Kevin Danaher

Danaher is from an Irish Catholic family and is the youngest of three children. His father, who was a bus driver, had immigrated from Ireland. He had an interest in politics and had been a messenger for the Irish Republican Army. In a 2003 article for Sfgate by Tom Abate, Danaher said that the stories he heard from his father about the IRA made him what he is today.

In an interview with Miguel Bocanegra in February, 2000, Danaher said that his government's trying to send him to Vietnam caused him to question what his government was doing, namely the bombing of people who were no threat to the U.S.. In the early days, he wrote a dissertation on U.S. policy towards South Africa in what he saw as U.S. policy being supportive of the white minority against the black majority.

From 1979 to 1983, Danaher was with American University in Washington, DC, as an adjunct professor. By 1982 he had earned a Ph.D. in sociology at UC Santa Cruz. In 1984, having moved to the Bay area, he was working with Food First as a senior analyst.

He graduated from high school in 1968 and flunked his physical to avoid being drafted. In those days he was working as a truck driver and bricklayer. His night times were spent as a bass guitarist for a band that did the rounds playing strip joints and topless bars. Eventually drifting westward, he met a woman in Los Gatos and decided to stay there. California marked a change in the direction his life took. By the time he had finished with the classes he took at De Anza College in Cupertino, and then his doing his time at Sonoma State University, picking up an undergraduate degree in sociology, he had undertaken Ph.D. at UC Santa Cruz. He had also written a thesis on the boycott movement against the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Kevin Danaher was born in New Jersey, on March 7, 1950.