Gene Hackman’s death is proving to be mysterious. The actor, 95, and his wife both collapsed in separate rooms of their Santa Fe, New Mexico, home, for reasons currently under investigation. Their bodies were discovered Feb. 26.
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Hackman’s birth, thankfully, is straightforward and of interest here in the Inland Empire. As his obituaries note, he was born Jan. 30, 1930 in San Bernardino.
The blessed event took place at Ramona Maternity Hospital. Parents Eugene and Lyda Hackman lived at 3503 E St., according to the birth announcement — remember those? — published in The Sun.
The Hackmans had come to San Bernardino to move in with Lyda’s family to save money during the Depression. With Gene’s birth, the household expanded to nine people.
The Hackmans were here only one year, though, before relocating to Danville, Illinois, evidently when Eugene Sr., a newspaper pressman, found work there.
So we can’t say that Gene Hackman went to this or that local school. At one year of age, he left Berdoo before he could walk much or talk much. He wasn’t even old enough to, a la “The French Connection,” pedal his kiddie car 95 mph.
Yet he had a bit more of a non-French connection to San Bernardino than that. In 1983 he gave his first, and perhaps only, interview about San Bernardino to The Sun’s John Weeks.
Weeks went to the Long Beach Grand Prix to talk to the actor, who was an amateur racer and a resident of Beverly Hills.
Based on the resulting April 19, 1983 story, sent to me by Nick Cataldo and Sue Payne, Hackman was friendly and forthright about his San Bernardino origins.
“Well, I was only there for a year,” Hackman said. “I don’t really think of San Bernardino as being my hometown, but yeah, I tell people I was born there. In fact, I’m kind of proud of being born in California. So many people out here are originally from somewhere else, and it’s kind of a treat to be able to say you were actually born here.”
And Hackman volunteered details about his later return to the city.
In 1954, years after his parents had divorced, Lyda and her other son, Richard, returned to San Bernardino. Her sister, Margaret Moyer, still lived there, at 232 E. 44th St.
Hackman, then 26, and his first wife moved west in 1956, renting a house in Muscoy as he tried to earn a living.
For a few months, the future Academy Award winner had a very unglamorous job with the San Bernardino County Public Health Department, in Animal Control.
“I went door to door checking dog licenses,” Hackman recalled to Weeks. “I got a dollar for every ticket I wrote. It was the most demeaning job I ever had.”
(I wonder if Hackman signed those tickets? Had someone held onto theirs for 15 years, it might have been worth money.)
Hackman also was hired as a driver for a food packaging company in San Bernardino. He said he was fired on his first day, for reasons he didn’t remember.
At the same time, it appears, Hackman was taking acting classes at the Pasadena Playhouse College of Theater Arts.
“I always had it in my head that I wanted to be an actor, but when I was in high school I was too shy to do anything about it,” Hackman told the L.A. Daily News, one of our sister papers, in 2001. “Pasadena was the first time I had the courage to actually get up there on stage and see if I liked it or if it was just some dumb idea.”
Both things might have seemed true. When he and classmate Dustin Hoffman graduated in 1958, it’s said, they were both voted “Least Likely to Succeed.” Yet they kept at it.
Hackman moved to New York City, studied Method acting and found roles on stage, including on Broadway.
His mother, meanwhile, was working as a clerk-typist for the San Bernardino County Welfare Office and renting a house at 224 E. 47th St. On Dec. 30, 1962, she died in shocking fashion — in a fire at home caused by a smoldering cigarette. She was 58.
“I have good and bad memories of San Bernardino,” Hackman told Weeks, “but since my mother died there, most of them have been not very good, I guess.”
Two years later, he made his screen debut, and three years after that had his breakout role in “Bonnie and Clyde.” From there he went on to “The Conversation,” “Young Frankenstein,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Hoosiers,” “Mississippi Burning” and dozens more, including as Lex Luthor in two “Superman” movies.
As a newsroom wag joked this week: “Is Gene Hackman the only San Bernardino native who’s tried to kill Superman?” Almost certainly. (I’m hedging in case we later learn that the cruel General Zod was born at St. Bernardine’s.)
Hackman’s father was a pressman for the Long Beach Independent Press Telegram, yet another of our modern-day sister papers, before his death in Perris in 1973.
The actor did return to San Bernardino now and then, placing flowers on his mother’s grave at Montecito Memorial Park in Colton. In the 1983 interview with Weeks, Hackman said: “I try to get out there once in a while. It’s been a couple of years. I should get out there again.”
In their conversation, Weeks related that The Sun got inquiries now and then from readers wondering if the lore was true that Gene Hackman was from San Bernardino.
Upon that news, Weeks wrote, Hackman “grinned with real pleasure” and replied: “Really? That’s something. I’m glad to hear that.”
More Hackman
Stories about The Mug have cited Hackman as a customer. That was the Italian restaurant and bar on San Bernardino’s Highland Avenue that operated from 1949 to 2015. It was said to be the city’s first eatery to serve pizza.
In an appreciation of The Mug written in January, Sun columnist Nick Cataldo said racer Mario Andretti ate there when in the region. And at some point, maybe in his 1950s return to the city, Hackman apparently patronized the popular restaurant too.
Cataldo was friends with John Weeks, the man who had interviewed Hackman in 1983 (and who himself died in 2024). Cataldo told me Wednesday: “I recall John saying that Gene fondly asked about The Mug and wondered if it was still there.”
David Allen is still here Friday, Sunday and Wednesday. Email dallen@scng.com, phone 909-483-9339, and follow davidallencolumnist on Facebook, @davidallen909 on X or @davidallen909.bsky.social on Bluesky.