By Savannah Blackwell and Tim Redmond

Tony Kilroy, a longtime neighborhood activist and a beloved fixture of San Francisco's progressive community, died Jan. 27 from complications associated with dementia. He was 71 years old.

A native of Meath, Ireland, Kilroy helped build San Francisco's influential neighborhood and urban environmental movements. He was a founder of San Francisco Tomorrow and was involved in so many progressive campaigns that his friends and admirers have long since lost track.

"I can't think of a single progressive or neighborhood-oriented campaign in the past 20 years that wasn't run out of Tony's garage," recalled land-use lawyer Sue Hestor, who worked with Kilroy in the 1980s to get the city to take a reasoned approach to office and other types of commercial development. Those efforts resulted in the passage of Proposition M in 1986.

"[Campaigns for] affordable housing, public transportation, you name it, it probably started at a discussion at Tony's dining room table," Sup. Jake McGoldrick, who represents the Richmond district, added. "That's a famous location, that dining room."

In 1991, Kilroy was named Activist of the Year by the Richmond District Democratic Club (which he helped found), and in 1999, SFT named him the Jack Morrison Environmental Activist of the Year.

Kilroy was best known in recent years for two major accomplishments: putting together and continually updating a user-friendly directory of the city's scores of politically active clubs and groups and bringing together diverse groups of local activists to break bread and share stories at "Kilroy's lunches" at the House of Shields on New Montgomery Street, not far from the headquarters of Pacific Gas and Electric Co., where, ironically, the grassroots organizer worked as an engineer for more than 30 years.

Both efforts were solidly aimed at Kilroy's most heartfelt goal: fanning the flames of real, grassroots political movements by encouraging activists of all sorts of dispositions to work together.

"What I always appreciated about Tony was his good spirits and goodwill," Hestor said. "So many of us in politics have an edge to us – and Tony didn't have that. He always tried to get along with everyone. He was the glue for a lot of people."

A proud member of the local Democratic County Central Committee, to which voters routinely elected him for more than 10 years, Kilroy "was the heart and consciousness of the local Democratic Party," McGoldrick said.

Although he probably never realized it, Kilroy may have unwittingly inspired an entire genre of political journalism in the city. In the late 1980s, over several midday drinks at the House of Shields, he urged a Bay Guardian editor to create a city hall column that would report on the people and backroom intrigue behind the policy debates. Reporter Jim Balderston started writing Inside City Hall soon after – and the way some tell the story, a San Francisco Examiner metro editor liked the idea and asked two reporters named Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross to launch an "insiders" column of their own. But it would be unfair to blame Kilroy for the end result.

Born Aug. 16, 1930, Kilroy earned a B.S. and M.A. in civil engineering from Trinity College Dublin in the early 1950s. In 1959 he moved to San Francisco, where he and his wife, Jeannette (who died least year), raised their children. He leaves behind his three sons – James, Myles, and Bryan – a daughter-in-law, Dana, and a granddaughter, Haley. Kilroy is also survived by two brothers, Billy and Max, and one sister, Jean, who all live in Ireland.