A Party Ship’s Last Voyage

As seagoing epics go, it never will rival the Titanic’s tragic end. But the Harvard helped chart a colorful era in California’s social history before it came to its own unhappy demise in the fog off Santa Barbara’s treacherous coast.

Both the Harvard and its sister ship, the Yale, were launched in 1906 from East Coast shipyards. By 1910, they were plying the increasingly busy passenger and freight lanes linking San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

With the onset of World War I, the Navy purchased both vessels for $1 million each. Stripped of their luxurious fittings and sporting camouflage paint jobs instead of dazzling white, the Harvard and Yale transported 500,000 soldiers on 166 trips across the English Channel before the armistice.

To the end of their days, both ships proudly displayed two golden chevrons on their funnels as tokens of their combat service.

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After the war, the Los Angeles Steamship Co., the West’s largest shipbuilding and repair facility, bought the vessels and refurbished them as state-of-the-art cruise ships at a cost of $1.5 million. Among the company’s owners were Fred L. Baker, a former Los Angeles city councilman, and Times Publisher Harry Chandler and his nephew Ralph Chandler.

In 1921, deckhands pulled up the Harvard’s gangplank. The ship’s whistle sounded and the crew cast off for the 17-hour-and-45-minute trip to San Francisco. The sleek 250-passenger, 375-foot vessel slipped past the San Pedro breakwater, heading north on the way to rendezvous with its sister ship, which was heading south from San Francisco to Los Angeles.

It was the Jazz Age, the Roaring ‘20s--flappers, bathtub gin, gangsters, a time to bust loose. The Harvard and Yale soon became California’s all-night party ships. The vessels held a special appeal for business travelers, tourists and rowdy USC and Berkeley football fans.

Because it also was the era of Prohibition, the parties depended on so-called rum runners, whose lightning-fast boats dodged the Coast Guard and G-men to ferry their illegal cargo to thirsty patrons aboard the cruise ships.

Not infrequently in those days, rough seas and imbibing too much of the rum runners’ cargo prevented even the most avid fans from cheering the USC Trojans’ fabled “Thundering Herd” too loudly at the next day’s game.

But hangovers, seasickness and feet sore from all-night dancing seemed a small price to pay for the Harvard’s diversions, which included scantily clad working girls for whom the switch from streetwalker to deck walker made a pleasant--and profitable--change of pace.

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But as USC alumnus Giles Pellerin, 92, who has not missed a Trojans game since 1926, recalls, the high price put the girls’ services out of the reach of most student fans. Most of them contented themselves with nips from their hip flasks, less commercial shipboard romances and the strenuous consolations of the Charleston.

On the morning that disaster overtook the Harvard, in fact, its passengers were the sort who drove rum runners and hookers to distraction--if not bankruptcy. More than 200 men and women were returning from a PTA convention in San Francisco on May 30, 1931, when the speeding vessel, cutting through thick coastal fog, rammed a reef 2 1/2 miles north of Point Arguello.

It was in the same area where--on Sept. 8, 1923--nine Navy destroyers crashed because of a navigational error. Seven of the ships sank, taking 23 men to a watery grave in what was the worst peacetime disaster to hit the Navy.

The drama that ensued aboard the Harvard wasn’t much like that tragedy--let alone the storied fate of the Titanic. Both the well-to-do on the promenade and the paupers in steerage survived. There was no pandemonium as the passengers were transferred to the Navy cruiser Louisville, which was quickly on the scene.

The entire event was observed by prominent aviator Roscoe Turner, who provided an eyewitness account of the passengers’ orderly descent into the lifeboats. Photographers aboard Turner’s plane snapped what became front-page pictures as the lifeboats methodically transferred their occupants to the Navy vessel.

Injuries were few, and minor. One of the worst casualties was a traumatized canary, Dixie, who refused to sing again after the stressful ordeal.

Two weeks after the Harvard’s ill-fated voyage, wind and surf carried her to the bottom of the sea 200 yards offshore, where more than 50 shipwrecks have occurred in the treacherous currents of the “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

For a few years, another ship teamed up with the Yale, but by 1935 a longshoremen’s strike ended passenger and freight service on both vessels.

A Seattle firm bought the Yale before the Navy repurchased it for another tour of duty in World War II. The ship finally was broken up for scrap in 1949.

The Harvard, by contrast, still is providing fun in its own fashion. Fishing reportedly is unusually good in the wreck’s vicinity.