Survivors’ Memories Remain Unshaken

They gathered before dawn Friday on a tiny outdoor stage -- a 100-year-old man in a checkered suit jacket flanked by eleven women in bright lipstick and their finest jewelry. Each is older than the Great Earthquake that nearly killed San Francisco in 1906, each a living link to a tenacious history celebrated here as a symbol of the city’s grit.

Now, as time presses on and survivors pass away, the annual commemoration launched by a men’s drinking club in 1919 takes on new urgency. If they are going to tell their stories, these survivors reason, now is the time.

Theirs are the glancing recollections of babies and toddlers. Herbert Hamrol -- the only man to attend the 5:12 a.m. ceremony -- remembers the enveloping arms of his Polish immigrant mother as they hurried down the stairs of their South of Market home. Della Vattuone-Bucchini, 98, recalls the hulking frame of her Italian father, hunched over her crib to protect her from falling plaster in their North Beach flat.

Marie Sagues was just two days old when the now-famous temblor rocked her family’s Haight-Ashbury house on April 18, killing hundreds and leaving 490 city blocks in rubble and flames. She was forever known to family and friends as “the Earthquake Baby,” regaled with the tales of a grandmother forced to camp with her brood of children and thousands of others in Golden Gate Park.

“When you’re 15, you don’t want to be called the Earthquake Baby,” said Sagues, a smartly dressed and articulate woman who, at 97, lives alone in Kentfield, north of the city. “Then everybody knows your age. When you’re 15, maybe you want people to think you’re 17!”

The natural disaster that transformed these survivors into temporary stars Friday was discussed rarely, if at all, in their youth, most concede. But the tradition, which drew a larger group this year than last, allows them to reach into the recesses of memory and unveil a city that many here know only through history books.

They described the men who worked their way down winding streets at dusk, lighting gas lamps with gangly poles. They recalled horse-drawn police buggies, treats sneaked surreptitiously from the cracker-barrel in the corner of the family store, and -- more painfully -- the segregation that kept families like Janie Lee Chu’s confined to the city’s Chinatown.

Chu’s memories are strong: the ceiling of her Stockton Avenue home crumbling, her mother calling from the next room for her to cover her head with a blanket, the exodus to Oakland and then Sacramento in search of stable housing. But even more vivid are the changes that transformed her life as Chinese Americans slowly gained respect and a shot at success.

“If you got as far as Powell Street, you’d get stoned,” Chu, a world traveler and longtime teacher who turns 101 this year, said of her early years.

The commemoration of the quake -- which included an overnight stay at the historic Weston St. Francis Hotel and a ferry tour of San Francisco Bay -- was also simply a reason to get out. Some, like Chu, came from rest homes, others from the houses and apartments where they have lived alone for decades, their spouses long deceased.

“One of the problems of old age is lonesomeness,” said 100-year-old Libera Armstrong, who lives alone in the East Bay and was persuaded to attend by her son and -- most forcefully -- her dentist. “Your friends are dying off and you don’t make new friends easily anymore.”

Echoed Hamrol, as he sat for a parade of television interviews: “As a rule, I’m not very noisy, but I enjoy being with these people. It opens me up a little.”

Others attend from a sense of duty. “I feel obligated,” Sagues said. “It’s like I owe it to the city I love. We are a dying breed. I think we should participate if we are capable.”

The commemoration was started in 1919 by the South of Market Boys, a fraternity that combined local charity with the pleasures of drink. The men -- many survivors of the quake -- placed a wreath every year at Lotta’s Fountain, a landmark one block from Market Street’s cable car turnaround that served as a message board in the disaster’s aftermath.

Carrying on the tradition was Leo Sapienza, a real estate investor who served as the group’s last acting president before it disbanded about a dozen years ago. Helping at his side since she was 16 was his daughter, Taren. Now, 27 years later, the annual event is a labor of love for Taren Sapienza and her former partner, publicist Lee Houskeeper.

“I call them my little miracle gifts from heaven when I get a call from a new survivor,” said Sapienza, who hopes to find funding for a Web site so she can track down survivors nationwide and bring them to the City Hall rotunda for the big bash in 2006.

But every year, her joy is accompanied by loss. There were the Downey brothers -- boxer Jack Downey among them -- whom she had known since childhood. By 1999, all four had died. Sapienza then discovered the four Myers sisters and a new love affair began. Now, just two remain. Since last year, five former attendees have died.

“It’s really hard for me because I don’t start making my phone calls until late March,” Sapienza said. “I’ll get a recording that says the phone has been disconnected.”

Still, each year brings new survivors to the party -- sharp-witted and surprisingly spry. At 100, Hamrol still works two days a week, straightening cans on the shelves of Andronico’s Market. His only physical complaint: macular degeneration that has robbed him of his ability to read the newspaper, drive or even peruse his mail.

Others battle heart conditions, cataracts and fractured hips. But all are full of survivors’ spitfire. “I’m lucky,” said Vivian Illing, 102, who wore a bejeweled hat and red, fake-fur coat. “I used to smoke, but I didn’t inhale.... My mother used to say I was so fresh I wouldn’t live long. I fooled everybody.”

This year’s dozen participants -- twice last year’s number -- gathered in the St. Francis Hotel at 4:30 a.m., their lapels brightened by lily corsages. Their children and grandchildren -- some gray-haired themselves -- stood by proudly, snapping photos. They motored down Powell Street in vintage cars, escorted by police officers in period dress. At Lotta’s, they were joined by several hundred onlookers. Bloody Marys flowed from a San Francisco Fire Department hook and ladder truck. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown played kazoo with See’s Candies owner Chuck Huggins, who sponsors the event with his wife, San Francisco history enthusiast Donna Huggins.

“It was the biggest disaster in the 20th century in the U.S.,” local historian Ron Ross said of the quake, which would have registered between magnitude 7.8 and 8.3 by today’s scales. “In this city, it’s the way they pulled themselves together after the earthquake that they celebrate.”