The Pittsburgh Press (December 23, 1941)
Rambling Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
SAN FRANCISCO – San Francisco is gradually taking on the outward signs of a city at war.
When I arrived, the city looked the same as usual. I rode in from the airport with a man who lives here and had been away for a week. “Why,” he said with surprise, “it looks just like it did when I left.”
But day by day things are changing. The warlike effect isn’t great yet, but there are touches here and there.
There are piles of sand on the streets, and you see buckets of sand in apartment houses and public buildings. Permanent air-raid sirens are being installed. Bars and other public places are blacking out their windows. Hundreds of Neon signs have been turned off for the duration, and the city has lost some of its Christmas-tree color.
So far, only one building in town has been sandbagged. That is the telephone building. It probably was done at the Army’s request. Two helmeted sentries stand guard.
The sandbags are stacked in a pyramid-like slope clear up to the second story. Whoever supervised the job must have visited England, for it has been done well. And as soon as the bags were in place, carpenters built a board framework over them, to prevent weathering.
That is one thing that often makes London look ratty. In a damp climate the bags will weather and fall apart in less than six months. The sand dribbles cut and gives a moth-eaten effect. The English have boxed in many of their sandbagged places.
War hits Christmas shopping
Typical war placards are beginning to spring up. You see the famous “Open for Business as Usual” sign that became so popular in England.
When I first saw these signs here I thought, “Aren’t they a little premature? There haven’t been any bombs yet.” Then I discovered that the signs had been up for some time, and they don’t mean business as usual despite the bombers. They mean business as usual despite the strike.
A hotel and restaurant strike has been going on here for months. The hotels are operating anyway, and that’s what the signs mean. When the bombing do come they don’t have to get new signs.
In Chinatown all the stores left open have signs saying, “This Is a Chinese Store.”
And the discovery that knocked me cold is that about two-thirds of the stores in Chinatown are closed and padlocked by the Government – because they were owned by Japanese!
The opening of war hit Christmas shopping an awful smack. People apparently were afraid to venture from their homes. But city officials and the papers have been drumming it into the public that the best way to conduct the war is to keep on going about your natural business. The first scare is over now and people are coming out again. You can hardly get through the streets.
The big stores, incidentally, have all put in new wartime hours – 8:45 to 4:45 – in order to give people time to get home before dark in case of a blackout.
Authentic ‘war face’ appears
There are no barrage balloons over San Francisco. Yet there is something else that gives vaguely the same effect. I just happened to notice it today when I looked out the window.
The day is clear and the wind is blowing. And from the flagpole of every high building in town there flies a huge American flag. The wind blows them out straight, and they make quite a startling picture against the whitish sky. I stood at my window and counted more than 40, just as I used to count barrage balloons from my window in London.
You seldom see an airplane over San Francisco now. There are no guns on rooftops, as you see in London. But on some of the grassy hilltops you can see sound detectors and guns.
There are no gas masks for the public. You don’t see many uniforms on the streets – probably because nobody is getting leave these days. Occasionally you see a soldier in a tin hat.
There are no barbed-wire entanglements here. From high office buildings, looking down on the docks, you can see a white ocean liner painted completely black in one day. And then in another day or two it has disappeared. The public has been barred from the Embarcadero, or waterfront.
There are no crisscrossed strips of paper on windows to prevent shattering, but there probably will be soon. There is one big building here whose front is entirely of glass. I’ll bet passerby in the last week have remarked 20,000 times, “Boy, what wouldn’t a bomb do to that!”
The people of San Francisco must have read pretty thoroughly about England, for they seem to know how to talk correctly, and how to put an authentic “war face” on their still peaceful city.