On his KWMR show, “TeaTime Books,” Howard Dillon sounds very much like the BBC announcers he grew up listening to as a young boy in England. He has a perfect voice for Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling and Dylan Thomas, each of whom he has read on the air.
Last week, however, he was reading entirely different fare: “Moody, Unbalanced and High Strung,” a madcap novel written by his friend and fellow Bolinas resident, Michael Rafferty.
On one page, Mr. Dillon found himself reading about the bloody shooting of a rockstar-turned-drug-kingpin named Barney Marshmallow. On the next, he found himself—quite unexpectedly—reading a sex scene the curmudgeons at the F.C.C. might have frowned upon.
The tale offered Mr. Dillon, a trained actor, an opportunity to display his facility for accents and improvisation. Somehow, he managed to skip over the spiciest bits without seeming to stumble. Things got hot, but not too hot.
“Remembering the chaos and the noise and the confusion from this afternoon, the thick smell of gunpowder, the smell of blood and fear, she began to feel increasingly aroused by her memory of the experience,” Mr. Dillon read. “Something seemed to let go inside her, and she felt vulnerable and excited.”
He read a little further, but we’ll stop there.
“I skipped quite a lot,” Mr. Dillon later confessed. “It got very descriptive about ass-grabbing and what have you, which I couldn’t get into, so I was doing instant editing.”
Mr. Dillon, 77, has lived in West Marin for 44 years. After falling in love with Bolinas during a visit to town, he returned 18 months later and took whatever jobs he could find. He washed dishes at the Wild Rose Café and worked the counter at the Bolinas Bakery and the People’s Store. (His wife of 40 years, Claire Heart, is a co-owner of the cooperative.) For five years, he managed the Bolinas Community Center, and he’s operated an informal airport shuttle, a job he still performs as needed.
“I arrived with a small handbag, with a clean pair of underpants and a couple of pairs of socks inside, and literally nothing else,” he said. “After a while, I went back to England and shipped over a couple of trunks of possessions that I’d left behind.”
Mr. Dillon has been less interested in clawing his way up a career ladder than investing himself, heart and soul, in theater, music and community—all while dressing the part.
“For Howard, life is his stage,” said Molly Maguire, who co-hosts Mr. Dillon’s second KWMR show, “Top of the Morning.” “And so, when he gets dressed every day, he puts on a costume, and it’s dialed in.”
Saturday night, on his way to hear Kelly McFarling sing at The Chapel in San Francisco, he donned a thick three-piece wool suit, a red plaid necktie and a Homburg hat. From the front, Mr. Dillon, who has a neatly trimmed white goatee, could have passed for a 19th-century British barrister. From behind, with his reddish-brown ponytail protruding from beneath the Homburg, he looked more like a flamboyant Bolinas hippie.
Somehow, the man is understated and outsized all at once.
He went to the show with Jeff Manson, a KWMR program manager and a singer-songwriter himself. “He’s the most generous music lover and listener I’ve ever encountered in my small career as a musician,” Mr. Manson said. “He’s always the first to arrive at an event, dressed completely to the nines, looking fantastic, and just ready to magnanimously receive.”
On “Top of the Morning,” Mr. Dillon and Ms. Maguire engage in friendly banter and spin an eclectic mix of music, everything from classical to oom-pah to rock ’n roll. Mr. Dillon’s playlist contributions focus on “West Marinicana.” Recent samplings included tunes by Jesse DeNatale, Mr. Manson, El Radio Fantastique and the late Charlie Docherty—friends and locals all.
Ms. Maguire, a composer and musician, often sung with Mr. Docherty, who introduced her to Mr. Dillon. Together they collaborated on stage productions she directed at the community center.
“Howard is unapologetically artistic and interesting, and those are the people that I like to have in my life,” Ms. Maguire said. “He’s a firm believer in making art happen and making theater happen.”
In his cozy home, where five stuffed ravens and crows are stationed about, Mr. Dillon’s eclectic tastes are visible everywhere. There’s a portrait of the Dalai Lama in the kitchen and one of Abe Lincoln in the living room. A crowded bookcase features poetry by Samuel Beckett and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, another Bolinas denizen. There’s a biography of John Lennon and statuettes of the Queen Mother and Winston Churchill.
“He’s a bit of a renaissance man,” said his friend Enzo Resta, founder of the Bolinas Film Festival, where Mr. Dillon has served on the selection committee and worked the front of house. “Bolinas is a village of characters, and Howard certainly is one of those village characters.”
Each year, the film festival hosts a table reading of scripts from classic movies. There have been three so far—“Pulp Fiction,” “Casablanca” and “Goodfellas”—and Mr. Dillon has participated in all of them as the narrator.
“He’s the glue that keeps the script moving,” Mr. Resta said. “Howard is a true thespian, and I don’t use the word thespian lightly.”
After graduating from the Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama in Kent, Mr. Dillon moved to London, where he landed various dramatic roles and joined an improv company.
“At 33, I was driven out of England by Mrs. Thatcher,” he said. “She cut funding to the British Arts Council, which was where my theater company’s lifeblood was coming from.”
During his first years in the States, Mr. Dillon was an illegal alien, but he eventually naturalized courtesy of Ms. Thatcher’s friend Ronald Reagan, whose amnesty program granted legal residence to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants.
In February, deeply regretting his inability to vote against Donald Trump, he became a U.S. citizen, gaining his third passport. His first came from Ireland, where he lived until age 8, when his family moved to England. He has long since lost his Irish accent, which he shed to avoid being bullied.
Although he was born into a family of Irish Protestants, Mr. Dillon supported the fight for Irish independence and regards his infatuation with the royals as something of a guilty pleasure.
“I’m a sick puppy,” he said. “I’ve been indoctrinated from birth by the British f—ing royal family, who are the ongoing soap opera of everyone in the British Isles, a multi-generational soap opera.”
Each year, Mr. Dillon displays his dry British wit as the emcee of the Bolinas Fourth of July Parade. From the balcony of Smiley’s Saloon, he narrates the proceedings in his posh BBC style, offering deadpan descriptions of the absurd.
“You never quite know what you’re going to get with the unusual floats that comprise the Bolinas Fourth of July,” Mr. Resta said. “They range from Brazilian belly dancers to people who look like they just climbed out of the mud flats.”
It’s Mr. Dillon’s favorite gig of the year. “I can just riff on whatever is in front of me,” he said. “It’s the essence of improvisation, and it enables me to let my freak flag fly.”
Afterwards, if someone compliments his work over a beer at the bar, Mr. Dillon is fulfilled. “Somebody laughed at my jokes, and that’s all you can ask for,” he said. “That, to me, is manna.”