Honorees

Hon. John Jerome “Jack” Brennan, Sr.

1883-1973

Judge Brennan was born in 1883 near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.  He completed his education at Fordham University.  After moving to San Diego, he practiced with L.L. Boone as one of San Diego’s leading attorneys.

In 1912, he met his future wife in New York.  Arcadia Bandini Scott was from an old and prominent family long identified with the development of Southern California, including San Diego.  They married in Los Angeles that October.  Mrs. Brennan’s father was also a lawyer and served as County Clerk at the offices in Old Town. 

In the 1920s, Brennan was a prominent attorney.  “As a business man, his reputation is of sterling worth, as a lawyer of marked ability, and personally his friends are legion because of his sincere kindness and genial nature.”  (Clarence Alan McGrew, City of San Diego and San Diego County:  The Birthplace of California at 140-41 (1922)).

Judge Brennan was appointed to the Municipal Court Bench by Governor Olsen on October 7, 1941 where he served until his retirement in 1961.  Brennan was initially assigned to the Traffic Court, two months before Pearl Harbor, which in “the immediate beginning of the war years, and San Diego’s mushrooming, boom-town, service-swamped streets, the job became one of the most difficult in the United States.  Brennan met the problems patiently, scientifically and effectively.  At times the workload was so heavy that the judge worked both night and day.  He seldom took a vacation.”  (Leland G. Stanford, Footprints of Justice in San Diego at 99).  Brennan’s impact was felt through the 1960s. “In no inconspicuous way these ultra-great of San Diego’s exotic formative years march today under the name of Brennan – and toward new history-making heights in this adopted city of the young New York lawyers who became one of our community’s socially-distinguished, professionally acute, and hardest working municipal court judges.”  (Id.)

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