Annie Laurie
San Francisco Examiner/April 22, 1906
I have been in San Francisco, that city of the core of my heart, just six hours today.
In those six hours I, a stranger, was three times offered food and twice offered water. A smooth-faced chunk of a boy saw that I looked tired and asked me to ride with him in his two-wheeled cart perched on the mattress he was taking to some homeless friends. A young fellow with the good old letters U. S. A. on his collar went out of his way to offer to find people for me, and a woman with eyes soft with gentle pity asked me if I had any place to sleep. If I had not she said that she would take me home with her.
And then I knew that the dreadful story of death and hopeless misery the blackened ruins were trying to tell me was false. San Francisco, the best beloved of the world, is not dead, and can never die while one man or woman with the true spirit that made the old San Francisco what it was still lives.
The beautiful streets, the smiling parks, the friendly houses of friends, the gay restaurants—these things were only a little bit of the outside dress of San Francisco. The real San Francisco is just as much alive to-day as it was some seven sweet years ago when the whole city was gay with flags to welcome our boys home from the Philippines.
San Francisco in ruins!
Why, you couldn’t kill San Francisco with a dozen earthquakes and a hundred fires. That isn’t the kind of stuff San Francisco is made of, and it’s taken just exactly these last four days of hideous horror to let even us, who thought we knew the temper of our own people, to get in under the silly varnish of the surface and really know them at all.
I met a woman out in Jefferson square to-day who ought to sit for a picture of the incarnation of the Spirit of San Francisco.
She was standing in a funny little square tent made partly of boards and partly of ragged bits of cloth. She wore a dress that had been through the fire with her, but her bright hair was brushed neatly back from her rosy face. She was washing dishes, petting a dog, talking baby talk to a baby and bossing some half-dozen of boys, all at the same time.
“Run down to the edge of the pavement with these beans,” she said to one boy, “and see if you can’t find somebody’s fire to warm ‘em a little by.
“Hike over to the commissary wagon; they’re giving out eggs there. The baby can’t eat these beans. Where are those blankets? Didn’t I tell you rascals to put them out to air? Oh, yes; I’ve got thirteen boarders. Yes; we all sleep in this tent. No; they don’t pay me a cent. Burnt out? Who isn’t?
“What’s the use of being blue about it, though? Didn’t yer see our totem at the door? Allow me to present you. This is our friend, Happy Hooligan.”
And there on the ridgepole of the tent was perched a little wooden Happy Hooligan on top of a crudely painted sign which said:
“Cheer Up.”
Happy Hooligan isn’t the handsomest creature in the world, nor even the most refined; but the rabbits brought him to that baby on Easter and that baby’s blessed mother had the good sense and the good heart to bring him along with the little handful of things she was able to save. I’ve never been very fond of Happy myself. I don’t fancy his taste in hats; but after this I’ll never see his ugly face in the cheapest kind of a picture again without thinking of that woman out there at Jefferson square, homeless, without a dollar, cold and not overly well fed, but a California woman, for all that.
When I came down over the mountains this morning out of the hateful gray desert into the green glory of California and saw the yellow poppies dancing in the only sunshine that ever really shines I kept saying over and over to myself what we’ve all heard General Barnes say so many times:
“California is God’s country, and God smiled when he made it.”
God did smile when he made California, and he’s smiling yet at all our foolish little perplexities and anxieties and want of faith and courage. Let’s look back at him up through the smoke and cinders, and smile, too—just to see what will happen.
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