Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen

Senator Dianne Feinstein addresses mourners at the memorial service for Warren Hellman at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco on Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Hellman’s sister, Nancy Bechtle, the former president and CEO of the San Francisco Symphony, shared some never-before-told stories about her big brother. “He was a teenage hoodlum with a greased-back pompadour,” she smiled, and revealed that he had been arrested for drag racing and charged with three felonies. Their parents were so angry that they took away his house key, “but he persuaded me to sleep in front of the door so I could let him in.” Such, she noted, were Hellman’s powers of persuasion.

Harris, who traveled from Nashville to participate, had also been moved by Hellman’s requests. She said that when she visited Hellman recently, “He elicited a promise that I would play at his service, should it come to that.” She added that she was “lucky to know this extraordinary man” and then brought tears to many eyes with her lilting version of “Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia.”

Hellman’s oldest daughter, Frances, chairwoman of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, held back tears as she took the microphone. “I want my father to be here, wearing this,” she said, touching the shoulder of Hellman’s famed “Rhinestone Jewboy” jacket that was on display next to his treasured Whyte Laydie banjo. “But I know you all do.”

Frances told a story of her own brush with the law. When she was a teenager, she broke into a golf shop with some of her friends and took some golf carts out for a spin. When police caught them and Frances had to call her father, she recalled, “He just started laughing.”

But, she said, Hellman was a demanding father. “When we went hiking as a family, he told us that if we were talking we weren’t going fast enough.”

Then Gibbs, the second eldest of Hellman’s children and the founder of the San Francisco Free Clinic, told the congregation about a recent discovery she made. When Hellman was dying, she learned that he always kept a letter she received in the 1970s inviting her to join the U.S. Ski Team. “Thirty-three years, he carried that thing in his pocket,” she marveled.

Hellman’s only son, Mick, also a successful investor as well as a champion cyclist, read a poem he penned about his famed father and played a few recorded verses of the song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” by the comedy group Monty Python — one of his father’s favorites. The audience soon began singing along.

“For life is quite absurd

And death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow

Forget about your sin — give the audience a grin

Enjoy it — it's your last chance anyhow.”

Mick cut the recording short before a profanity was broadcast, but the performance left congregants smiling.

Judith, the youngest of Hellman’s children, spoke about her parents' relationship, explaining that Chris Hellman, Warren’s wife of 56 years, was struggling with Alzheimer's disease and could not attend the service.

Judith recounted a story that her mother had told her about a flight she and Warren took early in their marriage. When the plane’s two engines died, Chris was terrified, but Warren comforted her, saying, “We’ve had a full life with no regrets. If this is it, that’s OK.”

Of course, it was not the end, and they went on to enjoy many years together.

Hellman’s 12 grandchildren then paid tribute to their “grandpa.” The eldest, Laurel Hellman, said, “We were lucky to spend so much time with someone who was already a San Francisco legend.” She introduced their band — the Go To Hell Man Clan, a reference to an anti-Hellman campaign at Mills College years before.

The Wronglers, Hellman’s bluegrass band, also sang a few tunes and reminisced. Fiddler Heidi Clare told about playing with Hellman in the hospital. “The doctors gave him some hard news,” she said. “He was sitting in a chair, banjo in hand. He listened patiently, and waited for them to stop talking. Then he said, ‘And now I have something for you.’ And we played this song.”

The song was “The Big Twang Theory,” written by Hellman and Colleen Browne. The Wronglers performed it as a sing-along with the audience, noting that Hellman had written the last few lines in the final days before his death:

One thing’s for certain

It’s been a cosmic trip

Riding through the ether

On this old-time music ship.