San Francisco Hotels Lost One of its Best

Me and Theo, and our coworker Julia, in 1990

Theo McKinney was an artist, a musician, a designer, someone who worked in all manner of hospitality, a true autodidact who taught himself many languages just by practicing with hotel guests from other countries, and my good friend.

He passed away last week after a multi-year battle with cancer.

We first met at the larval stage of my hospitality journey in 1989, when I was a young college student and working as a bellman at the old Carlton Hotel. He was a bellman, but worked at the front desk when I started. He was very friendly, but a bit aloof in the beginning until he got to know me.

That moment of singularity came when he mentioned to a guest checking in they were just in time for the floor show. He then pointed at the floor and said, "There it is."

I got the joke when no one else did. With that, we hit it off immediately.

I mentioned that when we met, he spoke three languages, but as his job was welcoming visitors from around the world, he taught himself another four. I lost count after he taught himself seven languages.

I remember him practicing Japanese with visitors from the land of the rising sun. He never missed an opportunity to brush up his skills, with whichever visitor checking in whose language he was mastering at that time.

I mentioned he was a designer, and would make incredibly detailed concept cars with material he just found and scraped together. Some were over a foot long. So good was he that I commissioned him to make a doll house for my niece's third birthday.

His doll house made a Barbie Dream House look like the condemned, yellow-tagged house from the movie Fight Club. Once it was opened you could see the details: a spiral staircase, granite floors, and wallpaper with intricate designs he made himself.

But he was first and foremost a hotelier.  He even worked for a time at the prestigious Mondrian Hotel on the fashionable Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.  But most of his hospitality career was at the old Carlton where we met and where he worked for 35 years.  Sadly, when a large hotel chain bought the Carlton, the short-sighted management fired him.

While at the Carlton he started Local Vocals, which paired up local musicians (some of whom were hotel workers themselves) with hotels in need of light entertainment during the hours they served complimentary wine and appetizers.  

Everyone benefitted: The hotels got free live music, and the artists got a venue where they could perform regularly.  The musicians even made a little money from whatever dollars were tossed into the hat they put out.

Before he got too sick he found his dream job as the night auditor of the Phoenix Hotel.  A hotel which is ground zero for bands on the road, performing in San Francisco.  A perfect setting for a musician who enjoyed Kibitzing with fellow musicians.

As happens in life, over the years we saw each other less as our lives went in different directions, but we never lost touch with each other.

For about four years, the Donatello Hotel (where I was the chief concierge for many years) was listed on Trip Advisor’s top 20 best hotels in San Francisco.  So was the Carlton.  Sometimes the Donatello would be number 18 and the Carlton was number 19.  Sometimes it was the opposite.  Regardless, we used to call each other when our respective hotels would eclipse the other.

Neither of us were serious about our faux rivalry, but it did give us an opportunity to call each other periodically and catch up.

When he was first diagnosed, he reached out to me in a way he hadn’t before. I think my own journey with loved ones who had cancer resonated with him. The last time we spoke his spirits were high, but that could have been any day as he was one of those turn-that-frown-upside down kinds of people. He said he was on the road to recovery, though he may have been sparing my feelings, so as not to be too worried about him. That was Theo. Always positive, always with a spring in his step. Now no more.

San Francisco lost a great ambassador to the world, San Francisco hospitality lost one of its own, and I lost a good friend.

He is survived by Mark, his partner of 40 years.