William Hannigan Jr., long time resident of Annapolis, died on April 9, 2012. He was 86 years old.
Born on April 6, 1926 in Brooklyn NY, he was the son of the late William Hannigan and Florence Hiebel Hannigan. He enlisted in the Navy where he served from 1943 to 1946. He moved back to Colesville, MD where he met and married his first wife Helen Horak in 1948. In 1950 they moved to the Panama Canal Zone where he worked as an electrician in the Aids to Navigation Department. In 1958 he sailed his 30’ wooden sailboat from Panama to Annapolis, in preparation to move back to Maryland in 1959. There they settled in Annapolis. He worked for the Chesapeake Instrument Corp in Shady Side which was later purchased by Gould. He retired from there in 1987. In 1988 his wife Helen died, and in 1989 he married Eugenia (Gene) Hommel. He liked to travel, build models, raise redwood trees and repair things in his work shop.
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Most little girls will tell you that their daddy is the strongest man in the world. I remember when I was little, we all staunchly believed that our daddy was (very strong, but) the second strongest in the world, second only to his daddy, our Poppop. Poppop was a large man with a large beard and a large belly. He had a workshop that he could build anything in: he built real, big boats, and he built tiny, very intricately detailed model boats, and toys for us to play with, and we would crack walnuts from the yard in the vise grips.
Four years ago, when I first walked into the violin shop where I now work, the smell of wood shavings, and good honest work, hand tools and power tools, brushes and fine motor skills, was a familiar surrounding. I was at home here. (fortunately, they hired me so I had an excuse to hang out here every day). Poppop always took credit for me going into a woodworking field.
The 4th of July was always a good tradition when we were growing up, at Poppop's (right after we just celebrated Elizabeth's birthday every year, with swimming in the recently opened pool, as soon as the helicopters fell off the trees, and eating angel food cake) We would eat all the hamburgers and watermelon our little stomachs could handle, and set off bottle rockets, and go out sailing.
When I was in early high school, my grandparents went on a cruise on the Queen Elizabeth II, over to the British Isles. They brought back a lot of Irish music books for my sister and I to play out of together, and other assorted celtic-y things (celebrating all our awesome Irish heritage), but they also brought back stories of how great the music was on the ship. I said at the time, wouldn't it be cool to be a musician on a cruise ship? You'd get to go so many cool places.
In 2010, I got to go to Panama, three times (as a musician on a cruise ship). And again, once in 2011. My first reaction to being there was, how could anyone live in this humidity. (He assured me that you got used to it pretty quickly when you lived there) Also, how incredible that people related to me actually lived here in the 1950s, I tried to picture it how they would have seen it. It was hard to do. I had seen pictures, heard stories. He had shown me old maps from those days, and maps that he had drawn where he used to race sailboats, around the bay, and go camp on the little islands. I showed him my pictures, one picture in particular of a lighthouse right on the locks. "That's my lighthouse!" he said, probably the most excited I ever saw him. He went up that lighthouse once a week to make sure it was working, apparently, back when he worked there. He was so thrilled that it was still there, that I got to visit there fifty years later and things still be the same.
He had some flaws too, but everyone does, and the many good memories I have of him will always be good. He was an incredibly interesting man, and I'm proud to be a Hannigan.
