Vibrant, alluring San Francisco probably would not qualify as a ghost town in the minds of most, but for those with Navy memories, the city offers little except ghosts and reminders of what once was. This summer my son Joe and I visited the city by the bay to see some baseball games. We also saw the remnants of the Navy port that was the last stop on the way out for many who fought in the nation’s Pacific wars of the 20th century.
In the late 1930s man-made landfill created Treasure Island near the God- made Yerba Buena Island. The flat new domain was to be the site of an international airport, so it included an art-deco terminal and two hangars. Before that aviation dream could be realized, Treasure Island hosted the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939-’40, and then it became a teeming naval station. The terminal, with its gently curving front entrance, became headquarters for the 12th Naval District and the Western Sea Frontier. In the 1954 movie, The Caine Mutiny, that building appeared as the site of the court-martial of Captain Queeg, the overbearing skipper of the fictitious Caine. In the 1980s it depicted a German airport terminal for a few seconds in one of the Indiana Jones movies. When I had Naval Reserve duty on the island in 1979 and 1987, the building’s lobby housed a fine museum.
In subsequent years, the base realignment and closing process hit San Francisco hard. It had been one of the gems in Secretary of the Navy John Lehman’s strategic home-porting program. However, as the fleet shrank and the dream of a 600-ship Navy died, so did the city’s place in the naval firmament. Two friends, George and Marlene Van, joined us for a visit to the island this year. As we drove down the causeway and entered the former station, no Marine sentries asked for identification. We walked to the front of the old Com 12 building and peered through the windows. All the artifacts from the museum, which closed in 1997, were gone. Names still painted on the walls were among the only evidence that the Navy once did business here. All across the island was an expanse of unoccupied buildings, including the former homes of many Navy families.
A trip across the Bay Bridge took us to the former Alameda Naval Air Station. Again, we entered unmolested and unquestioned. Memory took me back 35 years to a time when aircraft carriers called Alameda home in between demanding deployments to Vietnam. The battleship New Jersey (BB-62) had pulled in one sunny day in 1969 when the sky was a shade of blue that seemed San Francisco’s own. On the pier a band prophetically played, “There’ll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Indeed, there was, though the sense was far more ironic than the musicians intended. Rear Admiral Lloyd Vasey, commanding the midshipman squadron of which the New Jersey was flagship, ventured into the city in an official car. War protesters vented their outrage against a visiting symbol of the U.S. military.
Despite that mood, many other citizens wanted to see and touch the New Jersey, perhaps as a reminder of a time when the United States was unquestionably omnipotent. On a day set aside for general visiting, more than 10,000 people stood in line for hours to go aboard and walk the deck from one end to the other. One of those was young George Van, along with his brother and his parents. On this day, when the adult George Van came back, one retired aircraft carrier was there as a surrogate for the dozens of ships that had been there before.
George took us aboard the Hornet, which in her time was CV-12, CVA-12, and CVS-12. She was moored to the same pier from which a previous Hornet (CV-8) had embarked on the famous Doolittle raid in 1942. That operation was depicted in the movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and George showed us some of the places on the naval air station that had been filmed for the movie. Once on board we toured the ship from the engine rooms to pri-fly.
We were impressed by the knowledgeable presentations by the various docents who gave tours. The docent who described the superstructure to us was an enthusiastic, entertaining man named Rich Radigonda. He had, he explained, grown up in San Francisco and in the 1950s shipped out as a member of the flight deck crew of the carrier Ticonderoga (CVA-14). Telling visitors about this ship was a way of remembering his own. After the tour, as we took leave of the air station that had seen so much history, we passed by one of the few signs of human activity on the entire base—a Sunday afternoon antique sale.
It seemed appropriate, for we had made a day of revisiting the past.