On September 11, 2001, just after we woke to news of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, I was driving to a meeting on the UCSC campus and passed Conn Hallinan driving in the other direction. We stopped to talk for a moment. “It was bin Laden and Al-Qaeda,” Conn told me. “No one else could engineer this.”
It took the CIA until that evening before they informed then President Bush that it was indeed Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden who were behind 9/11. To most of us, sheltered from our world, this was fresh and shocking news. To Conn, it was keeping up with the news so he could be the great journalist and pundit he was.
Conn started teaching at UCSC in 1982. Roz Spafford and I hired him to take over—to be—the Journalism minor in the Writing Program. Conn taught most of the courses, consulted with City on the Hill, and offered advice and suggestions to many other student journals. He taught here for 22 years, until his retirement in June, 2004. The minor disappeared—the victim of budget cuts and (to my mind) misguided administrative decisions. But along the way Conn trained his successor, Susan Watrous, to take over his City on the Hill advising. To this day Susan’s clearheaded mentorship continues, apparent in the newspaper’s high standards and her ongoing efforts to teach students how to uncover the stories behind the stories, the profits behind the pieties, the motives that make events.
Conn—Ringo to friends—was born November 17, 1942. He was one of the Hallinan boys: his mother an activist, his father a famous/infamous attorney who defended working class and union organizers from the 1930s through the worst of McCarthyism. The six Hallinan boys continued the family’s leftist tradition: one became a criminal defense attorney, another a San Francisco Supervisor and District Attorney. Ringo talked about how his father made him jump into a frigid Merced River in April and how he swam across Birch Lake in the Sierra when he was months shy of four. He said he learned to box to defend himself when he and his brothers were bullied for the family’s politics; he never stopped fighting for and standing proudly alongside working men and women. The nickname Ringo came not from the Beatles’ drummer but the Ringo Kid, the hero of Stagecoach, a 1939 John Ford Western starring John Wayne. It was an apt choice, since Ringo was not one to leave anyone, stranger or friend, in need.
Ringo went to UC Berkeley, was involved in protests before and during the Free Speech Movement and Vietnam, and got a Ph.D. in Anthropology. He then turned to journalism, writing for and running a series of publications. That Anthropology degree, though, was not an anomaly: he was someone who saw that present moments weren’t the result of happenstance but of cultural, historical, and geographical decisions that effected every aspect of life, from the food we ate to what we thought and felt, who we wanted as neighbors, who we defined as enemies. And as a journalist, he knew it was his job to bring these hidden forces into the conversation. He read voluminously, seemed to remember everything, and, when memory lapsed, had a legendary set of files on warheads, Irish drinking songs, political speeches, football helmets. His lectures on Super Bowl ads—what they were selling, to whom; how they shifted over decades and why—were one of the many highlights of the courses he taught to the thousands of undergraduates who overfilled his classrooms.
Retirement was busy. Ringo often returned to UCSC to give guest lectures and consult with faculty and students. As former Kresge Provost Ben Leeds Carson wrote me, “Conn remained a deep inspiration at Kresge long beyond his time there, advising us, being a catalyst for the Media and Society series (and lecturing in it in 2018). It was in the spirit of his vision that Kresge has remained concerned with media, justice, and democracy for all these years after his retirement.”
In addition, Ringo started a new project: an expansive history he dubbed the Middle Empire Series. The series—five volumes—took shape in his mind as early as 2000 on a trip to Spain: “I got lost and ended up stumbling upon a Roman city in the middle of nowhere. The image of those ruins amidst the rolling hills of the Meseta stuck with me, and I began writing Hispania (the first book in the series) in 2003.”
That wasn’t all. Long into retirement, Ringo wrote a column titled “Dispatches from the Edge.” One thing we learned in the ‘60s was that the margins were the best place to examine the centers: centers of power, of influence, of inherited truths that had turned specious and led to war, poverty, and divisive class and race, gender and sexual conflict. I looked forward to these occasional columns, always learned from them, always was amazed at the range of Ringo’s roving intelligence, hard-won convictions, and persuasive writing. But beyond their political virtues was Ringo’s wit, particularly in his annual “Are You Serious?” awards column where he singled out some of the most egregious, inhumane, wasteful, and simply incoherent events, decisions, and pork barrels of the past year. The columns are available to read here.
If there is one comment of Ringo’s that sums up his approach as a teacher and journalist it might be this: “The objective persona is like the tooth fairy—it doesn’t exist. . . . The point isn’t to be objective and neutral, but to be fair and accurate.” “Fair and accurate” wasn’t just a catchphrase; it was a way of life. It required thoughtfulness. It demanded research. It required a sense of history, of class and race awareness. It existed because some journalist took the time to ask questions that weren’t getting asked, search for answers that weren’t slam-dunks. This is what he taught his students, year after year. If you want to be a reporter, he challenged, don’t just report: question what you are told and think you know; discover what you haven’t yet considered. And year after year students took Ringo’s lessons to heart, turned into investigative journalists, documentary filmmakers, experts in science, sports, war strategy, homelessness, slavery: civil servants in the deepest meaning of that term. Decade after decade, as students and then as alums, Ringo was there for them—ready with suggestions, eager to praise, happy to share a meal or drink or hour of conversation.
And man, that man could talk. And listen. And did. His ability to see the best in others, and find ways to bring that best out, made him a great teacher, and a great Provost. He ran Kresge College from 2001 to 2004. He ran Kresge the way a proletariat would. He asked questions, trusted his staff’s answers. He sought out students who didn’t know they needed his help or how to ask for it. Egalitarian to the bone, he led by example, dedication and determination—the only way he knew how to lead, or live.
Those of us who called him a friend, and hundreds of us did, were grateful for our time with him—his stories, his intelligence, his warmth. I wrote a mutual friend after he died: “Ringo brought himself into every moment in a way that is so rare that it stands out, made him stand out. I never quite knew where or how he kept the light burning, the energy going like there was an endless supply to call on. And there was.”
Ringo’s light went out on June 19, 2024. He was 81. His passion for justice and freedom, kindness and attention continues to burn in the families and friendships, careers and ambitions, of his students.
Paul Skenazy taught Literature and Writing at UCSC. Like Ringo, he is a former Provost of Kresge College.
