San Francisco During The War [1949]

World War II hit Baghdad by the Bay like a ton of block busters. Overnight the self-contained, self-satisfied city whose population had stood absolutely still for a decade was transformed into a major Port of Embarkation, a vital war industries center, a possible primary target for enemy action. 

The town that, traditionally, welcomed tourists, but was suspicious of strangers who hung around, found itself swamped under hordes of war workers and thousands of servicemen. In the twinkling of a raised eyebrow there was a housing shortage within the city's inflexible boundaries. Prices whistled into the stratosphere like a new, secret weapon. Every night in the hectic weeks following December 7 was crazy with rumors of Japanese planes overhead, Japanese submarines off the Golden Gate. 

But, as usual, San Franciscans soon found something to laugh and joke about: The first “blackout” exercises. 

Fortunately, the enemy was in no position to take advantage of the brilliant display of exterior lighting that followed the first signal to black out. While Civilian Defense chiefs blew their tops with loud, popping sounds, San Franciscans responded to the call as though they were celebrating the centennial of Thomas Alva Edison. 

It was at this time that then Mayor Angelo J. Rossi achieved fleeting immortality. Hounded by reporters to explain why his city staged a festival of light when it should have been black, Angelo shrugged and smiled: 

“Well—no bombs fell, did they?” 

But the blackout incident that sticks most closely in my mind happened a couple of “exercises” later. With the city pretty snugly under a blanket of darkness, sudden mysterious flashes of light were seen gleaming from a window high in a hilltop apartment house. They looked like a coded message. Swiftly the guardians of security surrounded the place, and a squad broke into the guilty apartment. 

They found that a large group of people had been having a party there when the blackout siren sounded. They obediently turned out the lights and sat in the pitch blackness for long, boring minutes. Then one after another tiptoed into the kitchen to get a bottle of beer from the refrigerator. Those mysterious “code” flashes were merely the light in the icebox—as the door was sporadically opened and closed. 

In retrospect it is painfully easy to see that the bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor destroyed a good part of San Francisco too. Not just in overcrowding and inflation; those twin evils were hardly peculiar to a single city. What was swept away in the debris, to return slowly, was a certain expansiveness of spirit, a long-established understanding of other races and people, a quality that was reflected most obviously in good food, good drinks, and good living. 

During the short (in the scheme of things) war years certain saloonkeepers boastfully became millionaires at the expense of servicemen; the black market swallowed up once-useful citizens; some restaurants sacrificed years of reputation on the altar of the quick buck. In short, a whole tradition went down the drain, and a city's name was tarnished. Not a pretty sight to see in a world-famed metropolis noted for a “special” something. 

It was “too bad, but inevitable,” they said, that the loyal Japanese-Americans should have to suffer along with the guilty. The twisted ships had hardly settled on the bottom at Pearl Harbor when San Francisco's large Nisei colony began to feel the blow. Crowds of sailors on Grant Avenue hurled rocks through the windows of Japanese curio stores, especially those which immediately displayed placards reading “I Am Proud to Be an American.” 

In the confusion, Chinese were beaten up and eventually took to wearing lapel buttons that insisted: “I Am Chinese” in big black letters. The telephone in my office rang night and day with canards about trusted Japanese gardeners who suddenly turned out to be admirals, and houseboys who were hauled away to internment camps, hissing at their quaking employers: “Someday I come back—and when I come back, I kill you!” 

One of the less vicious fables concerned an air-raid drill in a Peninsula elementary school. At a signal from the teacher the children were supposed to duck under their desks. So the teacher gave the sign, watched as the children disappeared, and then bent down to slide under her own desk. But already there, according to the tale, was a grinning Japanese child. 

Slightly more amusing, perhaps, was the story that allegedly happened December 8, 1941, in a nearby rural school district where the children are picked up in a bus on the way to school. After several white children had boarded, the teacher decided it was time for a little lecture. “At the next stop,” she said, “we're picking up Yoshio. Now, I know we're all excited about what happened yesterday, but remember, he's an American, just like the rest of us. So be sure you treat him like one of us.” 

At the next stop there was an uncomfortable silence as little Yoshio climbed aboard. For a few minutes not a word was spoken in the bus. Then Yoshio piped up. “Well,” he said cheerily, “guess we sure beat the heck out of you guys yesterday!” 

An incident that still rankles in the heart of all good Stanford men occurred several years before Pearl Harbor, when Ray Lyman Wilbur, then president of Stanford University, was approached by his young Japanese houseboy. 

“Sir,” said the houseboy, “as you know, Japanese fleet about to arrive in San Francisco Bay on goodwill tour. Could I have three days off, to see my countrymen?” 

“Certainly,” said President Wilbur, “go right ahead.” 

A couple of days later the educator, along with a group of prominent San Franciscans, was invited to meet the high-ranking officers of the visiting Japanese fleet. As Wilbur was moving along the white-gloved line, shaking hands with admirals, he suddenly came on the outstretched hand of his houseboy, nattily attired in the uniform of an admiral's aide. Wilbur started to make a surprised comment, then thought better of it, bobbed his head quickly, and walked on. 

When the houseboy reported back to work on the Stanford campus, Wilbur said: “Say, that was you, wasn't it, in that lineup of admirals?” The houseboy nodded and explained with a perfect dead pan: “Yes, sir. You see, I am nephew of Admiral Nomura.” Sputtered Wilbur: “But I don't understand. Why are you working as my houseboy?” 

“Because,” said the young Japanese man to the distinguished educator and ex-Cabinet member, “my uncle thought it would be good experience for me to work in household of typical middle-class American family!” 

* * *

San Francisco during the war. Loaded transports filing in sand out of the Bay, slipping through the Golden Gate in the hush of night. Planeloads of VIPs roaring in stratospherically from the far Pacific and far Washington, jamming the St. Francis and the Mark and the Fairmont and the Palace with big “this is off the record” talk and the clinking of many glasses. 

The Shore Patrol and the Military Police, walking the dimmed-out streets of the Tenderloin two by two, looking unreasonably alert until you notice the blank, faraway looks in their eyes. The busy women of the AWVS, proud and neat in their uniforms, dashing around town in smart station-wagons on missions of no less than the utmost importance to the war effort. 

(Just after Pearl Harbor a new business was born on Market Street, near the Orpheum Theater. It was called: “Ye Olde Colonial First Aid Shoppe.”) 

The hectic years. Tin-helmeted war workers, with tin lunchboxes under their arms, riding to duty on the rattletrap, jampacked streetcars. Soldiers, looking almost warlike in their plastic helmet liners, roaring up and down the hills in the Army's workhorse six-by-sixes, whistling at the girls in the time-honored, wearying tradition. The every-dawn sight of sleepy-eyed sailors and their “sea gulls” trooping out of the tiny hotels along Eddy and Ellis, the sailors running slightly in their impatience to get back to their ships in time, the girls in an equal hurry to find a bed just to sleep in. 

(I remember a conversation I overheard in a Chinatown bar called the Twin Dragons. A sailor slipped onto a stool next to an attractive, unescorted girl, and eventually said to her, blandly enough: “Say, haven't I met you somewhere before?” She studied him for a second and shook her head. “Hmm,” shrugged the sailor, returning his attention to his drink. “Large world, isn't it?”) 

The hysterical nights. Civilian patriots in saloons, buying drink after drink for supercilious, slightly contemptuous young GI's listening with deaf ears to their self-appointed hosts' recital of their prowess in World War I. The fat black marketeers, comparing notes, nylons, and stacks of gas coupons, dining on finagled filets and getting drunk on smuggled scotch. The unabashed draft dodgers, walking around proudly with deferment cards in their pockets and telling tales of The Man to See and How Much. The lonely, deadpan kids from faraway places like Texas and Georgia, standing on street corners till curfew time and then shuffling back to duty, wordlessly, haplessly. 

(One afternoon in the St. Francis hotel I noticed a cab-driver dropping coin after coin into a pay telephone while a young GI talked feverishly into the mouthpiece. After the soldier had hung up and left, the cabby explained: “Aw, the kid was from Tennessee and was darn near crazy with homesickness. He just wanted to talk to his mother. So I got her on the line for him, and then kept feedin' the phone so he could talk to her. He didn't have enough dough, of course.” When I started to praise him, the cabby begged off: “Ferget it, ferget it. I always keep a bunch of lead slugs in my back pocket for kids like that.”) 

The home front in action. Amid all the griping and all the easy cynicism, wonderful women writing letters every day to dozens of servicemen in the overseas theaters. Young war widows, trying to forget, with a riveter's gun in their small hands. Tired, aging men working twice as hard all day and patrolling for Civilian Defense at night. Housewives inventing strange dishes out of unrationed foods and trying to keep themselves from smelling the unmistakable perfume of sizzling steaks cooking in the apartment of the “smart” couple down the hall. The pictures of the war heroes in the bootblack stands and barbershops—MacArthur, Eisenhower, FDR, Stilwell…

(A couple of horse-loving GI's, assigned to the cavalry and afraid they might be switched momentarily to the tank corps, cornered General “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell at the USO on Market Street one night and got to talking about the value of horses in war. “Say, General,” one of them wondered, “didja have any horses over in the China-Burma-India theater?” The general nodded. “And how were they?” persisted the young cavalryman hopefully. “Tasty,” answered the general, “mighty tasty.”) 

The growing signs of victory. Rotation, replacement, discharges, and homemade banners on Richmond District houses reading “Welcome Home, Charlie!” The first United Nations conference at the Opera House, trying to complete its business amid an endless round of cocktail parties. (Some of the Opera House credentials were signed by a youngish man named Alger Hiss.) 

At last the Japanese surrender, touching off one of the wildest, and in many ways most disgraceful celebrations in a wild city's often disgraceful history. The veterans, still proudly wearing their overseas ribbons and their battle stars, still refreshingly eager to tell where they'd been, what they'd seen, how The Thing Had Been Done. 

(This happened one night in 1945 on Powell Street, near California: A Japanese youth approached an elderly mustached man and said: “Pardon me, can you tell me the way to Chinatown?” “What do you want to go to Chinatown for?” sneered the other. “You're a Jap!” “Yes,” the Nisei smiled, “and you're a German!” 

There was a moment of silence, broken at last by the oldster's surprised “How do you know?” “Because,” snapped the Japanese kid, flipping back his overcoat to reveal an honorable-discharge button, “I killed plenty of ’em in Italy.”) 

The long road back—to normalcy? Not quite. Post-war San Francisco would never be the San Francisco of 1941, any more than the post-fire city could recapture all that perished in 1906. In four years a city that had basked in its own semi-private esteem had come apart at the seams. All of a sudden it was bulging with long-neglected problems that seemed minuscule during a global war, mountainous in the first dawn of peace—problems of transportation and housing and readjustment. The “old” natives realized, with some degree of fright, that 200,000 “outsiders” had discovered San Francisco and its hoarded delights and had decided to stay. What to do with them? Where to put them? 

(But still, the war was over, and that was the main thing, for a while, at least. It took Mr. and Mrs. Joe Chew of Sausalito to herald the return of peace most simply and naturally. During the war they had two children, whom they had promptly named Winston Franklin Chew and Josef Chew. When their third child was born early in 1946, neighbors eagerly asked what name they'd selected. “Tyrone,” reported Mrs. Chew.)