Jo Anne B. Imperial

1932 - 2025

Jo Anne B. Casey Imperial
12/05/1932 - 08/08/2025
If she had her way -- and she was too polite an Irish Catholic girl to ever be demanding -- every resident of San Francisco would be required to read Gary Kamiya's Cool Gray City of Love, David Talbot's Season of the Witch, and selected columns by Herb Caen and Charles McCabe before they'd be allowed residency in The City. Mayor Lurie, take note.
Jo Anne Barbara Imperial (nee Casey) went to her rest August 8th, having outlived most of her generation. She was 92, and she'd spent her final sixteen years dearly missing Al, the Italian kid from Montgomery Street, whom she married in 1955.
She was born into an endlessly long list of San Francisco Irish families. Casey, Mullins, Branick, Butler, Gartland, Flanagan, Kelly, Coghlan. And more. Her parents, Joe and Virginia, eloped in 1930, and divorced in 1952. Both events were headline news in those days.
She was the eldest of three children -- Mike (d. 2007) & Dan (d. 1955) -- in a family of Teamster leaders on one side and City lawyers on the other, and she came of age when, as Talbot noted, an "old-boy's network of Irish Catholic officials held sway." Many decades later, she remarked that the prominent characters in Chapter 1 of Season of the Witch had dined and wined regularly at her parents' dinner table, an activity she and Al continued with friends, colleagues, and brilliant young Jesuit Scholastics through the 1970s. Educated at Saint Rose Academy and Lone Mountain College for Women – and, yes, the jokes derived by the rearrangement of her college's name did not elude her – she was a San Francisco girl through and through.
Her grandfather, Michael Casey, founded the Teamsters in San Francisco in 1901; her brother Dan was an athletic legend at SI whose suicide in 1955 haunted the family; and her father might have been mayor of The City if not for the bottle. And still she emerged her own self.
…She walked arm-in-arm with her future husband, her savior, in the Marina one Saturday night in 1954 when they passed Marilyn Monroe and Joe Di Maggio heading to visit Joe's mother…She watched Bill Russell lead the USF Dons to victories at Kezar Pavilion and two NCAA titles...She saw Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen do stand-up at the Hungry i on Broadway…She watched Game 7 at Candlestick when McCovey's line-drive found the glove of the Yankees' Bobby Richardson, abruptly ending the '62 World Series. (God bless the '10, '12, '14 Giants.)…As a mom, she endured every one of her kids' CYO and Epiphany Basketball League basketball games and City tennis matches…She piled three families of wild kids into station wagons for a month of memories each summer at the Russian River…She was a teacher for 25 years in the SFUSD…She crossed The Bridge with 300,000 of her closest friends on May 24, 1987…She parented, trusted, and worried continually for her three kids as they navigated childhood, Dead concerts, Cal parties, and the responsibilities of adulthood.
She believed in an America where peoples from everywhere embrace each other in hope, as all good people of faith ought.
She loved her husband Al Imperial (d. 2009); her children Rob (Sherri), Pete (Susan), and Sue, who is a Rosebud. She adored her grandchildren (Gina, Danny, and Isabella); and she will be watching lovingly over her five great-grandchildren. She loved hosting Christmas Eves with the Casey girls, her evening Manhattan, focaccia from Liguria Bakery, Dim Sum from Xiao Long
Bao on Clement, and cappuccino from Café Puccini and Café Greco. In her last years she found solace at Café Rulli in Larkspur.
The roots of this world ground us. She is one of those roots, and she has let go. Best that we reach back and hold tight to our roots, lest we lose our selves.
Her wake will be held Wednesday, September 3rd, at 6 p.m., at Duggan's in Daly City. Her funeral is Thursday, September 4th, at 10:30 a.m., at St. Brendan's Church. Come if you can, raise a glass if you can't.