Memories In Time: Maureen Tobin

January 27, 2021

I first met Maureen at her father’s big house on the Main Line in the fall of 1972. While we were the same age, we went to different high schools. I attended Upper Merion, and she went to Lower Merion. For those that are not from the Philly area, it sounds like the schools were right next to one another, but they are 12 miles apart. Cousin Tim Boyle had taken me to the house in Merion Station one night while there was a small gathering of musicians playing music together in the living room. As a fledgling player myself, it was my first experience at a party where pickers sat around and jammed with one another. Prior to this I had been in a band for a short while, but the band members had just gotten together to rehearse, not to just play with other friends. At the house I remember seeing and hearing this blue-eyed, long-dark-haired beauty sing. I asked Tim who she was, and he said, “That’s Karen’s younger sister, Mo.” While Karen inherited the red hair of her father, Mo got the brown hair from her mother Kit. And while I had already heard Karen sing before this night, it was plain to see that her younger sister had similar vocal chops. But being only 18 years old and not yet very worldly, I just watched from a distance and thought to myself, “I’ve got to get better on the guitar so that I can join in with folks like these someday.”

Fast forward to a few months later, to February of 1973, when I attended Karen and Tim’s wedding. I wasn’t sure that I was even going to be able to attend, so at the last minute I had to borrow a blue velvet sport coat to wear from my friend Daryl Katz, since I did not own a nice jacket at the time. The ceremony took place in a big church, and the reception was held at Karen’s father’s house, which was a mansion in a tony area just outside the city limits. It was the most amazing wedding party that I have ever been to, and one that changed the direction of my life in more ways than one, all for the better.

The downstairs of the house was packed with guests, and there were people upstairs as well. At one point I started climbing the stairs to see what was going on up there, and halfway up the flight I encountered a pretty woman in a granny dress with dark curly hair, and as our eyes met, we both realized that we had met somewhere before. I blurted out, “Hey, I think I know you!” Turns out that she was one of the players that was at the party months before, and she remembered me from the church as the guy in blue velvet coat with the long red hair. Her name was Jo Ann Pacinelli. We had seen each other at the music party, but we did not speak. We got off the stairs and found some chairs to sit in and began to chat. I asked her how she knew Mo, and she said that they had been high school classmates. I asked her if Mo was seeing anyone, and she pointed out a tall, long-haired guy with wire-rimmed glasses and said, “See that man over there? That is Stephen Johansson. He is an art student, and he is Mo’s boyfriend.” Hearing this told me that Mo was unavailable and realizing that this girl across from me was extremely attractive as well, we talked at length, had a couple of beers together, and then later even played some music in one of the rooms upstairs. I don’t think I got home to the family house in Wayne that night until about 2 a.m., but I could barely fall asleep with the excitement of the wedding party and having met someone that I really liked, and the fact that I got her phone number!

For the next six months, while commuting as an undergraduate during the week to the Penn State Delaware County Campus, many of my weekends were spent in the Lower Merion area hanging with Jo, Mo, and Stephen. The four of us palled around quite a bit, going to art museums, concerts, hikes in parks, and restaurants (we were all only 19-years-old at this time, so bars were not an option) (though from time to time we did score some beer whenever I got the nerve to go into some shady dive and ask for two six-packs to go). We took a train to New York City one weekend and stayed with a friend of theirs that was attending Sarah Lawrence College, and we had a memorable dinner one night at the renowned Mamma Leone’s (it’s been gone since 1994) on West 44th Street in Manhattan. On another occasion we drove down to Cape May and stayed with relatives of Mo’s while having a great time there, especially since, at that time, the drinking age in NJ was 18. My new friends took me to numerous shows at the Academy of Music on Broad Street in Philly, the Main Point in Bryn Mawr, as well as to my first classical music concert with the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra, which took place outdoors in the summer in Fairmount Park in the city. I was transfixed and transformed by my initial experience ever with classical music. And there were countless other gatherings where we just got together with some of their other friends and played music together. It was one magical summer full of music, art, laughter, and good times, and one that we hoped would never end.

But good times always seem to come to an end sooner than expected. As luck would have it, in September Jo Ann headed off to the University of Pittsburgh, and Stephen went to the Rhode Island School of Design. I believe it was around this time that Mo moved out to CA to attend the University of California at Berkeley, so everyone was gone except for me. Six months later I moved to State College, PA, to attend the Penn State main campus, and I never lived in the Philly area again, as I moved from there out to CA five years later. While I stayed in touch with Jo and we saw each other a few times during college breaks, I never saw Stephen again, and while Mo and I corresponded via the US Mail (this was two decades before email, texts, cell phones, etc,), I did not see her again until five years later.

In the winter of 1977, over the Christmas holidays, I rode out to CA for a visit with a friend of mine from State College who had siblings living in Los Angeles. By this time Tim and Karen had moved from San Francisco to LA, so I stayed with them while my friend visited his brothers. While there Karen’s cousin Betty stopped by one day and said that she was driving up to the Bay Area. Knowing that Maureen was living in Berkeley and that I had a former band mate not too far away, I asked if I could ride along. She said yes, but that I would have to fly back, since she would not be returning to LA. I had never flown before at this point, and I was excited at the prospect. So, I made a short, unplanned trip to the Bay Area, and my life changed forever as a result.

I arrived in San Francisco a couple of days after New Year’s, and it was sunny and 65-70 degrees for the three days I was in the area. In early January! After first spending two days with my PA musician friend, being shown the sights of the city, the bay, the ocean, the bridges, and the rolling hills, I spent the last day/night at Mo’s in Berkeley. And I knew that this is where I wanted to live, so I started thinking and planning on my flight back to LA and then on the long drive back to PA. When I arrived back in State College it was about 10 degrees, and I knew then and there that this would be my last frigid winter on the East Coast.

I took me a little more than a year to save up enough money and buy a car to drive out to CA, and I finally was able to do this in early February of 1979. I arrived in the San Francisco area on my 25th birthday, and I have been here ever since. While things worked out well for me over the decades, it wasn’t easy getting settled in at first, and if not for Maureen, I may not have lasted but a few months out here.

The original plan was for me to stay with my musician friend in Marin County, just north of the city. He was renting a house on the coast in the small hippie town of Bolinas. I talked with him often before leaving PA, and I drove the Southern route out to CA to escape ugly winter weather in the Midwest. It took me two and half weeks to get here, and by the time I did my flakey friend had gotten kicked out of the place he’d be renting, and he was staying in a hovel. I stayed with him for two uncomfortable nights before heading to San Francisco. I had called Mo for help, and she said that her former boyfriend Stephen’s brother Peter was living in the city, and that he said that I could stay with him until I found a place of my own. I had met Peter a couple of times in that fateful summer of 1973, and he was quite gracious in letting me stay with him for a few weeks. At this time Mo was still living in Berkeley even though she was done with college, and she was commuting everyday to downtown San Francisco to work in the financial district. I was having a hard time finding a place that I could afford to rent on my own, and Mo was tired of the daily commute on the train, so she suggested that we get a place together, which is what we ended up doing. We found a nice Victorian flat to share in the Noe Valley section of the city, I found a job with a local tour bus company, and for the next nine months as housemates we did a lot of fun things, like singing songs together, going to movies and art museums, hosting parties, etc., like we did as that foursome in the summer of 1973 in Philly. She showed me around the city and introduced me to many of her friends. It was a great way to get situated, and I was so grateful for her friendship.

As luck and fate would have it, however, nine months later, in December, out of the blue I was offered a once-in-a-lifetime job to go over and live in Germany to work for a big tour bus company for at least a year, so my time in San Francisco came to end less than a year after I arrived. I got a former college housemate of Mo’s to move into the flat in my place, and I relocated to Heidenheim, Germany, in January of 1980 (that’s a whole separate story that I won’t go into here), where I stayed until October of that year before moving back to San Francisco. By the time I got back Mo and the housemate had gone separate ways, so she found a place of her own while I also did the same. We’d get together occasionally, but over time we saw less and less of one another.

Some years later, after the Loma Prieta (Giants/A’s World Series) Earthquake in 1989, Mo was literally shaken and rattled, and the area she was living in sustained serious damage. Not happy with her job downtown and freaked out by the quake, she moved back to Philly from SF in 1990 to stay with her mother in Bala Cynwyd. Though her mother passed many years ago, this is the same house where Mo lived until her final day in December of 2000. I never saw her again after she left San Francisco. There were occasional phone calls and Christmas cards for a while, and as far as I know, she never had a computer or cell phone, so there were no emails or texts. Eventually all contact ceased about 15 years ago, though I would hear about her from time to time from Karen. While we all have our demons to deal with, Mo had more than most people do, and she ended up being defeated by hers at too young an age.

As you might imagine, I was deeply saddened by the news of her passing just before the holidays. And I have much empathy for Karen and the two nieces, Lyndsay and Brijet, as well as other family members that knew Maureen. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine who or where I’d be now if I had never met her. I’ll never forget seeing and hearing that 18-year-old raven-haired beauty singing folk songs in the living room of that Main Line mansion in the autumn of 1972. And while she stopped doing playing music after leaving SF, I have no doubt that she’s singing with the angels now...