean, then north and
all the way up and around to Russia. It was very dangerous.
“He would tell me ships would get torpedoed, that he would see bodies floating in the water,” says his daughter Rachel Barahal.
He returned to Detroit and worked as a labor organizer in the National Office of the UAW in their education department.
“I opened libraries in Union Hall.”
He married his wife, Anabel, in 1946 at a ceremony in Cadillac Square during their lunch hour and afterward went with a small group of co-workers to a hotel for a celebration. Erma Henderson, who was their witness and later became the first African American woman elected to the Detroit City Council, was denied entrance and they stormed out, leading the way, along with the National Maritime Union, in picketing the restaurant non- stop until the restaurant finally gave in. The action led to the breaking of the color line at all the hotels and restaurants in Detroit.
Intending to teach English in China, they left for San Francisco to await their departure papers. However, it was during the Chinese Revolution of 1949; Allan looked around, saw the orange trees and decided the city looked pretty good.
“San Francisco was a real working- class city at that time, strong unions and all that,” he says.
He taught at the California Labor School but was laid off due to lack of funds. He and his wife were caught in the web of McCarthyism and both were blacklisted for their social activism, his stemming from a sense of injustice, growing up poor with not enough to eat, that affected him deeply, having experienced first-hand the inequities between the very wealthy and the very poor who were without jobs, with no protection.
After some years of odd jobs, while Anabel was the main breadwinner, he joined the ILWU to become a Longshoreman and warehouseman on the San Francisco docks, working this job for the next almost-20 years.
He was not cut out for the hard, brutal life a longshoreman, but, “he unloaded merchandise manually from deep within the holds of the ships — bananas with enormous heavy stalks, scotch whiskey, circus animals and all manner of machinery, clothing and other goods,” says Rachel.
He did the manual work, out of necessity but also because, “if I was that much of a working man, I figured I had to prove to myself that I could do it.”
At some point he was asked to be a bodyguard for Paul Robeson, an internationally acclaimed African American concert artist and stage and film actor who was also blacklisted for his activism.
“He'd come out to sing in the Bay Area. It was a bad time, with McCarthy and all, and when he left the stage, some antagonists started throwing bottles at him. He barely got out alive,” he says.
“He was a great guy, but he snored really loudly.”
While working on the docks, he met a guy at a party who was working toward getting his teaching credential at UC Berkeley.
“They needed teachers. I enrolled, attended every Saturday and within a year had my teaching credential.”
It was 1961 and he was hired to teach Social Studies at San Rafael High.
“I showed up the first day and I met Jeff Tedesco, the present teacher; he was standing in the doorway of the classroom; and he said to me, `go ahead, I'm not going in, you take over.'
“Man, I was nervous and the students didn't help; they wanted to know where was Tedesco. I started taking roll and six kids stood up and walked out. I was so unsure of myself at the beginning. I never saw Tedesco again, who was supposed to be my mentor. I staggered through.”
He became a very popular and highly-respected teacher, a great one, who taught history, government, humanities and philosophy. It was during the '60s, the Vietnam War, and he listened to his students and understood their concerns.
“His first graduating class was in 1962 and he still has students who visit and contact him from that year all the way up to 1980 when he retired,” says Rachel.
The high school has a program that nominates past teachers and in 2017, he was inducted into the San Rafael High School Hall of Honor.
On their website honoring their Hall of Honor inductees, he is described as, “an educator who successfully intertwined his life experiences with that of his teaching to give students a more enriched understanding of the world they would enter as adults. His many students remember his passion for helping others and standing up for what he believed was not right in the world.”
After he retired, he and Anabel taught at alternative schools for some years until they fully retired when they took their bicycles and rode off into the world, the Pyrenees, the British Isles, France, camping in Oregon.
“They just loved it,” says Rachel.
They moved to Point Reyes for some years and headed north to Ukiah in 2001, where they stayed active hiking and biking.
In his' 90s, he was reading from the Torah during Jewish High Holiday services at Kol Ha'Emek here in town.
Anabel passed away in 2020, just before COVID, when she was 100.
Allan, still clear of mind at 103, lives in the comfortable and well- appointed home he first moved to, supported by his caring daughter Rachel and his equally caring son-in- law David Hardy.
As to the long life he has lived, he says, “Mostly, it's been a good one.”