[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 48 (Thursday, March 25, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E575-E576]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




              ON THE PASSING OF THREE EXTRAORDINARY WOMEN

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NANCY PELOSI

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, March 25, 1999

  Ms. PELOSI. Ms. Speaker, it sometimes happens that the unexpected 
juxtaposition of disparate events imposes its own logic, and the 
emerging pattern rivets our attention and commands our respect. So it 
is with the recent passing of three extraordinary women: Frances Ross, 
who died December 9th at 84 years of age; Helen Feinberg, who followed 
on February 22nd, also 84; and Vivian Hallinan, who departed March 16th 
after 88 years of life. Of the same generation that was tempered in the 
Great Depression and triumphant in World War II, all three women shared 
many characteristics and values. All, of course, were native or 
adoptive Californians. And, in the trail-blazing spirit of the Golden 
State, all were true pioneers in their respective fields: Ross in the 
treatment of the mentally ill; Feinberg in nursing and human rights; 
and Hallinan in a wide range of progressive causes.
  All three women exhibited, early in life, the qualities we associate 
with leadership. They were relentless champions of social justice, 
peace, equality, democracy, and freedom. And in the pursuit of those 
values, their perseverance was legendary. Finally, and perhaps most 
impressive, Frances, Helen, and Vivian also shared the exquisite 
ability to balance an active life in the public domain with an equally 
impressive dedication to family and friends in the private realm.
  In conclusion, Frances Ross, Helen Feinberg, and Vivian Hallinan were 
courageous leaders of a generation that is rapidly passing from our 
scene. We are losing a national treasure, and we should all pause to 
register our common loss. Details about the wonderful lives of these 
three women are included in the following tributes.

            [From the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 11, 1998]

            Frances Lillian Ross--Advocate for Mentally Ill

                            (By Eric Brazil)

       Frances Lillian Ross, who pioneered residential treatment 
     for the mentally ill in San Francisco, died Wednesday in San 
     Rafael at age 83.
       She had been in failing health for two-months, following a 
     stroke at her Villa Marin home.
       From 1965 through 1997, Mrs. Ross was executive director of 
     Conard House, which developed the model for treating mentally 
     ill patients in a non-institutional setting.
       ``She was instrumental in establishing what community 
     mental health looks like in this town,'' said Steve Fields, 
     executive director of the Progress Foundation.
       Conrad House ``was very, very much on the ground floor. It 
     was one of the first models of a halfway house, if not the 
     first,'' recalled psychiatrist Dr. Price Cobbs.
       Born in San Diego, Mrs. Ross attended 13 grammar schools 
     and three high schools--including Polytechnic in San 
     Francisco--before graduating from San Francisco State.
       Even before the '30s had ended Mrs. Ross had lived an 
     eventual life--as a ``girl cashier'' at the World's Fair on 
     Treasure Island, as Northern California campaign manager for 
     winning Democratic gubernatorial candidate Culbert Olson and 
     in organizing relief for Spanish civil war refugees.
       During the early 1940s, she was a teacher and social worker 
     in Central Valley migrant labor camps, including Marysville-
     Yuba City, where she met and married her late husband, Fred 
     Ross, a community organizer, whose career--including the 
     discovery of farm labor leader Cesar Chavez--became 
     legendary.
       Her youngest son, Fred, now chief of staff to Rep. Nancy 
     Pelosi, D-San Francisco, recalled that his mother taught 
     birth control as well as drama and other subjects to wives of 
     farm workers. He said, ``Birth control was called `baby 
     spacing,' then, and one of the women asked her, `Is that to 
     teach us how to space them closer together or farther 
     apart?'''
       On the eve of World War II, Mrs. Ross worked to get refugee 
     Jewish physicians out of Germany, and after the war began, 
     she operated a drill press and worked for racial integration 
     at a Cleveland airplane parts manufacturing plant, while her 
     husband worked with Japanese Americans who had been relocated 
     to the Midwest from the Pacific Coast.
       At age 41, Mrs. Ross returned to San Francisco State and 
     obtained a master's degree in clinical psychology.
       Her professional career was interrupted by polio, and she 
     was unable to work for nine years.
       When Mrs. Ross was hired as executive director at Conard 
     House--she had been a rehabilitation counselor at Lighthouse 
     for the Blind--institutionalization was virtually the only 
     recognized form of treatment for the mentally ill.
       Mrs. Ross started Conard House's co-op apartment program, 
     which provides an extended period of recovery for clients 
     admitted to the program's halfway house.
       Katherine Erickson, owner of two retail gift shops at Pier 
     39, who worked for Mrs. Ross for seven years at Conard House, 
     recalled her as ``the most powerful woman I've ever worked 
     with . . . a most extraordinary woman. She had the ability to 
     cut through the B.S. and see what was really going on.''
       Mrs. Ross is survived by daughter Julia, a director of 
     recovery systems in Larkspur; sons Robert, a high school 
     teacher in Davis, and Fred of San Francisco; and by three 
     grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
       A memorial service will be held Dec. 19--her 84th 
     birthday--at 3 p.m. in the auditorium of Villa Marin in San 
     Rafael, where she had resided for the past 13 years.
       The family suggests that friends wishing to remember Mrs. 
     Ross with charitable contributions direct them to the Post 
     Polio Support Group of Sonoma County, 4672 Park Trail Drive, 
     Santa Rosa, CA 95405; or to the Larkspur public library.
                                  ____


              [From the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 24, 1999]

      Helen Feinberg, 84; Social Activist, Spanish Civil War Nurse

                           (By Myrna Oliver)

       Helen Freeman Feinberg, nurse and human rights advocate who 
     aided victims of the Spanish Civil War and Ecuador border war 
     as well as garment workers and Latino immigrants at home, has 
     died. She was 84.
       Feinberg died Monday of cancer in Newport Beach, said her 
     daughter, Margo Feinberg.
       A New Yorker trained in nursing at Brooklyn Jewish 
     Hospital, the 22-year-old Helen Freeman had barely begun her 
     nursing career in 1937 when a meeting on Spain's strife 
     convinced her to sail abroad as a member of the Medical 
     Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy.
       One of only 50 American women involved, she worked in 
     makeshift front-line hospitals to aid soldiers of loyalist 
     Spain and international volunteer fighters including 
     Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. The young nurse was 
     severely wounded during a bombing.
       ``We were so idealistic at the time. And we wanted 
     everything for a better world,'' she recalled in 1990 after a 
     speech to Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in New 
     York. Feinberg served as commander of the brigade's Los 
     Angeles post in the 1980s and 1990s.
       Her injuries in Spain prevented her from serving as a 
     military nurse in World War II. But she spent that time in 
     Ecuador, following its border war with Peru, with the U.S. 
     Government Emergency Rehabilitation Committee organizing 
     clinics and hospitals and training nurses in mountain and 
     jungle communities.
       After the war, she returned to Europe with the American 
     Joint Distribution Committee to develop clinics, organize 
     health education programs and treat chronically ill victims 
     of Hitler's concentration camps.
       The dedicated nurse also went to Oregon with the 
     Agricultural Workers Health Assn. as a circuit-riding public 
     health nurse for migrant labor camps, and worked with the New 
     York City Health Department setting up community health care 
     clinics.
       Working for the Union Health Care Center of the 
     International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1952, she met 
     and married Charles Feinberg, union organizer, professor and 
     public health administrator. After her marriage, she went 
     into school nursing in New York and, after the Feinbergs 
     moved to Orange County in the 1970s, with the Newport Mesa 
     Unified School District. In Orange County, Feinberg 
     concentrated on working with children and families of migrant 
     workers and other immigrants. She retired only last year, at 
     83.
       In 1985, the school district named a new facility at 
     Whittier Elementary School in Costa Mesa, Feinberg Hall in 
     honor of both the nurse and her husband.
       Feinberg is survived by a son and daughter, union labor 
     lawyers Michael and Margo Feinberg, and two grandsons.
       A memorial service is scheduled at 2 p.m. March 6 at 
     Pacific View Memorial Park in Corona del Mar.
       The family has suggested that memorial contributions be 
     made either to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, 799 
     Broadway, Suite 227, New York, NY 10003, or to Whittier 
     Elementary School, 1800 N. Whittier Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 
     92627, for its library.


     
                                  ____
            [From the San Francisco Examiner, Mar. 17, 1999]

               Peace Activist, Matriarch Vivian Hallinan

                          (By Seth Rosenfield)


                 She was role model for political women

       Vivian Hallinan, the preeminent peace activist, wife of the 
     later legend Vincent Hallinan and matriach of San Francisco, 
     best known Irish political family, whose members include 
     prominent criminal defense lawyer Patrick Hallinan and San 
     Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan, has died.
       Mrs. Hallinan, who was 88, died Tuesday at the Berkeley 
     home of her son Matthew. Family members said she has been in 
     poor health

[[Page E576]]

     in recent weeks and attributed her death to old age.
       Over a five-decade span, Mrs. Hallinan played a prominent 
     part in San Francisco's progressive politics with grace, 
     beauty and courage. In 1986, when she was 77, she was tear-
     gassed in Chile while protesting human rights abuses.
       Although Vincent Hallinan, an atheist who once sued the 
     Catholic Church to prove the existence of God, was publicly 
     perceived as the more radical of the pair, Vivian Hallinan 
     fueled the family's political fire, two of her sons said.
       ``She was really the heart and soul of our family's 
     political philosophy,'' said Patrick Hallinan, her eldest 
     son. ``My father resented the abuse of political authority, 
     but my mother had a focus. She was a very committeed radical 
     socialist.''
       Mrs. Hallinan combined a dedication to her family, prowess 
     in real estate and political passion.
       U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, said 
     Tuesday that Vivian Hallinan showed women they could combine 
     family and politics. ``She was a role model for many of us,'' 
     Pelosi said. ``If Vincent was the lion, Vivian was the 
     lioness.''
       Mrs. Hallinan was born Vivian Moore on Oct. 21, 1910, in 
     San Francisco. Her father was Irish, her mother Italian, her 
     family blue-collar.
       Her father abandoned the family early, and she hardly knew 
     him, said Patrick Hallinan. And though her mother was more 
     present, Mrs. Hallinan was raised mostly by her mother's 
     relatives.
       Mrs. Hallinan attended Girls' High School, a now-defunct 
     private Catholic school in San Francisco. She was admitted to 
     UC-Berkeley but quit after two years to support herself by 
     working in retail shops. Patrick Hallinan said. She never 
     graduated.
       She soon met Vincent Hallinan on a blind date. He was 13 
     years older and already a famous liberal lawyer.
       ``When I opened the door, I thought she was the most 
     beautiful thing I'd ever seen,'' he once said.
       They were married in 1932, an occasion reported by the late 
     FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover as ``a case of one warped 
     personality marrying another.''
       The excitement began promptly. As the couple left for their 
     honey moon, Vincent Hallinan was jailed for contempt of court 
     for refusing to surrender a client in a murder case. One 
     headline read: ``Hallinan goes to jail, bride goes home.''
       Mrs. Hallinan's striking beauty, with brunet hair and hazel 
     eyes, was part of her persona, said Doris Brin Walker, a 
     radical San Francisco lawyer and longtime friend of the 
     Hallinans'.
       ``She always looked great,'' Walker said, ``but it was not 
     the most important part.''
       The Hallinans first lived in a Nob Hill apartment on 
     Sacramento Street. About two years later, they had the first 
     of six sons. (Their fourth son, Michael, later died.)
       During the Depression, Mrs. Hallinan began investing some 
     of her husband's legal earnings in real estate, refurbishing 
     abandoned buildings and eventually building the family 
     fortune, said Terence Hallinan, her second-born.
       Although Mrs. Hallinan held ``socialist'' views--ideas that 
     people should be guaranteed a decent living, that there 
     should be racial equality and an end to war--she never joined 
     any socialist or communist party and was a life-long 
     Democrat, said Patrick Hallinan.
       She was one of San Francisco's early civil rights 
     activities, renting and selling homes to African Americans. 
     Her efforts earned the enmity of other real estate agents and 
     her own neighbors, her sons said.
       In 1945, the Hallinans moved to political conservative Ross 
     in Marin County, because it had the best public schools. They 
     bought a a 22-room house with its own gyn and an Olympic-size 
     pool.
       But times got hard. In 1950, Mr. Hallinan was sentenced to 
     six months in McNeil Island prison for a contempt citation he 
     got while successfully defending union leader Harry Bridges 
     against charges of being a communist.
       In 1952, after Mrs. Hallinan persuaded her husband to 
     campaign for president on Henry Wallace's Progressive Party 
     ticket, the couple were indicted for tax evasion. She was 
     acquitted, but he was sentenced to two years in jail.
       The government seized some of the family's real estate 
     holdings, said Terence Hallinan. And Doubleday refused to 
     print more copies of a national best-seller she had written 
     about her family, ``My Wild Irish Rogues,'' Patrick Hanninan 
     said.
       Hoover had branded the book as ``a flagrant employment of 
     the Communist Party line, including references to racial 
     discrimination and vicious attacks on the U.S. government.`
       But Mrs. Hallinan was unfazed: She sustained the family 
     with her real estate business and continued her jailed 
     husband's presidential campaign on his behalf.
       Mr. Hallinan was disbarred and in jail during most of the 
     '50s, and Mrs. Hallinan remained under Hoover's scrutiny.
       In 1964, she and sons Patrick and Matthew were arrested 
     while sitting-in at San Francisco's ``auto row,'' the car 
     dealers that then lined Van Ness Avenue, protesting their 
     failure to hire African Americans. She served 30 days in 
     county jail.
       She helped organize anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, 
     leading a march of 5,000 women in Washington, D.C.
       She headed the San Francisco chapter of the Women's 
     International League for Peace and Freedom. ``Peace was 
     always her biggest issue,'' said Terence Hallinan.
       In the 1980s, she opposed U.S. policy in Central America 
     and befriended Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua's Sandinista leader. 
     She also met with Fidel Castro.
       In 1990, Mayor Art Agnos named her to The City's Human 
     Rights Commission.
       She is survived by five sons, Patrick, of Kentfield; 
     Terrance, of San Francisco; and Matthew, an anthropologist, 
     David, a travel consultant, and Conn, a journalism professor, 
     all of Berkeley; 18 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
       A memorial service is to be announced.

       

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