The Pittsburgh Press (January 2, 1942)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – The other night my phone rang and the voice said, “This is Lt. Petticrew at the Presidio.”
So I started trying to think who might be this Lt. Petticrew, and whether or not I was supposed to know him.
And then all of a sudden it came to me, and it is an odd coincidence. Just another of those small-world-after-all things. It was this way:
A year ago in England I wrote that the thing I missed most was sugar. So a number of readers back home sent me boxes of sugar. The very first to arrive was from a Mr. and Mrs. Dick Petticrew of East Lansing, Mich.
I didn’t know the Petticrews, and I had never expected to lay eyes on them, but you never can tell in a world like this. For the voice on the phone here in San Francisco was none other than that of the sugar-sending Petticrew of East Lansing.
The Petticrews came downtown to see me, and they turned out to be swell people. Dick got a reserve commission after graduating from Purdue University four years ago. He was called up last June, and after a few months at Camp Lewis in Washington was transferred down here.
Mrs. Petticrew, whose name is Sally, came along and they found a nice apartment and are crazy about San Francisco. Dick is in the ordnance department, and they are so busy getting shells and bombs out to the Coast that he works a 12-hour shift, seven days a week.
Vanity takes fall for defense
The ordnance officers have to do a lot of telephoning to the arsenals back East, and Dick, being affiliated with that old Midwestern habit of thinking you have to scream over the long-distance phone, shouted himself practically voiceless.
I asked him what impelled them to send me the sugar in England, and he said oh he didn’t know but he guessed it was just one of those rare times when you actually up and do one of the nice things you’re always thinking about doing.
San Francisco is full of war anecdotes. Here is one:
A certain rather foppish little man has been busting to get into the civil defense organization, mainly because he thought he would look so nice in a uniform.
So he volunteered for civil defense, and what do you suppose they put him to doing? Why, he is a spotter, and he has to sit in a manhole on a dark street, with just his head sticking out, from midnight till 4 a.m. every day.
Japs give money to wrong men
Immediately after the war started, men from the Treasury Department closed all the stores in San Francisco owned by alien Japanese.
But some smart boys got in ahead of the Treasury. I’ve heard of several Japanese who turned over their money (one as much as $900) to men who purported to be Treasury agents. They got no receipt – and didn’t demand one because they were scared – and now their money is gone forever. For the “agents” were phony.
Westbrook Pegler has been nice to me in his column several times, so I should be more grateful than to tell this story. But it rubs me the right way, so here it goes:
The day after war was declared, I went down to the Southern Pacific depot to see Mayor LaGuardia come in. There was quite a gathering of city bigwigs and newspapermen there. I was standing talking with Fire Chief Brennan, when a friend of mine overheard this remark:
“See that fellow over there in the trench coat,” one of the crowd confided to his friend, pointing at me, “That’s Westbrook Pegler.”
O.K., Peg, go ahead and sue.
San Franciscans apparently aren’t all as cosmopolitan as I’ve been led to believe.
Shortly before Christmas I bought presents for my father and Aunt Mary, and had them shipped to Indiana. Aunt Mary’s gift came from the City of Paris, and Dad’s from Roos Brothers.
And do you know that the clerks in both places, when they went to put down the shipping address, had to ask me how to spell “Indiana!” I’m telling you the truth.
Half a dozen San Franciscans have asked me where that building is I spoke of the other day that is practically all glass front and would be a nice morsel for a bomb.
And when I tell them they invariably say, “Well I’ll be darned, I’ve lived here all my life and I never even noticed it.”
My joke about the Jap submarine under the Golden Gate Bridge turned out to be not so funny after all didn’t it? They’ve been so close lately you could almost hit one with a rock.
But they won’t get far inside the Gate, for the big submarine net is up now. It’s no military secret, I guess, for you can see it out there – or rather you can see the buoys that hold it, and all the funny little sharp-nosed net-laying boats that put it down.
It makes you realize, more than anything else I’ve seen, that we’re actually at war and in danger right here at home.