Fort Miley was an active U.S. military post from 1903 to 1975 when the Army turned those lands over to the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Even with hundreds of years of stories at this place, there are a few that have been saved. Unlike Army records and military details that are usually easy to find, these personal remembrances shed light on the lives of the civilians and staff who lived and worked there.
"And so I got involved because SPUR spoke about East Fort Miley, and I couldn't figure out where it was, though it turned out to be three blocks from my home." - Amy Meyer
Amy Meyer Part 1
The interview was conducted by Steve Haller on 25 February 2002. The interview discusses Amy Meyer’s long association with Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including her efforts to establish the park, and her work with the Citizen's Advisory Commission, People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the Presidio Trust
SH: My name is Steve Haller and I'm here at Fort Mason on February 25, 2002, with Amy Meyer to do an oral history interview about her long association with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Thanks for coming, Amy. For the record, I understand that as far as the literary rights to this tape go, you're willing to have this tape used by researchers and quoted freely by researchers under the normal provisions of the U.S. Copyright laws, but that you wish to retain the literary rights to the information on the tape, is that correct? AM: That's correct. In other words, that a person quoting me would say where they got their information from.
SH: Yes, well, we normally do that anyway. If we need to amend this agreement, we can talk about it further, is that okay? AM: Sure.
SH: Well, then let's talk about the ideas and events, if we can start prior to 1970 that were important to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Could you discuss how you got involved with the movement to establish a national park at the Golden Gate? AM: Well, I'm going to take one step back and answer the question that you put to me, almost before that. Which is what ideas--and events--most of all, pre-1970, affected this park. And that would include the establishment of Muir Woods and Mount Tam--Mount Tamelpais State Park. It would include the presence of a huge amount of military land in this area that runs for miles along the coast in both directions, the establishment of Fort [?] Point National Historic Site in 1970, and Phil Burton's involvement with that, and also the recognition in the late 1960s that we really had a lot of military land that could well be put to other uses. In Marin County itself, I would look at the Golden Gate Parkway that was not--did not happen--between the Golden Gate Bride and Point Reyes, Marincello [?] behind the forts which did not happen, and the Marin General Plan of the mid-1960s which provided for enormous amounts of development. So all of that is background to what made the place for Golden Gate to take place. There's a great deal more than that, but that's just a quick sketch. Then you wanted to know how I got involved in this movement.
SH: Sure, let's talk about your involvement and which are the particular threads you first took up of those many ones that you mentioned just before. AM: Well, I must have been--in the list that I gave you--I was snagged by the one with the excess military land. And that's because I lived--I live still---on Clement Street near East Fort Miley, across the street from Lincoln Park. And I went to a neighborhood meeting that SPUR had sponsored to find out something more to do than I was taking care of two little kids, and I was interested in what was going on. And so I got involved because SPUR spoke about East Fort Miley, and I couldn't figure out where it was, though it turned out to be three blocks from my home.
SH: At that time had you been involved in any other community groups? AM: Nope. I was an artist and an art teacher. I was raising two small kids with my husband, and my husband was working long hours. He was a psychiatrist. And I had my hands full, and I was not involved in community work. And I stumbled into this, and said, gee, this is interesting, what a nice little project that I could work on. [laughter] The next thing I knew I had this sort of tiger in my hands.
SH: Thirty years later. AM: Thirty years later! So I got involved because I heard about the archives building, and since I was exploring what I wanted to do, I did want to do something, and I went down to a Sierra Club meeting, and the question down there was does anybody know about these archives, and I said well, I lived in the neighborhood and East Fort Miley, the archives, I'd heard about it at the SPUR meeting and started looking into the park. So that's how I got involved.
SH: In a 1978 interview, Ed Wayburn referred to the establishment of [...?...] which I guess is [...?...] people from Golden Gate National Recreation Area, as growing out of a conclusion that the Sierra Club and a particular committee formed to investigate and fight this proposed archives at Lands End that you began to discuss. But [...?...] should be as separate, as he put it, front organization to fight for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area's establishment. What do you think he meant by a front organization, and why in your opinion wasn't the Sierra Club the proper forum to go about this business? AM: Well, first of all, it wasn't a front organization. I think he's using the expression, perhaps not as carefully as he should, that the Sierra Club was not appropriate because the Sierra Club has an enormous number of causes that it's involved in all the time. And this takes, and has taken focused concentration. I mean this is what I've done for 30 years because--and the person who phrased it properly was John Jacobs who said, yes, we do need--from SPUR--who said, of course, we need a separate organization because with all the things that are on SPUR's mind, and all of the things that Sierra Club does, this park will fall between the chairs unless we have a separate group.
SH: Amy, when you got involved with work on behalf of the park, you linked up and made, as some people have said, a very devastating team with Dr. Wayburn, with Ed. How would you describe the nature of your working style in relationship to Dr. Wayburn, and why it was such a good partnership? AM: Well, we're very different, and good friends, but we're very different. He had already 25 years or more experience. Actually, by that--yeah, maybe 30 years experience even at that point in working on environmental issues. He had congressional contacts, agency contacts, knew superintendents, knew the National Park System. I knew nothing about it at all. What I know how to do is to organize people. And I knew that we had something here first, the fight against the archives on East Fort Miley was a fight which meant that neighbors had to be organized and there were several of us--I wasn't necessarily the principal organizer on that. And that when we learned that this was really supposed to be part of Headlands National Park, that was the first name we heard of, we learned that from SPUR, then it became a matter, as I conveyed this to a Sierra Club meeting, that people in the Sierra Club said, you'd better meet with Ed Wayburn because he's been worrying about this and thinking about this for years. And when I did eventually meet with Ed in the spring of 1970, the archives project was already pretty much dead, but the--not fully, but almost dead--and he looked at me and Ken Hunter who had come with me, and said, I had no idea this was going on. But he and Ansel Adams, in particular, and others have been trying to save the Headlands of the Golden Gate since after World War II, and here it was 1970. And they'd started on it in maybe 1945, 46. So I brought a very on the ground people organizing I like to work with my neighbors, people, and other organizations. The coalition we developed had between 65 and 75 organizations. My job was essentially to bring those organizations in. It was one of the things I did. I had some help but mainly I went from group to group and said, you've really got to support this, other people might write a resolution that the group might support. We each had our skills. Somebody did news releases. We all did different things. But I would be one of the principal people who would go and say, we need your help and get people to sign on. And that's not the kind of thing Ed ever did. But he, on the other hand, got the Sierra Club very early in the game to endorse a GGNRA of 10,000 acres. Very early. Now you could always enlarge the number of acres, but he got that from the National Club which is very important because it's not just the locals talking anymore. So he took it immediately up to the national scale. He also took it to Phil Burton. I didn't even meet Phil Burton until sometime in 1972. I mean I've looked back, I couldn't believe it, but it's true.
SH: Was there any interest--that immediately wants me to seque into some interesting story about how you met Phil Burton. Was it a particularly dramatic meeting? AM: Yeah, he was looking for people to put on this [his?] campaign literature and he suggested Ed and I meet him at Fort Point, which we did. And they took some pictures, and then Sala [sp?] Burton vetoed them because she said to his campaign manager neither of them live in his district. [laughter]
SH: What kind of motivation do you feel drove the people that coalesced around supporting an early park? I particularly want to make the point about a spirit of volunteerism that you and others have mentioned as a motivating factor, so what did people care about that was behind the desire to volunteer? AM: I'll have to give you a parallel. My daughter's a doctor. And she says if you have pain you'd better be treated by a doctor who has experienced pain, or you won't get the treatment you need. But a doctor who's experienced pain will treat you correctly. With volunteerism, and this is where this writing here is so upsetting...
SH: The writing is...? AM: The Rosen book is so upsetting. Is that if a person has not been committed to a cause that they believed in and utterly cared about, I love this place. I came here from New York. My husband was drafted. I remember his picking me up at the airport, it was evening, we were driving toward the East Bay, I couldn't believe the size of the Bay, the open ground--the open land--I couldn't believe anything that I saw. It was the most amazing sight. And the idea that I got hooked--I mean my hair stands up--I don't even want to talk about it now--that the idea of getting hooked into this, years later, I mean I came here in 1955, I didn't get into this until 1970, I was doing other things, but when I did, to be absolutely compelled. My father had owned country property in New York and I loved that country property, and he had sold that property. And I was very, very upset. It's one of the reasons I never went back to New York. And it just, this was, the chance to have--his property was only 50 acres--okay, this was my property. I mean when Bill Whelan [?] came here, I said I guess I'll have to stop answering my phone, Recreation Area, because that's how we answered the phone. But this was mine. I mean all of it. And it's [...?...] not exactly been possessive of it that way, but on the other hand, I am. This, all of us, all the people I work with, care passionately about this place. We love it. We think it is the most special place on the face of the earth. I mean now Ed's gone [?] and worked on Alaska, and he's worked on the redwoods, and he's a much--takes a much broader point of view, and it's fine. It's very important, this is why we dovetailed our skills so well. My skills have stayed right here. When people have suggested I go on to some other project, I've said I know it's a worthy project, and occasionally I have done something like the Tuolumne River Preservation Trust, a great group of people. But there's nothing, I mean there isn't an inch of this place, I will fight for anything, over anything that anybody dares to do to any inch of this place. And that's how I feel. And I know that the people that I've worked with over the years are pretty much constructed along the same lines. And you have to have experienced it, you have to know this to understand it. I don't know any other way to put it. Well, I'll tell you what I say about the Presidio, this isn't the right time in this interview, but I'll say it. People will come to me and they'll say, well, why can't we just run the Presidio the way everybody runs the National Parks. I say, well, the National Parks run from emergency to emergency. I mean a building breaks down, and until the roof is actually having a--leaking--sometimes that building doesn't get fixed. And they say, well, the National Parks are always run that way. And I say, I know, but that's not how I want the Presidio, that's why I'm very comfortable on the trust even though it's got other difficulties. Because I run that trust, and [...?...] like my own home, and that's my home. And this place is my home, GGNRA is my home. And it's all an extension of my home. And the Presidio is my home, and the roof gets fixed before it leaks, and the asbestos gets taken out before it causes any trouble, and the bricks get pointed, and the rock gets taken care of, and the paint job is done because it's my home. And I don't why I'm so passionate about my home, I can't quite answer the question. But I just know that that's who I am and that's where I come from.
SH: Well, I wanted to ask you about a cross-section of people's motivations here. [laughter] [inaudible] ...tap dance around yours, which is great. And certainly many of the people that you work with share those motivations. AM: Oh, absolutely.
SH: There's no doubt about that, we both agree with that. But I would also ask you if--and again, we're going back to the early--let's go back to the early days--and the coalition of people that came together to found the park, talk about the range of motivations. Because certainly, no one denies, everyone agrees that people love this place, and that was one of the prime motivators. Were there other motivations that also came in to play? AM: Several of us like good government. John Jacobs of SPUR, and I--we are both very deep believers in the American democratic system. John probably was the most articulate example of that particular aspect of it. And that's another one, and I'm sure it motivates several. I'm thinking of the couple, Diane and Ken Hunter; Diane has died, but Ken, who married and now lives in Washington, D.C., but comes back here regularly, but he loves the National Parks. He's visited I don't know how many parks and areas. He loves scenery and habitat and animals. I mean you get people who break it down differently from me. It's, one man, our mapmaker, loves Marin County. Now that's the only area that he really knows, though he tried to help a little bit with other things, but we left [?] him in Marin County. He was a 20 year old man, Bob Young, and he said he had been physically on the land and streets of three-quarters of Marin County. And when he mapped, he mapped with passion. John Hawk [?], who with Bob Young, went to Ed Wayburn and said, if you're going to do this, you've got to get the Olema Valley. And Ed just lit up. Now I didn't even know where the Olema Valley was. And actually my home has been extended many times in this process because my home was really just the Headlands on each side of the Golden Gate. I had gotten that far, and by the time I was through, my home runs-- [laughter] a lot further, But it is for me very much a matter of intimacy with this place, and for others, it might be more an intimacy with historic buildings, historic--Randy Dellahanti [?] who is working on my book with me, for him it's the continuum of history and knowing what's possible with history in relationship to this park and how much this park illustrates certain aspects of history. So anybody who's--I've worked with who's touched this--they have to have the capacity to care a great deal, and it means getting out of yourself a lot. These are all people--Becky Evans cares very deeply about the Sierra Club and she's worked with me for 30 years, and she's a Sierra Club person. There have been a sequence of people at National Parks Conservation Association. And there have been a whole bunch of people who have worked for the Park Service, who each in their own way, I mean, after the park was established, they would be passionate about their area. People like Terry Thomas on Habitat, [...?...] fantastic. There's a whole bunch of others, I'm trying to list everybody. I mean just wonderful people who care deeply. Are able to really love something, and I would say these are people who are able to love. And they love their families and they love their children and they love their spouses, but they are able to love a place. And all of them seem--I would say that's the thing that everybody has in common, is this enormous love of the earth and the things that are on it, and particularly in this--perhaps particularly most of all, in this place, and then sometimes not only this place, you know, elsewhere, but somehow they got involved here.
SH: Who in particular resisted the idea of the National Park out here? AM: Literally no one. The biggest fear was that we would do in the Presidio, that the sounds and noises that were made--because this was during the Vietnam War, and the irritation with the Army, whether they were hunting ducks on Rodeo Lagoon, or building nasty looking housing on the heights above Lincoln Boulevard, and planning a lot more housing, which one of the congressmen who heard of it, some of them at a hearing, said, oh, I see, you want to just put it in the Marin Headlands. So you won't put it in the Presidio, you'll put in the Marin Headlands, sort of how dare you even think of it. That they were very afraid that we would do in the Presidio. And the only other opposition I heard was the people who were trying to figure out how to handle the financial problem of owning a couple of the ranches in Marin County where they seemed to be between a rock and a hard place. That is, they saw taxes rising in relationship to the potential developability of the land, and they at the same time, they didn't go in under the Williamson Act, which would have protected them, and they somehow wanted to be paid and make money on it, and at the same time not pay the taxes. There was just a couple of those. This was like a minor--both of these are minor things. I mean the overwhelming, the rightness of this, part of the way was paid by Point Reyes. You had a whole alerted public and then all those things that I was listing for you earlier that, particularly the Golden Gate Parkway, Marincello, the Marin County-wide plan, the Marin General Plan of the 60s before the Marin County-wide plan. Do you know that in 1970 or 71, the County did--I don't remember which year it was--I do know, but it isn't in my head--their first book about the county-wide plan was called, The Visitor in Marin, and the second book was called, a year later, Can the Last Place Last?
SH: That's quite a difference. AM: They had slightly different origins, and they were actually composed by two different committees and Marge Macras [?] took me on--this is what I mean by first hand interviews. I mean I sat down with Marge Macras, who was the former director of the Marin County Planning Department, on the phone who had worked on the second one, and made sure--and I have it--I know very carefully how these two dovetailed together, it isn't just the same department coming up with two different titles, it's different than that, it's more complicated. But the essence of it, the meaning of it was there. That that county wanted to save its land. And Audubon Canyon Ranch pitched in with education, and then there's the whole story of the saving of Bolinas Lagoon. I mean it's just thing, and all of that, a lot of that was primed by Point Reyes. I mean, well, we got Point Reyes, but what about all the space in between, let's go for it. So nobody, I mean there's hardly a conversation I ever had where people didn't say, hey, wow. And that's one of the reasons why when I, you know, find myself in a more negative climate at the Presidio, it causes me pain.
SH: While we're talking about people's motivations, and the relationship to the portray of the founding of the park in Dr. Rothman's [?] book, if you don't mind, let me ask you about a concept that Dr. Rothman puts forward which is his belief in how people are influenced by their enlightened self interest. And what relevance do you think enlightened self interest has to your motivation and the motivation of people that we're talking about? AM: You heard what I said about a doctor who has experienced pain and one who hasn't, fine. Dr. Rothman doesn't know what I'm talking about. Because enlightened self interest is hardly [?]. It's so bare a factor in this. Yes, we all, sure, it's enlightened self interest but I take care of my family or my spouse or I see that my kids go to a good school, yes, it's enlightened self interest. But to care passionately about my kids' education to make sure they get the best possible education, to make sure that my spouse is happy and feels contented, well fed, and looked after, and loved, that's very different from enlightened self interest. Enlightened self interest is so skinny next to what this is.
SH: The parallels you may see today and in the past in terms of groups and their feelings about the park. And this relates to the reactions of people in Marin County, against Marincello, and particularly the stand that Sausalito took against Marincello around 1970 or so, and the relationship, do you see any connection between that and their discomfiture with the Parks' plans for the redevelopment, if you will, of Fort Baker in 2002? AM: It depends upon where you are in the Marincello sequence. Marin County was first of all a totally different county when Marincello began in the 1960s. It was Republican, it was very sparsely populated, it was relatively conservative, and this also to many people I am told seemed like a preference to have this kind of development as against having suburban sprawl all over the hills. That was the logic. But the effect on what this would mean, it took years of education and a series of lawsuits, and the county turned around and turned Marincello down. What I have seen at Sausalito is the most errant, sad, miserable self interest, unenlightened self interest. The most selfish of motivations. We'd like this place, if you please, to walk our dogs, and we don't care if it's historic, wonderful historic parade [?] ground surrounding, the historic buildings surround the play ground, we don't care if they all turn to matchsticks, we don't want anybody here. We'd even consider at one point, maybe we could raise 20 million dollars and buy this, so that nobody can come here. I have--there's no resemblance between that and any phase of Marincello.
SH: So you don't see any phase of Marincello being motivated at least in some part by a feeling of we don't want this development in these Headlands, and we can have it more or less to enjoy for ourselves? AM: No. Marincello was seen as enormously overbearingly heavily dangerous involving, depending on whose estimate you took, up to 16 lanes total needed on Highway 101 to deal with--a bridge that had six lanes--and damaging to the Golden Gate. And it was also called a new town, and it wasn't a new town. New towns are beyond the Greenbelt. And Marincello was in the Greenbelt. So the thinking there was more--there really is no parallel--the thinking was the thinking of a much earlier era of wanting controlled development. That was a big thing in the 60s and 70s was to control development and not let it run over you. Too many people had seen farmland going down, down the Peninsula would be one major place, just with uncontrolled development. How do we get a grip on this. How do we make it so that some of the land is left, and how do we do development without overwhelming the systems. Marincello was very, very big. [end of Side 1] [side 2] SH: Amy, you had some other thoughts about Marincello? AM: Yeah, there's one item that comes to mind. The original fight was against an alternative to suburban development. This project, one aspect of it, was this is too big and too urban for us, too much unlike Marin County. What's going on in Sausalito, a part of it seems to be, we don't want urban people here. And what's been picked up by the former director... [noise] ...In Sausalito, it's been more a matter of we don't want urban people. The former director told me of incidents where people come from the town and they come to something like the Halloween Festival or the Kite Flying Festival and they see a bunch of Chinese kids and black kids there as well as white kids, and they say what are they doing here. And there seems to be a conservatism of a different sort, not a nice thing at all, of kind of a nasty pulling in and saying we don't want urban people here. We are threatened , much more threatened in a way than--their predecessors were threatened with development, these people seemed to be threatened with people. And it's all one aspect of it. I mean there's other things which includes the, oh, lamentable I can't get out of my garage, and this is why I don't want this to happen. But it has had a prejudiced quality to it that was shameful. And it's painful. Very un-Bay Area.
SH: At this point in the interview, why don't we talk about the Citizens Advisory Commission. Can you share with us your knowledge of how the idea of such a commission became a part of the legislation that established the park? AM: Yes. The people in Point Reyes came to us and said, we need a commission because Point Reyes didn't have one.
SH: What people at Point Reyes? [overlap] [...?...] people or community people? AM: Community people. Jerry Friedman, and Bill Dobleson [?]z who had been the aide to Congressman [...?...]. And they came to my house along with a couple of other people and sat down and said, this is what we need. And I had a lawyer working for me who was an intern from the Sierra Club, and he [?] was a law student. And he wrote up an advisory commission which Phil Burton simplified and put into the bill. But it was very evident--and that's why our bill contains the advisory commission for both parks. Because people said we have no way of expressing ourselves out of Point Reyes and we have no place to talk.
SH: Do you think that if Point Reyes folks hadn't been so concerned, there might not have been an advisory commission for Golden Gate then? AM: I never heard of one. Somebody had to tell me about it. Ed Wayburn, I do not recall his mentioning it...
SH: Congressman Burton? AM: No. I mean it was--I think because the advisory commissions in 1971, 72, may have been much less than what--certainly, incredibly less than what this one has become. But this is also the kind of thing would probably have been if we didn't have one. Within two years we would have had to invent one because there was no way this park was going to survive in this area without one. I mean it's unimaginable to have Golden Gate without one.
SH: Let's go a little further with that thought. I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on how you envision the role of the commission and how it's changed over the years. But you started by saying that you don't think this park could survive without one. So what's the role of the Commission? AM: Well, first of all, I always liken the Bay Area to the--it's a different form of the Massachusetts Town Meeting. It's two of the most active, politically active, personally active areas in the country, which I find thrilling. That's one reason I live here. I come from New York City where there are plenty of noisy and active people, but the chances of feeling that you're really being heard are a lot less because it's such a dense population and because the tradition is different. Here, you not only are heard, but people pay attention and things happen, if you make them happen. Now it isn't all what happens in a meeting, a great deal happens behind the scenes. But if you have a position and a form and a group of people chosen carefully, but originally chosen along much more, I suppose, traditional lines, that is a great number of the earlier commissioners were chosen because of where they were--this was a Republican administration--some experience that they'd had--I would say on the whole we were a very good group, but it was definitely a quieter group than we have today. And the Chairman was, of course, an ex-colonel in the Corps of Engineers. But we had Rich Bartke, retired mayor of El Cerrito. Ed Wayburn, long time activist. Me, active for this park. And we're the three who remain from that original Commission. And then the others of that time were people who had participated at various levels of civic affairs. Since that time we've had other people who have previously held elective office. At the moment we have a former mayor of Mill Valley. And we have people who--today we have more activists. And one of the things I remember that Bill Whelan had to help Frank Berger understand was that people like me were expected to be on the Commission, because Frank had a lot of trouble understanding me.
SH: That reminds me of a quote in the 1993 interview that you gave with Sara Kaufman. And in that regard you explained--and this is a quote that your "role on the Commission was an activist and that was what I was doing, exactly what I was supposed to be doing." What's the difference, can you explain, what's an activist do on the Commission that's different than what another Commissioner might do? AM: Oh, activists anticipate. Activists anticipate. Activists have fingers into the community. Activists put up antenna, they listen, they pay attention, they try to anticipate where trouble will be or where something good is coming along that we all hop on and join. Now we have Lenny Roberts who's been one of the top activists in San Mateo County--and Santa Clara, both counties. Trent Orr, who's an environmental lawyer. Ed Wayburn has always been an activist. I always have been. And we insert ourselves into dialogues. We will call Brian and tell him, you know, you've got to do this, or you'd better not do this, or you're going to get in trouble. We are very open about how we feel. We don't like for items to be agendaed to vote on them. Now at the beginning we had some commissioners, and we have always had a certain proportion of commissioners who wait for an item to appear on an agenda. But today, almost everybody pays really a lot of intense attention to what's going on, and sees how the agenda for the park, subjects and topics for the park, how do they fit with what's going on in the city, the county, the region, the nation, the environmental movement, wherever. Wherever they happen to be in their thinking. We have a former head of the San Francisco Board of Education, Fred Rodriguez. We have all kinds of people, and Fred waited for years to get on this Commission. Asked me five years ago, said he wanted to come on. Because we get something done. In this area, in the city itself, our commissions are very active. I can't speak as well for the commissions outside the city. But there's generally a tradition, whether it's the Human Rights Commission or the [...?...] Park Commission, of a certain amount of active interest. These are not passive bodies. And I, for example, years ago, this is a very old--it might not be true anymore--but I remember sitting through a meeting with the State Park Commission and saying, my god, all they talk about is what is on the agenda, it's just sort of being fed to them, and it's all very [...?...]. John Sansing essentially treated the Commission shamefully. It was a dog and pony show. You know, once a year, or at the most twice a year, never asked us anything of any importance whatsoever. Never wanted our opinion or cared. And we had to take, and the activists, this is Jerry Friedman and me and several others, each in our own way, had to tell John he had to figure out how to find out, there had to be some way of measuring whether a rancher was abusing his land. And we came up with--I mean we didn't because we didn't have a background, they came up with residual dry matter, which is measured every year out there. In other words, so that you can tell. Now it doesn't protect everything but it certainly was a way of seeing whether some beat up areas got improved. And that's the kind of thing we do.
SH: Do you think there's a significant role for other kinds of commissioners who are not necessarily activists to play on the Commission, on this Commission? AM: At this point with no budget? You've got 18 extra bodies. Don't complain. We're [...?...] they're working. I mean the amount of hours that I spend on this park, you know, I can spend--I mean putting my book aside, I still work five full days, so when you add the book to it, it's seven full days.
SH: There's [...?...] active with activists now. I'm just talking about a different style. AM: Active means reading, writing, sending letters, paying attention, talking to people, mediating all kinds of things. Listening, dealing with my neighborhood association. We have a problem that's been going on since the day this park began. It began at East Fort Miley next to the Veterans Hospital. This is now 32 years later, and we are still dealing with the Veterans Hospital. And I've got this massive plot going that involves Brian, the head of the City's Comprehensive Planning Department-- or the Comprehensive Plan for the City, he's the second in command, Amit [?] Goche [?]. The neighborhood lawyer for this kind of matter. The neighborhood association. The immediate neighbors in other associations. And all of us focused in on what the VA is up to right now. And I do this, and this has, you don't ever see this, and it comes up for five or 10 minutes at a committee meeting, and at some point we'll have a vote of the Commission meeting. But I've spent, I can't tell you how many hours on it. And so has Jack [...?...] in particular. And there have been others. Joe [...?...].
SH: That leads us into the line of questioning about what kind of action and activities that go on behind the scenes, not in public meetings, are crucial or have been crucial in the way the Commission has affected the park's history over the years. [...?...] behind the scenes glimpses? AM: Well, I'll give you one that took place, oh, very recently, if I can even piece it together, because it was so wild. [?] We were traveling down to a meeting place in San Mateo County, it was a public building, I think it was in Redwood City. And I'm with Brian and I learn that's what really needed that night is a resolution in support of an enlargement of the park in San Mateo County. This is less than a year ago. So I said, well, have you prepared a resolution. No, nobody's had time. I said, well, how are you going to get it done in time for this to be passed at this Commission meeting. He said, I don't know. I said, fine, what should this resolution contain. He, of course, is driving. He dictates to me what the resolution should contain. I get to the meeting, we're fortunately 10 or 15 minutes early. I find Audrey Rust who is coordinating the effort to enlarge the park in San Mateo County. She is there along with a nice chunk of people who want this to happen. Does she have a resolution, no. I say well, this is the resolution you need, now you go out and you start writing this, and you work in the testimony--Audrey Rust is very experienced--you work in the testimony, as we get people testifying, just work in little bits of this, and I'll take notes also. She structures the resolution while we take care of some of the other business of the meeting--the Commission does. This is about the third item or something on the agenda, and we finally get to what she passes--she comes behind the Commission table, she slips me the draft resolution. And I read this into the record, and after which we have a resolution to debate. And then we fill it in, and the public testifies to this, we work in little pieces of what the public has said, I guess that's where we work them in rather than before we worked them in, as they were talking. We then have this revised resolution with all the public input, and it goes, passed out in just a blaze of glory.
SH: I know there are also in that regard, the Citizens Advisory Commission has subcommittees I guess they're called. AM: Committees.
SH: Committees of the Committee. AM: [...?...] Commission.
SH: Correct. Thank you for that [...?...] correcting me. Committees of the Commission. And then I believe [...?...] also kind of informal get-togethers prior to some of the meetings where you discussed business? AM: Well, now, we're--remember we're not covered by the State's Brown Act or anything. We now have started starting the meetings at seven o'clock, before the 7:30 meeting, this is brand new, this is only the last few months. We're now having pre-meetings, to say nothing of the committee meetings. [laughter] In order to figure out, you know, how to deal with certain things. Because you're in so many sensitive areas like dogs [?] and other touchy things. So that if we have to, we meet ahead of time and try to figure out, you know, get our bearings and get the commissioners primed for the meeting. Because we are dealing with sensitive stuff. And one of the things is that neither he National Park System, nor the Endangered Species Act, nor any other acts, need any more public pressure that says you are bad guys or these laws are bad or we want no more park land. The real job around here is to try to keep from inflaming areas. Sausalito was inflamed, and there's [?] been a terrible inflammation and consumed enormous amounts of time. The dogs are consuming a lot of time. But we have a process. We're finally working with that process. But every time we meet now, we have to sort of get our bearings on where we are with certain processes.
SH: It seems to me that one of the great roles of the Commission over the years has been, I guess this is fairly obvious, as a go-between between the park and the public. AM: Yes.
SH: And in that regard, you mentioned earlier in the interview that the Commission's changed totally over the years. And I was wondering just what you meant by that. AM: Well, we have a lot of people who have served a very long time, but I mean that you get, first of all, people have come to expect first from Frank Berger, and certainly from Rich Bartke [?], just a relaxed good chairman, they expect to be listened to. They know that they will getting a hearing. They know there'll be time for them. We have set up certain formulas for that. We now have an open time for public expression at the beginning. So the people don't have to wait. It was realized it was inconsiderate to keep them standing on one foot, and sometimes it just inflamed a situation. So we give them 15 minutes at the beginning and tell them if there are a lot on one subject, you'd better divide up the time, because it's ending, you know, going to end pretty quickly. But most of all they expect to be heard and that we'll have some reaction or suggest what they can do or you know, with their ideas or concerns.
SH: What do you think are the most important actions the Commission has taken over the years? AM: Oh, boy. Well, the mountain bikes in wilderness were certainly a major one. Fort Mason Center. The Alcatraz plan. And that was a behind the scenes mixture, I mean, Brian said I had my fingers all over that one. I did. He was very upset with me. And Brian was gentleman enough to come along about a year later and say to me, thank you, you were right.
SH: [...?...] AM: Alcatraz plan, as done by GGNPA, was very overdeveloped. Too many lights, trail, just too much stuff. Too many benches. Everything was stuff. And I said, and others said, but they were constantly coopted out of it until Audubon came along. And I said if you really think that way, I encourage you to go after the Park Service, I have to, I have no choice.
SH: To Audubon? AM: To Audubon, and they said they would, and they did, and they threatened a lawsuit. Because what I was told originally, this was at a time, this is a difference in activism, EAs were not routinely, environmental assessments were not given routinely to the Commission. And what grew out of both Alcatraz and the Presidio lawsuit in the mid-80s was that anything, every EA had to be given to the Commission. Now at this point, every once in a while I get one like how do we clean up the underpinnings of Alcatraz. [tape stops because of noise] ...on Alcatraz that Audubon Society saw that this was overdeveloped, that it wouldn't allow room for the bird colonies and was threatening. We [?] threatened the Park Service. And the thing that stood out was, I had learned from one of the planners, we don't expect to distribute the EA on Alcatraz to the Commission, and in any event, we're bringing it out in the summer, so there'll be no time for a public hearing. And I said what do you think you're doing. If it's an EA, there's going to be a public hearing. Oh, no, we weren't planning a public hearing. And I had to go through the Commission and get--and it took a while, anything that gets an environmental document, we get a copy of the environmental document. And that took some educating. Because the place where it finally fell on its nose was with the Army and the Presidio lawsuit, which Rothman [?] doesn't understand that either. We had a lawsuit. They didn't just stop building. It cost the government $750,000, a torn down post office, and the rehabilitation of Chrissy Field to deal with the fact that my very good friend, Doug Maido [?] did not gives us the environmental assessment, and it took Margaret Moore and her husband, who got two copies--one from Doug, and one from the Army--to find out that the Army had moved the post office closer to the [...?...] and that's where they tripped up. Because the environmental assessment that the Commission finally did get its hands on, had the post office 400 feet closer to Doyle Drive, where it probably would have escaped notice.
SH: Who's Margaret Moore? AM: Margaret Moore's a lady who lives on Walnut Avenue and the Presidio Wall. And she, I learned the other day that she's up to some similar piece of mischief somewhere else. She says things, she spots them. She knows what she's looking--when she sees something, she knows what she's found. And she found a foundation for the post office, and said what's going on. And it went from there. Fort Mason Center was a major thing. Alcatraz, development of Alcatraz. And then bike trails, biking trails in wilderness, but also bicycle trails, single track bicycle trails. Chrissy Field, the whole shaping of Chrissy Field, I can't tell you the amount of behind the scenes work that Red Curnan, Michael Alexander and I did on that one to quiet the windsurfers and get them to come on board. The [...?...], I mean we helped Don Neubacher through that. And I've already mentioned the RDMs. And then on the Presidio, it's been the Advisory Commission. I'm not allowed to participate in debates, I can sit and watch them. But I cannot debate, even in Committee, I can ask questions and I do sometimes ask a question, but they have done a super job on letting the Trust know what they see and not bothered by any noises around them, have managed to be very helpful. The Commissioners have given us material at the Trust without the political overload that has come in from some other sources, which has been quite useful. So that's some of the things they've done, we've done. And it's just been, this [...?...] that was simply the quickest [...?...].
SH: If we could go back to Fort Mason Center for a moment. As I understand it from Doug, the staff. as well as the Commission, kind of shared a role in the development of the idea of Fort Mason Center. AM: Sure. What they did was, we had a Saturday at the what was called the Hall of Flowers, it's now called the County Fairground Building, and a hundred groups came and presented their ideas. And some of them were great and some of them were lunatic and they were all things in between. And the people from [...?...] staff shaping it, they formed into four groups. Some people joined all four groups, and some people just joined one group. The idea was to have a coalition and somebody would get to be in charge of running lower Fort Mason in this center. There was a paper that had to be developed on the what we expected from Fort Mason. I did the first draft and turned it over to the staff. The staff then massaged it into a Park Service paper, because I don't like Park Service language. They turned it into a proper paper, but I did the original work of laying out what I thought this was about. And they kept a good deal of it, and shaped it up. And then the Commission heard all these groups talking [...?...] on the Commission and said we recommend the Anne Howell [?] group. But the staff, I mean, there was a whole thing, a whole dialog that Mark Caskie has told me about between, by that time it had moved on to be Lynn Thompson's staff by the time he got there, but for a while it was Anne Howell's staff and Bill Whelan, working on how this place would take shape. And [...?...] the most awful condition, terrible condition.
SH: I wanted to ask about some of the other treads of motivation that went into Fort Mason Center. Clearly it was a desire of the community and Commissioners in the Park to bring people to the park in a compelling sort of way. [...?...] you also referred to the conditions of the building, and as a way to use the buildings. How much of an evident thread of historic preservation and adaptive reuse was there at the time? Was that part of the thinking when the Center was established, or is that just kind of perceived to be one of the good things that grew out of it, and recognized as such later on? AM: No. It was actually from the beginning. Because we were surprised. I mean we had very little background in this. And the Historic Preservation Act wasn't that old. We said why don't you make it prettier. Why don't we have flowers, why don't we have, you know, why don't you tear up some of the concrete, and they said, no, we can't do that. Park Service staff explained to the Commission, no, no, it has to look this way, this is...you keep the form. We said oh! I mean, you know. So that was understood. But that was from the beginning.
SH: Do you care to elaborate on any of those other particular contributions or do you think we should move on to some other subject? AM: I think you should move on because all of them are huge chunks.
SH: I agree. Well, let's move on to the story of San Mateo County which had some initial struggles to overcome in terms of bringing San Mateo lands into the park, but eventually has turned into at least something of a success story. So can we talk about the comparison between Marin County's incorporation of park lands, and to GGNRA and San Mateo and how that was a slower process? AM: Jerry Adams, a reporter for the Examiner, had said to me at a party after the first legislation passed, he said, I always thought you were a nice lady, Amy, when I heard you speak, I also thought you were crazy. Nobody took us that seriously. We were working with things like [...?...] paper from SPUR, you know, I mean mimeo ink from SPUR, our stuff was very unprofessional. All of a sudden we got this national park, and Phil Burton. By the time--and it's a small county and the county was solidly behind it and New Point Reyes and it had been through all the other things we've talked about like Marincello.
SH: San Mateo County was behind it and New Point Reyes. AM: No, no, no. All of that's Marin. We had the park in 72. So in 75, we turn our attention to San Mateo County. And they formed a committee against the establishment of the GGNRA. [end of tape]
Amy Meyer Part 2
The interview was conducted by Steve Haller on 25 February 2002. The interview discusses Amy Meyer’s long association with Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including her efforts to establish the park, and her work with the Citizen's Advisory Commission, People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the Presidio Trust
SH: If you don't mind picking up on the story of San Mateo County's lands and how they came into the park, please do so. AM: Okay, well, the essential thing to understand about San Mateo is the contrast with Marin County. Marin County was small, very environmentally oriented, previous experience, and they got, you know, their park--a huge chunk of the land of that County went into the park in 1972, and it came all the way up next to Point Reyes for ten miles. Okay, now, so, a few years later, we started moving into San Mateo County, formed a committee. It was San Mateo, Santa Clara. We got a mapmaker who started maps. I inherited him. He was a student--a graduate student from Antioch. I inherited him from Clare Dedrich [?] when she went off to become the State Secretary of Resources under Jerry Brown. She said, "I have this student. Will you take him?" I said, "Sure, we need the maps desperately." And that's what he was doing anyway. So, we had all this wonderful stuff going, and the people in the San Mateo County freaked out, because--as I would get phone calls--"I've saved all my life for my ten acres, and you're not going to take it away from me." And it was--the tradition there was different. The ownerships were different. A lot of the ownerships were corporate. From Pacifica north, people were on--were with us. But the land that was really--that you wanted that was available after Sweeney [?] Ridge was much further south. So, we went through this huge mapping process, told people about it, and they essentially said, "We don't like it." But we also had a Congressman--and this is a much bigger county. We're dealing with far more people and far more acreage. We were trying to add to a northern park that at that point had had one addition in 1974. So, instead of being 34,000 acres, we were maybe 35,000. We were trying to add about 220,000 acres in one huge gulp. And it was far too much for anybody to digest. And it was also the corporate owners, the small private owners, the people at La Honda [?]. I mean, one of them accused us of, "You're with the Interior Department. That's who wants this land. You plan to drill for oil here. That's what the Interior Department is." I mean, we ran the whole gamut. "We want to save agriculture." We said, "Do you realize that a lot of your agricultural lands are owned by corporations waiting to be developed?" They didn't really understand that. We went all the way down to the newly established Wilder [?] Park, just north of Santa Cruz. Down there, for example, Big Creek Lumber, who was very positive about what we were doing--we had these scatterings of people who understood, but nothing was cohesive. What's happened now is Sweeney Ridge finally got in, Morey [?] Point--all the things around Pacifica that everybody wanted. Those were relatively easy. I mean, relatively. They've taken a lot of work. But the further south--to some extent, people down there had to forget about our effort. And we don't make any effort to tell them. They're actually picking up exactly what we wanted. And I'm not--I don't ever go out and say that in public. I mean, you'll use this, but it will be in a set of archives. This is not something that I would feature, but what Audrey Rust [?] has been able to do down there is to pick up the big land holdings--the ones that we really wanted to get. Now she's got family lands and corporate lands. She's got some things that were threatened with development, and some--a few where even development had started to take place. Near Pigeon [?] Point Lighthouse, this nasty looking little inn sort of development. She's got them all. The place she missed so far--the only really big significant miss is that big nasty looking hotel somewhere along the coast by one of the chains. I mean, I wish them no luck whatsoever. But that piece she missed, because they couldn't get it. Half Moon Bay.
SH: Do you think that the same kinds of people--the same interests that had concerns back in '75 or so still have--are the people that you've had to overcome in recent years? AM: No, I think she's working with very different--first of all, she's working with willing sellers. She's working with people--she's working with a--God, what is it? A 200 million dollar base, and she's--100 million donated by two foundations. And I'm going to blow it, so I won't tell you what they are. And then the rest is to be privately raised, and she's buying it. She's not waiting for the government. She's buying it. And then some of it will come in--like the Corral [?] Des [?] Tierres [?] is 4,000 acres. And much of it--most of it will come in to GGNRA. Some parts of it may join on to a state park or a county park. But she's just moving through. But if you deal with willing sellers, it may not be quite as coherent as, you know, shaping a whole national park down on the coast, but she's gone around. She's hopped, skipped, jumped around communities. She's picked up stables. She's picked up farms. She just keeps going.
SH: So, talk about Audrey Rust again. AM: Audrey Rush is the head of the Peninsula Open Space Trust.
SH: Do you think that the political climate, particularly the Prop 13 business around '78 and '80 may have changed the attitudes of people in San Mateo County? AM: I don't know.
SH: In terms of the park? AM: I really don't. I think it's--the approach is totally different, and I think that's why it's working.
SH: So, you think it's more the approach? AM: Yeah, willing sellers.
SH: Wait--than the attitude of people in the area. AM: Well, some of those people weren't ready to sell their land then. Some of it, you know, was something that--they were estates that people were living on, farms. It's taken time. People are ready to do this now. And Marin County was mercifully ready, because they were being threatened all through the 60's. So, when we came along in 1970, they were thrilled. But San Mateo County was not threatened the same way. The threats were really only in the north of the County, and that was the Sweeney Ridge area with 1,100 homes by West Aspen Corporation and Morey Point with one development scheme after another. Those were the two big ones down there, and then there were others. And Cattle Hill was finally donated by the Challenge Corporation, but they bought--what was Challenge doing down there? They were going to develop. It's just been--maybe north of Mantara [?] a little better, but then--and there's obstacles there. There's the Devil's Slide obstacle. It's a very different county, very different--politically different. The feeling is different. Marin is much more intimate. It's much smaller.
SH: Let me ask you a question on a different kind of tack. And that has to do with the recreation area title and our beloved park. Could you talk about how that may have affected the development of the park--people's perceptions of it? How it may have been--how the park may have been different or used differently, because it has "national recreation area" in its title? AM: I don't think it's been used one ounce differently, because of that title. I think what's happened here is this is a park that came in. It was not in line to become a park. In other words, the studies hadn't been done ahead of time. This was not waiting in an orderly line for the next apportionment from the Land and Water Conservation Fund. Now, we'll have a park at the Golden Gate, which I understand that some parks actually have been acquired that way. [laughter] This one certainly wasn't. So, none of the studies were done. Nobody knew where anything was. And we were faced with an enormous amount of leftovers of other purposes. The title "recreation area" never meant anything in terms of local recreation. Unlike Gateway in New York, because Gateway picked up on a lot of the local recreation--for example, at Reese [?] Park and at Breezy Point. Places like that where they were stuck [?]--there was a private club at Breezy Point. My mother belonged to it. They never took that, never put it in. They never did the Hoffman Swimburn [?] Islands. What they developed was a mixture--an odd mixture of city recreation--you know, because they're so crowded, and because there wasn't much to work with. That was, by the way, a park of 25,000 acres within two hour driving distance in 1972 of 20 million people. This was a park of--in 1972, 34,000 acres within a two hour driving distance of fewer than five million. And a very big difference. And of course, they haven't grown, and we have. The main thing that happened for us that I felt was good, although I didn't learn about it for a long time, but it made no difference, because from the earliest days, we said, "This really should be a national park," but we came in under the Parks to the People where the people are excess military land, all the things that went in the direction of people use plus the fact this is a major visitor destination, a major tourist destination, and people here are involved in outdoor active recreation. And on Mount Tam, before this park came along, if you went hiking on Mount Tam, you'd meet all your friends, because the mountain was too small. [laughter] It just--everybody was out. It's been the nature of this area. So, all that has happened now is--I've been laughed at by the people from Kayahoga [?], because there's already Kayahoga Valley National Park, and my God, they are not anywhere near this place. But we have not, because of the dogs. We would have slipped this in a year ago, but the dog people--
SH: Slipped what in? AM: Golden Gate National Parks. We would have put it in legislation. We would have put it in legislation with the enlargement in San Mateo County, but this is not the time to go and slam the public in the face. It just doesn't make sense. It's just [...?...].
SH: So, you're implying that one of the things--one of the issues that gets raised more, because of the title "National Recreation Area" is something more of a difficulty with the dog issue. AM: Oh, they have--well, they also--please, we have people who do not believe to this day, no matter what we say that after all, the Commission decided in 1979 that dogs could run off leash and that's that. I mean, "Don't bother us with the code of federal regulations. Besides, isn't this a recreation area?" And then they go on to say, "And besides which, when the City gave Fort Funston to you, you know, why we had all kinds of wonderful freedom there." And I've had to tell them, "The only freedom you had was to watch motorcycles going up and down the hills, and people playing camouflage games in the bushes." There was nothing going on out there until this was a national park. That's when the hang-gliders came in. But they don't remember that.
SH: Amy, if we may, let's now turn to the place of the Presidio and the history of Golden Gate. As a for instance, many people in the park, including your fellow Commissioner, Doug Nadel, said that the park had the ability to do the planning for the Presidio with its own resources. How do you feel about that in comparison with how the planning effort actually unfolded? AM: Well, Doug said in another place in this manuscript that it would have been overwhelming--roughly, that's what he said. This is an enormous job, and requires a set of skills that Doug who is very competent had neither the personnel for nor the background--the urban--in this case, it's a different kind of planning background. And he certainly didn't have the money, and wasn't going to get the money to do this job, especially not in the context that we were stuck with by Congress. The amount that has to be done there--the amount of planning is overwhelming. And it would have stripped this park bare. Now, I think what Doug is talking about is two different things. One is the team that was sent over from the Denver service center. They were so incompetent, and we complained so bitterly that Roger Brown was sent back after a year to Denver. And Don Neubacher [?] is one of your own. Now, I happen to think--and I did not have time to check it this morning--I don't think that Rothman [?] is right. I don't think Don was Chief of Interpretation at Point Reyes. I think he was the Deputy Superintendent at Point Reyes. And that his background, Don told me, was in planning. So, when he came here, he was not stepping from an Interpreter's job, but he had a background in planning, and he was one of the Park Service's own. But I think part of this gets into--you know, and I'm not equipped to say what's right about how Doug is perceived as a planner. I think Doug was a splendid planner for Golden Gate. But I think this is a horse of another color. [laughter] You know, a totally different project. And how different it has been--I don't know how much he knows. I don't even want to--I feel very cautious, because I really am very fond of Doug.
SH: Well, in that case, why don't we jump to the idea about talking about the time--this point in time when the Presidio Trust Act was passed, and the critical point in time between the park's assumption of management of the Presidio in October '94 and then the passage of the Presidio Trust Act. What do you think happened to make the Presidio's Trust, as it was outlined--what do you think happened that made the Trust Act and the Trust that it created so very different from the management scheme that was proposed by the Park Services GNP Amendment of '94? AM: That's really two questions in one. The first question is: What happened between the original introduction of legislation to establish a Presidio Trust, which should have passed in the fall of 1994. That had a Democratic Congress. It was a more generous bill. It presumed what Don Neubacher had presumed, which was an ongoing subsidy for the park. That disappeared. And because that bill did not go through, one of the things that drove people crazy was that we knew it had to be kept apart from the desert bill, that it was something that those two bills were not to go together.
SH: And this was the Mojave Desert bill, right? AM: That's right, which Dianne Feinstein had been carrying for Alan Cranston who had retired from the Senate, and which was--I mean, it had been going and going for seven years. So, it got precedence. And we had pleaded--not I personally--but I happened to know that legislators had pleaded with the Park Service to speed its work so that the Park Services bill for the Presidio could come up ahead of time, but whatever it was, the two bills must not come up together, because we would get only one of them. The Mojave got precedence. They came up together. Mojave passed, and the word that came back to me was, "We aren't going to pass two for California like this. It's the last day of the session. Goodbye." The next thing we knew, we were in the Newt Gingrich Congress. And instead of having a Democrat controlled Congress, which by the way in that early period--and I don't have the dates for it, but I think it happened once in each Congress--I just have not done this work myself, so I don't know the answer. This was John Duncan of Tennessee who tried twice to sell the Presidio. And he each time was turned back, and it was Nancy Pelosi who led the charge to turn him back, and he was turned back successfully twice, but not by the hugest of margins. The idea was either to sell the whole thing or really that the intention was only to keep the Coast. I had to go to a hearing that was conducted by Bruce Ventos on this, and I did a lot of research about how the intention was the whole Presidio, and that was the essence of what I had to say.
SH: The intention of? AM: Of Burton's legislation was the whole Presidio. And anyway, that had to be downed twice. It became very evident that Congress bipartisanly--Newt Gingrich notwithstanding--but bipartisanly did not intend to continue to pay or would not pay a huge amount in perpetuity for the Presidio. The difference is that the earlier Congress would have been more generous, and would have been more reasonable. This one not only came along two years later with two more years of decaying buildings, demoralization, and other things, but when it came through, it came through with no subsidy after 15 years--and we had to move that 15--it was 12 originally. It was also supposed to be five members on our board. We would no more have survived that than the man on the moon. I mean, it's all we can do with the seven of us to keep up at that place. And so by the time we got our legislation, we had, I would say a certain punitive quality in the legislation. There's an old line that goes, "A, B, C, anything but California," in case you haven't heard it. And this has to do with how generous--I mean, this place is as big--California is as big as six states, you know? And everything goes to California. So, we got a very onerous bill, and we have to live with it. We were chosen--the bill passed in '96--we were chosen in '97. And I think--I was sworn in in '97--in the spring of '97. I believe it passed in the fall of '96. And we have been dealing with a planning and development situation ever since. The biggest difference is that we deal with a market economy, and that's what makes the GNPA not quite work for us. We've used a lot of stuff from the GNPA. We've borrowed a lot. We actually will have at the moment--now, the Lucas project is not on the ground, but at the moment, we have more nonprofits on the Presidio than we have for profits. But the idea, if I--my usual example is: If I were going to start a global center for the solution of the world's problems, I would probably start in a couple of rooms in a downtown office, and I'd think about which problems I wanted to work on, and which ones I was going to solve, and who would fund them. And I'd have to seek the funders. I'd have to get that working. And then I might pick out a slightly larger office downtown, or I might go out to a small city like Santa Rosa and start, you know, in a building--a small building somewhere--my global center, and build it slowly. I'd never start with a defunct Army post with 850 structures, 470 of which are historic where the whole blooming mess is a Potemkin's village of structures, because behind those facades is rot, asbestos, no handicap access, rotten electrical lines, and in the words of one of our Board of Trustees who knows this kind of stuff, Don Fischer [?], our commercial stuff--the buildings that--commercially he calls them "nonresidential." We have never found a word that we could--I don't like the word "commercial." We never could find another one. He said, "All of that stuff is not worth anything. It requires so much work to bring it up to date that only the bravest come in." What did we do? We went for a combination of what would bring us money quickly--and this is the kind of planning that is--this is market based planning. It has nothing to do with Park Service type planning. And this is why somebody like Doug was not suited for this. It takes a totally different mindset. It is, you go--let's see, "Where can we got money?" The low hanging fruit is the housing. Housing has to be filled. It will rot if it isn't filled with people anyway. So, let's get the housing as much as possible filled. The Army's occupying some of it. We're thrilled. Let them stay for a while. Are they paying a fair rent? No, but at least they're keeping the buildings warm, and that's important. Let's go for that. What's the biggest thing we have on our plate? We're in an up market--a really booming real estate market. The biggest thing is Letterman [?] Lehrer [?]. UCSF didn't want it. We had special legislation on that. That's not covered, of course, properly or accurately in the manuscript. Ah, but we had special legislation, and for the reasons given in the manuscript, among others, that didn't work out. Fortunately, it didn't work out, because the State of California would never have paid the kind of money that we need to get out of that property so we can help to have nonprofits on that place, and do the vegetation management that the Park Service and we want to see happen. And the habitat restoration and the historic building repairs--all of which are tremendously expensive. So, we had an entrepreneurial type director who went in and more boldly than anybody went and solicited what we needed for--and we had 16 submissions. Eight of them were sort of okay. They got down to four, after two of them combined. And we finally wound up with Lucas. Is Lucas exactly what we set in mind? Did we wait for the perfect tenant? We can't do that, not with the schedule we're on. And so we're now going through--if this had waited till now, we couldn't have gotten Lucas in. Or if we got Lucas right now, instead of getting five plus million a year, we might get three, you know? Because we got him sewed up in a lease. And that's the way this goes. We are--we have to respond to what people bring to us. When we put out requests for qualifications, which is the first step, which is: "Can you handle a project?" sort of thing. That we want bed and breakfasts in the Funston Avenue area. Can you handle this? A bunch of people say we can. Okay. Put in--now we have requests for qualifications. First, we reject some of those people, because they aren't qualified. Then you get requests for proposals, and you go through that. Okay, a handful survive. Well, in the end, nobody wanted them. That part--that area we all think is ideal for bed and breakfast, and you know something? No one wants to put a bed and breakfast there. So, we said, "Why?" We took a closer look at the buildings. You look at the shapes of the suites and the lack of a proper kitchen, the fact that it isn't a group kitchen, and how expensive it would be, and how people couldn't have bed and breakfast, because you'd have to have a resident manager in every building. You'd have room for about two rooms. So, you'd probably have to charge several hundred dollars a night for your rooms, and the bed and breakfast people looked at it and said, "We can't do that." But the plan says "Bed and Breakfast" there. And it just looks like a bed and breakfast, but it isn't. And that's the kind of thing that we're dealing with. It's--the two things that make us different from the way the park runs--one is what I cited before that I take care of this and the other directors take care of this place as if it were our own homes. I mean, we run this place, and we keep up the buildings the way we keep up our homes. And the other part of it is, we're in a market economy, and we have to produce, and it's not the same thing. You know, the Bay Area Discovery Museum ideally, perfectly fitted itself into this little corner of East Fort Baker. But how long did we wait for them to come? They didn't come during the first ten years of the park's existence. They might have come in about the fifteenth year, you know? Hey, we can't wait that way. We put out something, and if somebody can handle it, and it's a positive force, we will find a way to make that person and that group or that project contribute to the Presidio. We will find a way. Either we will get money for it that will make other things happen, or they'll do exhibits for us, or in the case of Lucas, to take one fraction of what he will do aside from his rent, as we know that we will have access to the kinds of technology that will help us to do some very good stuff. So, that's part of what we consist of.
SH: I think you've already alluded to several points in which the operations of the Trust differ from what the Park Service might have done. Do you have any other thoughts on that matter? Or do you think you've already answered it fairly effectively? AM: Well, I think I'd like to say why we're similar. We subscribe to and work with you on the vegetation management plan. We have gotten 100 million dollars to clean up that post and we have--that is environment remediation and we have an insurance policy for another 100 million if we need it. The Park Service, by the way, was willing to settle for six million of clean-up and 30 years of monitoring. We said no, we're going to clean the place up. We are very concerned with habitat. We are thrilled with our grey foxes. [laughter] We are absolutely ecstatic over the changes that we've been able to work with the Park Service in doing a nursery program, and in having people do site stewardships that develop out of this program. All the stuff that we're working on to make sure that the historic buildings are well cared for. And we, of course, we do the proper historic approvals. We are not trying to get around the historic preservation laws. There's this quirk in the legislation that refers to the "habs report." It's a quirk in the legislation. We're paying attention to--we're a national historic landmark that governs us, and we have no intention of losing the national historic landmark.
SH: We're nearing the end of the interview, and I appreciate your patience in [laughter] going through this process. It's been enjoyable and a learning session for me as well. But let me ask you a couple of kind of wrap-up or broader scale things. So, let's kind of drop back to the broader scale at the end.
[End of Side 1]
SH: Why don't we drop back to some broader scale thoughts here as we conclude the interview? And I'd like to ask you, first of all, what issues you may foresee in the next decade, let's say, that are going to be of great importance to Golden Gate NRA? AM: Well, when I think of Golden Gate NRA, I think of the whole park, even if some of it is under Point Reyes. And when I think of that, I recognize that we have--this is something I happen to be aware of at the moment--a certain amount of growing conflict, because of changes in population, amount of population, the nature of a population that hasn't remembered, you know, how this came about, takes it for granted, new toys that I can't predict. I mean, who could predict, for example, off-road bicycling? I mean, it happens, you know. The off-road ones. Suddenly. And I see a tension between natural resource people who have been given a very good charge by former director Stanton to respect natural resources and the users--the dog people, the ranchers who have had a different kind of openness and freedom as long as it was always another place to do something. All of a sudden, those places are closed up in one way or another, and all of us are having to live somewhat differently. And so I see more competition over the space that we have. And that's because of changes of population, both in habits and in some cases, affluence, but also deaffluence--that's certainly not a word, but less affluence. I live in a big house. My kids live in--one lives in a condominiumized flat with her family, and the other one who's single lives in a tiny apartment. And I always had more space to live in when I lived out here. I mean, even when my husband and I were newlyweds, we always had more space than they have. So, the parks mean an enormous amount to them and all the things--all the activity that they want to bring. And I just see that we have--I'm just grateful and so happy for every inch of this space that we were able to set aside, because I don't think there's much--you know, we're doing quite well in San Mateo County. We have a deadline there, too. We have to move in and get the land that we want, and I'd love to see the east side of Tomales Bay saved. Right now, it's not on the political cards. I just don't see it. The champions are not there. And the negative forces are there. That's one--so, that's one whole unit of trying to--to care about--we need as much space as we can to deal with the population that we have that surrounds, which are--which population is living in smaller circumstances. I see and I am concerned for the Park Service having a--leaving a negative impression in parts of the community. Now, I happen to know that there's a lot of chafing--it's been quite evident for some time-- with the ranchers up in Marin. Well, this is more a Point Reyes issue, because it's administered by Point Reyes. A lot of this land is Golden Gate. And the original expansion on the east side of Tomales Bay was supposed to be Golden Gate until the neighbors or the ranchers said, "Oh, no, Point Reyes treats us better," but they no longer think that. And the issues have to do with all of the curtailments and restrictions that a whole bunch of acts that came in starting in the 60's have brought on of care for the land--how can I object to any of that? Until I learn that for example, nobody up in that district has a lease any more, because the Fish and Wildlife service is dealing with the natural resource issues up there. And there's some question as to how these forces will balance. I think it's going to be a tough call between what is Marin County, and the history of both of these parks feels very strongly is a ranching community north of the Bolinas Fairfax Road and the call for saving species as though, you know, at times, one and the other cannot be accomplished side by side. It takes good thinking. It takes a scalpel and not a meat axe to work one's way through that. Most of all, I'm concerned again that this leaves a bad taste in people who say--as do the northern ranchers on the east side of Tomales Bay--"We don't want a Park Service here, because they're going to interfere with our way of life." What are you doing in your way of life that they would interfere with? I can think of one who's in the park who used to run all of his rows--I couldn't believe it--they all drained into Tomales Bay. They drained into Olima [?] Creek and drained into Tomales Bay. This is Golden Gate land, because he ran the furrows over the hills. Instead of contour plowing, he ran them over the hills. You said, "Oh, my God"--now, surely, he would learn something, and it would be better for him if he learned it. But you get into other areas where that's not going to be so easily learned, or there really will be conflict between red-legged frogs and Sonoma spine flowers and other things. And so that exists. So, as I say, there's that kind of thing, and then there were the dogs. And the recreational--there we have a very vocal population where I feel again that the Park Service needs to be, you know, forceful in what it needs to do, and does have to uphold National Park standards. It takes such effort and genius really to get past what have been built-in uses over many years. Now, when we got rid of hunting in December of 1970 on Rodeo Lagoon, three counties--or two counties and the City of Sausalito all ganged up on the Army at one time. It wasn't hard. It was the Vietnam War. They were shooting ducks on Roedo Lagoon. You don't shoot ducks in that kind of a location in the city. And they all passed resolutions within 36 hours of each other, and they got the hunting stopped. I mean, first put on a moratorium and on New Year's Day or Eve, the good--commanding officer said, "I quit." You know, "I give up. No more hunting." And of course, there are no more hunting clubs up north. How about the coyotes? We've got terrible pictures in the Point Reyes Light [?] this week about coyotes eating lambs in Marin. And the coyotes are moving down into the cattle area. I don't know how much a cow and a coyote--it's not the same size as a lamb. I have no expertise that way. But how about reintroductions of animals? How about the wolf reintroductions elsewhere? I'm very sympathetic to the wolves. I want the wolves to come back. I want the coyotes to be able to be around, but you really do run into conflicts. And again is it the rotten Park Service that's creating this conflict, or do we really have an educated public--or a public that can be educated that says, "Well, coyotes have their place, and you know, we'll keep the lambs fenced, and we'll pay for--and if the government will pay us for the lost lambs," I mean, you know. But there's--there's also apparently, there's been quite a bit of depredation [?] in the sheep ranchers. We do not have sheep ranchers in the park, but I [?] see the coyotes coming down. So, that's a major area. It's a group of major areas. It's population pressure, uses, and conflicts between natural values and other values.
SH: Do you have any silver--I don't know if "silver bullets" is the term, but do you have any magic recipes for the Park Service to help see its way through some of these challenges coming up? AM: Well, if there's any park that's trying, it's this one. I mean, in the sense that we don't have the adequate personnel. We simply don't have enough people to do it. But when I see somebody skillful like Chris Powell or Brian and some of the others--skillfully using good people skills to work to get jobs done, to try to make something comprehensible to people--when I see Rich Barking knocking himself out as he leads a meeting on this, and a commission really trying, we need all of that we can get to try to explain this to people. We have a terrible tangle at Fort Funston, which has been characterized by more than one Commissioner as "the biggest dog toilet in the world." And we have the Fort Funston dog owners who are nuts to deal with. And then we have the people on China--on Baker Beach who say they never knew that the dog had to be on a leash, and they're asking for jury trials. And we have the much more better behaved and more--much better behaved and more--trying to work with us people on Chrissey [?] Field--the Chrissey Field dog walkers. So, it's really a matter of how many people can recognize that we're all human beings in this together, and we have some human problems to solve. I happen to think that this park is very dependent on people of good will.
SH: Let me ask you to reflect on your 30 some years of service to this park, and ask you to single out some of the contributions you feel are the most important or significant. AM: Working at it in the first place. [laughter] In the second and the third and the fourth sticking with it. Making it a complete single purpose endeavor where I hardly ever do anything else. I've rarely--I was a City Rec Park Commissioner, and I did work on the Tuolomne River Preservation Trust, but where this has been always the dominant single purpose, and I think that's very necessary to--I've been able to be the connection. What Doug Nadeau [?] and I have not done--and you may--it would be awfully useful if somebody got us sooner rather than later is to get down better--a little different intent than this, although this is part of it--the collective memory of this park. We haven't got--that's not down on paper. And--the institutional memory. This is one of the things I've been looking for in this book is the institutional memory. To me, that's the dominant need for this book. And that's why I'm frustrated when it isn't all there. So, I'd say that's--after that, it's hard for me to single it out. The Presidio Trust work is, you know, painful, but absolutely fascinating, and it's just--it's a different dimension, and I guess it's more than anything else put a spotlight on what is becoming more and more heartbreaking, which is that this agency doesn't have enough money to do its job.
SH: Any final thoughts you want to share before we call it an afternoon? AM: [laughter] I'm glad the park's here.
SH: I'm glad the park's here, too, Amy, and I appreciate the time you've taken for the interview. Thanks a lot.f AM: Thanks, Steve.
[End of Interview]
Colonel Schonher Inspecting
Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives, GOGA 33762
“Fort Miley was surrounded by what they call a man-proof fence; but no fence is man-proof. But that was more security for just any casual person trying to get in. ” -Col. Schonher
Colonel John Schonher Part 1
A discussion of San Francisco Harbor Defense between Colonel John Schoner and Golden Gate National Park Historians Stephen Haller and John Martini conducted in 1995.
Haller: “My name is Steve Haller. I’m the park historian for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. John Martini, the curator of military history, is here with me today on October 25th, 1995, at the home of Colonel John Schonher. And Colonel Schonher lives in Sacramento, California, and he’s graciously invited us both here today to allow us to interview him about his experiences with the Coast Artillery Corps and the Harbor Defenses of San Francisco during and after World War II.
“So thank you, Colonel Schonher, for having us here today.”
Schonher: “You’re welcome.”
Haller: “Now, we are making this tape for the archives of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. And I understand that the National Parks Service has your permission to make this recording and to transcribe it and to use it for research purposes; is that correct?”
Schonher: “That’s correct.”
Haller: “And that you’re willing to assign the copyright to this tape for those purposes.”
Schonher: “Yes, I am.”
Haller: “Great. Well, thanks very much, as I said, for having us today.
“And why don’t we start the interview by asking you to tell me a little bit about your personal background, like when you were born and where, that sort of thing.”
Schonher: “Yes. I was born in Seattle, Washington, on September 5, 1909. Attended schools and one year of high school there, and came to California in October of 1924; attended high school in San Francisco. And at that time, I had joined the Junior ROTC program at the high school and, later, the National Guard. I obtained a scholarship to the University of California in 1927, and I continued the ROTC program into the senior grade as commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Reserve in December 1930, and I graduated in 1931 with honors in the College of Commerce.”
Haller: “Did your family have a military background or were you the first --”
Schonher: “No. Came from a single-parent family. I had a very introverted, isolated type of life until I came to San Francisco and went to live with my aunt for the last two years of my high school years.”
Haller: “So what motivated you to join ROTC?”
Schonher: “Well, I guess it’s fascination with the military. Sometimes I think maybe a patriotic background probably wasn’t a great deal there. Everybody seems to think that, but at least I was fascinated by the military.”
Haller: “So when you start --- after your ROTC --- your military training, how did you actually get into the military?”
Schonher: “When I was in high school, before I obtained my scholarship my hopes of getting any kind of advanced education was through the military academy; and my instructor in the Junior ROTC had arranged with the local congressional representative to get an appointment to West Point.
“I’d had a little trouble with my left eye. I’ve got a scar on the cornea from a cracker getting into my eye, according to what my mother said. Anyway, I went out to the Presidio for an examination. On a good day, I guess I could pass the 20/20, but it was very borderline. And with the risk of having to pass an examination, physical examination, in the academy every year, it seemed a little bit risky. So I put it on hold for the time being, as far taking advantage of it [the appointment – JM]. And it was only a few months later that I obtained a scholarship to the University of California.
“At that time, five percent out of the top graduates of the ROTC program could obtain a commission in the regular Army. And I had that in view, except at the time I received my commission, money was running out and the Depression had started; and those appointments were no longer available.
“Of course, in recent years, the bulk of all officer personnel comes from college ROTC programs rather than any of the academies.”
Haller: “So when did actually you become commissioned and where did you start in the Army?”
Schonher: “Well, I started out to go ahead and seek my own career in civilian life --”
Haller: “I see.”
Schonher: “-- which was not very easy in the depth of the Depression.
“So that when CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps] started, they offered active duty for officers to go on duty with these camps. And so I went to active duty in 1933 --- I think it was May --- and I continued until March of 1937 as second lieutenant and first lieutenant. And during that period of time, I certainly had a great deal of experience with rather similar duties as you do in the military. E CAMPs [?], as far as the military was concerned, was just to provide housing, recreation and welfare for the enrollees, the different Park Service, Forest Service; took over the work programs.”
Haller: “Where were the camps that you supervised?”
Schonher: “Well, first camp was in Modoc County, north of Alturas. While I was there, I was selected to winterize the camp over in Hayfork on the Trinity side of the valley. And went over there and hired personnel to cart, to saw, to turn a summer camp into a winter camp. And then I remained there on duty as a junior officer. Then I went to other camps. Went over east of Redding, where I became camp commander for quite a period of time. I moved up to another camp in Castella and then back to Hayfork. And then went to Oregon in a camp west of Salem, in the foothills there, which was with the Park Service, and left in March of 1937.
“After that, there were some periods of two-week active duty. I had taken a position as an auditor with the State Franchise Tax Board and considered leaving --- staying there until I retired, but I stayed active in the Reserve.
“And in 1940, the Sixth Army held --- no, it was the Fourth Army --- the Fourth Army held maneuvers in the state of Washington, and I went on a four-week active-duty tour, which was rather unusual to have that long a period. But it was a large maneuver; involved the regular Army, National Guard, Reserve officers in a huge program because at least the President and members of congress felt that we should start doing something about our own national preparedness.
“And then at the end of that, I returned back to Sacramento and I could feel that it was only a matter of time to be called to active duty, so I volunteered to go on extended active duty in November of 1940. And all the orders I received --- others were there involuntarily, because Congress had passed an act that they could call Reserve officers for one year of active duty, plus the drafting of personnel to fill out what was a very skeletonized Army.”
Haller: “Is that --”
Schonher: “And --- sorry. Go from there.”
Haller: “Oh, excuse me. I was just going to ask you, is that the time, at that point --- were you then assigned to the Coast Artillery Corps? Did you ask for that assignment?”
Schonher: “When you --- when you get your commission in college, you can ask for your Reserve assignment with any kind of active organization that’s available. Many of the infantry people – of course, the Infantry unit at Berkeley was the largest. The Coast Artillery and the Naval unit and the Air Corps group were about the same size. And I, of course, asked to be attached to the 6th Coast Artillery as a Reserve officer.”
Haller: “I see.
Martini: “Was that because it was a local unit in San Francisco?”
Schonher: “Yes --- well, it was the only nearby coast artillery. That’s what I had been trained in, yeah.”
Martini: “Did you have a special interest in coast artillery?”
Schonher: “Well, yes, because I belonged to the National Guard, as I previously stated. I joined underage, which many of them did. And that was the 250th Coast Artillery; tractor-drawn, 155-millimeter regiment. And so I had a lot of hands-on training, from the very basic part of the artillery preparation, and manipulation of the data to transfer to the guns for firing.
“I think the first summer of active duty, I was just what you call a --- operating one of the azimuth instruments that tracked the target. The next year, I was a plotter that did the plotting on the firing board for the --- I’ll show you a picture --”
Martini: “This is one of your private photos? This is a group photograph.”
Schonher: “Yes. It’s --- they gave us copies of them. Signal Corps, of course, no problem taking pictures and making copies of them. This is an earlier one with Colonel Eustis.”
Haller: “To go back sort of chronologically and not get too badly out of chronological order, were the --- when you were discussing the 1940 maneuvers in Washington, which I assume was around Camp Lewis; is that correct --”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “-- Fort Lewis, rather?”
Schonher: “Yes. They had the --- north and south was the boundaries of the Shahala River. So I believe we were in the southern group.”
Haller: “Uh-huh.”
Schonher: “And this was --”
Haller: “You were in the --”
Schonher: “2nd Battalion, the 6th Coast Artillery, at that time.”
Haller: “Okay. Great.”
Schonher: “And that was supposed to be the anti-aircraft battalion --”
Haller: “I see.”
Schonher: “-- which, of course, didn’t materialize quite that way; eventually.”
Haller: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “But all they had was .50-caliber machine guns. They had no 90-millimeter antiaircraft guns, nothing. So we --”
Haller: “No 3-inch guns, no nothing?”
Schonher: “No, nothing.”
Haller: “Really.”
Schonher: “Very skeletonized.”
Haller: “Okay.”
Schonher: “But we could go through the maneuvers, you know, move and go wherever we’d be needed.”
Haller: “Right.”
Schonher: “So we spent the first week up there just getting in the trucks and moving, reconnoitering all the territory so we knew what the ground was like. Of course, it turned out a lot of it was wasted, but we didn’t know what was coming. And, finally, they did --- I think the maneuvers lasted three days, if I remember correctly. And we really didn’t know what was really going on very much. They had umpires galore all over, too, but I never saw one. So I guess we never got very much involved in the maneuvers at all.”
Haller: “Well, I don’t imagine a first or a second lieutenant --”
Schonher: “But it was a big one. It was big one. It was very interesting. You’d see ---you’d go up --- you’d go up a highway and come to a crossroads, and here’s a reconnaissance unit with a horse and a 30-caliber machine gun. [Laughs] And I thought it was --- we saw the trains coming in for that maneuver on the Milwaukee Route in the northern part. I never saw so many trains and coaches that they brought out from everywhere just to pull these people in. Because it took, I think, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California. I guess what was used to be called the 9th Corps Area before they divorced the tactical up to the maintenance people.”
Haller: “Now, what greeted you when you got --- it was later that same year that you got to Fort Winfield Scott?”
Schonher: “Well, it was later --- that was --- that was in August, and by November --- what was going on then, it was an all volunteer Army and I thought maybe they’d call on us. I thought maybe it might be a little advantageous to be on there first. But it didn’t seem to make a great deal of difference, because the whole group was eventually --- pretty much every officer that was a member of the Reserve assignment to 6th Coast Artillery were all under active duty. We had a huge mobilization.
“And at this time, of course, there was still a very strong peace movement in this country and didn’t want to get involved. But President Roosevelt, you know, he’d been Secretary of the Navy. He understood what the problems were and thought he’d convince Congress that we should start doing something. But we were still defense-minded. You know, the Navy’s the first line and then the Coast Artillery’s the second.”
Haller: “Right.”
Schonher: And at this period of mobilization, I guess the Coast Artillery’s kind of the top dog in the Army, as far as that’s --- you know. Precedents in training --- although the Infantry was certainly mobilized. 30th Infantry was filled out very quickly with draftees, just as much as the Coast Artillery. But the news and everything else seemed to center on the Coast Artillery, because this was something people could visualize.”
Haller: “Now, you were talking about the Fort Lewis maneuvers, where the recon outfit at a crossroads would consist of a guy on a horse and a 30-caliber machine gun.”
Schonher: “Yes, yes.”
Haller: “So what was the situation in terms of readiness and equipment that greeted you at Fort Winfield Scott later on --- or subsequent?”
Schonher: “Well, I went on active duty in November of 1940. They’d gotten the grade officers -- captains and the junior officers -- were all in a class. They got instruction on battery administration --- you know, what it takes to run a battery --- food, rations, morning reports, prisoners, guard duty; all the little details which you don’t have hands-on experience, because you don’t experience this, even on a two-week active-duty tour, you know. So that was a period of time until January, when we received the troops; and they activated the batteries that were reorganized. I think it says in here how many were active at the time. And it was a big expansion; and we manned installations that weren’t even --- were obsolete, in a way.
“My first assignment in Battery D, we decided to move to one of the barracks out at Fort Barry. One of those two old barracks as you probably remember.”
Haller: “Yes.”
Schonher: “Battery E was next door with Captain Hack- --- Hackenson? I forgot his name now. It’s in here. At any rate, he had --- it was one of the active batteries, because they were manning the 16-inch gun battery at the time [Battery Townsley – JM]. But they only had what was skeleton organizations for all of these batteries, you know. They’d maybe only have 70 men, where a full complement is a little over 200.
“So I received my full complement of draftees in January. Of course, I had a cadre of first sergeant, some of the technical people, cooks and the mess sergeant that you have to have. Basically, they had some training. And Battery E next door, they received enough to fill themselves up to a full complement.”
Haller: “So you were CO of Battery D, you said, at this point?”
Schonher: “Yeah, D.”
Haller: “Now --”
Schonher: “And we --- we were assigned to Battery Mendell at that time.”
Haller: “How would the assignment of a battery, in the structure of the Coast Artillery regiment, how would a battery, like Battery D, be assigned to an emplacement such as Battery Mendell? Was it one company per battery --”
Schonher: “That’s --”
Haller: “-- or per similar --- battery with similar mission or how did that work?”
Schonher: “See, the guns are a battery.”
Haller: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “The personnel, the company, is a battery, too. It’s a company in the usual sense of a military --”
Haller: “Got it.”
Schonher: “It’s a group of people, a company, an Infantry company. So they called them a battery instead of --”
Haller: “Right.”
Schonher: “So that’s --- they did the same way with the Field Artillery, the same thing.
“When we were assigned to Mendell, that was only temporary. And I’d say we received these troops about --- I think it was about January 23rd, somewhere in there. And by April, we had to fire one gun at Battery Mendell. So these people that came, they came directly from the reception center. They had no basic training. It seemed logical, simply because the Infantry-type training --- the early training at some of the training centers where they applied it to Infantry-type situations, where the Artillery’s more specialized. So we had to train them from scratch, as far as military discipline, whatever it was.
“So we fired Battery Mendell, and it was quite successful. I think one round put a crescent on one of the skids on the target, but --- we had a misfire because of a faulty primer. So the time element, we ended up with only a satisfactory performance.
“And then in May, we were moved to Fort Miley.”
Martini: “Battery Chester?”
Schonher: “I think that’s correct, Chester --”
Haller: “12-inch disappearing --”
Schonher: “12-inch disappearing --- they had that one old 1892 barbette, with the hoist the shells up with the… hoist.”
Haller: “That’s right.”
Schonher: “It was sort of a museum piece. Actually, Chester was disappearing, which was really obsolete. But they weren’t going to give up on them because, I guess, the overall idea of a defense was use whatever you have. So there we started our continued training; not only artillery, but just also even mob control was one thing that we were involved with.”
Haller: “Mob control?”
Schonher: “Yeah. Well, troops are routinely done that … do that and there’s a lot of techniques that have to be learned so you don’t fire at people indiscriminately.”
Haller: “Who were they afraid might --”
Schonher: “Well, this is --- this is just routine. I think any military group that’s --- they have, very occasionally, been called in, mostly the National Guard. But I don’t think that there was a realistic idea of any great threat of that. They had training in chemical warfare, Infantry, use of bayonet, target practice with a weapon.”
Haller: “Was your company expected to provide sort of perimeter defense for the emplacement, as well as do the firing of the weapons?”
Schonher: “Well, yes. That particular --- Fort Miley was surrounded by what they call a man-proof fence; but no fence is man-proof. But that was more security for just any casual person trying to get in.
“We were kind of like a post by itself. We had our own post flag. We had a retreat ceremony every day. I had to mount a guard. Instead of sending people down to the guardhouse to go on a guard mount, we had to provide our own guard. We had rotation and people on guard; one officer. There were 12 of us. We just had to rotate to be on duty.”
Martini: “You had command of Battery Chester.”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Martini: “The other installation there was the mortar battery.”
Schonher: “Yeah. They were --- they were given up because of very limited range.”
Martini: “So that wasn’t active?”
Schonher: “No. They --- they didn’t --- they used to practice with some of the mortar batteries. I went on one active duty in 1932, I think, where they had a mortar practice at the one on the south side, down towards Funston.”
Martini: “Yes.”
Schonher: “There’s a mortar battery there, and we watched that. But they gave up on it because --- it was just a matter of training and tracking of targets, so on, doing the things that --- hopefully, they’d have better armament later to use.”
Haller: “Were there any particularly memorable experiences of your sort of last peacetime days while you were serving on the harbor defenses?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes, many of ‘em. I don’t know how far you want to go. At any rate, I thought I’d move on a little.”
Haller: “Let’s do that, and we’re going to turn over the tape.” [End of Side 1, Tape 1.]
Haller: “During the time that you were in charge of Battery Chester at Fort Miley, were you the senior officer for the entire post?”
Schonher: “Yes, yes; because there were no other officer personnel, except our own battery. And this went on --- oh, yes, we had other training.
“For example, they had a height finder that was just brought in the service for antiaircraft purposes, a rather long tube with reflectors and telescopes. And we had to train some personnel for that, too, because that was the only fire control they had for antiaircraft gun at the time.
“And we found a lot of foggy weather there in summer, of course. So we finally ended up sending them over to Oakland every day.”
Haller: “Okay.”
Schonher: “And I don’t know who provided --- I guess the Army Air Corps provided a plane for us, to track. That was another one of the facets of training that went on.
“Now, as far as incidents, I think I can move on to about December. E Battery, they had problems there. I don’t --- I’m not going to go into it. Anyway, they relieved the commander and sent me over to take charge of the battery. And I was scheduled to have target practice the week after December 7th.”
Haller: “1941.”
Schonher: “1941.”
Haller: “Okay.”
Schonher: “And I found a lot of things rather strange there. I reported over in the afternoon and I’m standing there talking to the first sergeant in the office and I look at my watch and I said, ‘It’s time for retreat.’ ‘Retreat?’ ‘Haven’t you ever had a retreat?’ He said, ‘No.’ I says --- that was pretty sad. This is how bad things had gotten.
“At any rate --”
Haller: “Yeah. Now, where was E Battery?”
Schonher: “E Battery was in the barracks area at Fort --- at Fort Cronkhite area --- E Battery, I guess you know where it is, yes. Anyway --”
Haller: “And you were assigned to --- E Battery was assigned to what weapons, then?”
Martini: “Townsley.”
Schonher: “Battery Townsley, right.”
Haller: “Okay.”
Schonher: “They were in the throes of trying locate, you know, all of the property that had to be signed up. This was a big hassle of any commander, is you’re responsible for all the property. And I wouldn’t sign for anything until I could find it. And there’s a lot of property with that 16-inch gun battery. That was an interesting part of getting started. I think this was several days before December 7th. I don’t recall how long.
“But, at any rate, I got familiar with the organization and took care of some of the problems that they had with the personnel. I had some excellent people and some dogs. And, unfortunately, a lot of the problems were people that had gotten into the Army voluntarily sometime in the past. The draftees were no problem.
“At any rate, on --- you want to know what happened on December 7th?”
Haller: “I was just about to ask.”
Schonher: “My wife --- this is --- not my present wife --- was at Berkeley visiting a friend, and I was --- I had quarters on the post, Quarters 26B. And the two children were out in the yard playing Sunday morning on December 7th. I was trying to get some breakfast together. And my daughter rushed in and said, ‘They attacked Pearl Harbor!’ So I turned on the radio and heard the story.
“And then the phone rang, and General Stockton called and said that he was getting ready to activate all of our defenses, and he would call me later. And, in the meantime, on the radio, they had calls going on in the Bay area. Everybody --- all military personnel report immediately. And everybody starts to evac., because everybody was --- for so many people, it was Sunday and there’s a lot of things to be done. Then another call from General Stockton said that go ahead and report to the battery and get organized to be able to defend ourselves in any kind of attack. And that’s what happened on Sunday morning.”
Haller: “So what did you do to organize --”
Schonher: “So --”
Haller: “So what did you do?”
Schonher: “Well, we --- I think we had to bring the cots up, as they were in the barracks, scatter them around the best we could. Later --”
Haller: “Inside the battery? Inside the emplacements?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes. There’s a lot of room in that --- in that --- a lot of room [for cots – JM]. It’s hard to find it ‘cause it’s dark now. But the Quartermaster found out a way to attach these springs to the wall and that could be held by chains so that they were in proper position. They could also be folded back after the bed has been made. So this became the living quarters. We had --- one (inaudible) was available for the kitchen. They had gasoline field ranges, which had been authorized because of the antiaircraft -- the possibility of movement in the field. And we had enough area to feed. We had another area for the office and enough room for the officer personnel to put their own bunks in there, including the battalion commander, a good commander, who was Lieutenant Colonel Fauville (?) at the time.
“And I don’t remember if it was the first night or the second night, we were quite late --- I was in bed and I was asleep. And I had a phone right next to me in bed and Fauville’s right next to me. And the phone rang, and it came from the harbor defense commander, saying that --- the statement was that it’s been reported that the Japanese navy was 400 miles off the coast of California. I shook Colonel Fauville and we looked at each other. And 400 miles, well, that’s a long ways away. So we went back to sleep. And I think both of us had very many reservations about that statement to begin with. Turns out we were correct.
“I remember when General Stillwell came back to take over the Sixth Army after 1946, I think it was. He was interviewed by the San Francisco Chronicle, and he made that same statement about this --- he got the same report.”
Haller: “That’s right. He was --”
Schonher: “He said --- well, the intelligence was --- we didn’t have any, because we had no Navy. And you don’t gather intelligence any other way, across an ocean, than by a navy.
“At any rate, that’s how my career started with the Battery Townsley.”
Haller: “Were there any other unusual incidents around the first days of the war?”
Schonher: “Yes. We had an alert --- we had a rather primitive radar setup that was right there at the roadside near the barracks area, just where the road starts up the hill, there was a van parked there with radar equipment. Now, I think they had more than one. At any rate, immediately, the alarm was sounded that there were planes overhead and a blackout was ordered for San Francisco; and it was incomplete. And I remember there was a lot of hair raising over that as far as San Francisco was concerned. People went around jerking out lights, breaking windows and so on.
“That happened to be a very clear night, too. And nobody could hear anything, see anything. The searchlight battery turned on all their searchlights. There was a big antiaircraft organization in the Oakland area. They were alerted. That --- that came to naught. Then --- I don’t know --- several days later, we had a very heavy rain. And, of course, up and down the coast, the Infantry and Field Artillery are just going around all the --- from wherever they started, the Golden Gate Bridge was filled with trucks, artillery going someplace to take a position.
“And then it began to rain.
“And this one day, a captain --- who had an Infantry company in the area, he was supposed to provide Infantry protection --- came and, lo and behold, it was Captain Bunker, who was a CCC commander at the same time I was.
“So --- and I said --- ‘All your people have are shelters … only shelter halves.’ And I said, ‘Well, I think it’s going to be okay. If you’d like to move in behind the two guns, it’s a large covered area.’ I said, ‘It’s kind of damp and cold and the wind blows through there, but it’s out of the rain.’ He said that would be great. So I called Harbor Defense and they said that’s fine. So they moved in and it was heaven for them. They could get in out of the rain, put their sleeping bags on the cold concrete.
“And we happened to be on alert at that time. We had A alert. A alert was shoot your guns every --- code B was 15 minutes, be ready. And one of the gun commanders … sergeant came to me and said he had the magazine doors open. Had to have everything ready. And he said, ‘there are quite a few Japanese in that outfit.’
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know. It’ll probably be all right if I called headquarters.’ Called Harbor Defense Command Post and stated it. And I think General Stockton answered the phone at the time. I don’t remember. And he said, ‘I’ll get back to you’ --- no, I guess it wasn’t. Anyway, he came back personally and said, ‘Well, they’re members of the Army.’ He says, ‘Let ‘em stay,’ which is natural and it should be. I assumed if he had any question about it, I thought I had to inform him.
“And they were there for only two nights, and then they moved on. I think there was a lot of repositioning --- a lot of changes went on. And even our organization, as a chain of command --- originally, the Harbor Defenses were organized as sectors. The Northern California sector was --- General Bergen, at the time, was the commander.
“And --- but when that war broke out, we were transferred into control of the Army Corps. I can’t remember the number of it. I think it was the 19th. At any rate, this was the organization for a --- for a while, until the --- I guess it went back under --- directly under Fourth Army. I’m a little hazy about this, anyway.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “The changeover, I know my promotion was delayed for about five or six months. And my first step up after that was ---well, first, to go back to duty here, it was early in --- somewhere in January, the War Department wanted to get data on bombproof shelters; and they had nothing about penetration by aerial bombs. They decided that they would use the 16-inch gun battery, Number 1 gun, at [Townsley] --- it was the only 16-inch gun in the continental United States that could be traversed to a land area.
“Well, they constructed four concrete blocks of various thicknesses and various reinforcement steel in ‘em. And I was assigned the problem of firing at these blocks. Although the ordnance officer at Harbor Defense post would be charged with it, I never saw him.
“Well, it was kind of a neat problem. They had to define the muzzle velocity of the shell to approximate the terminal velocity of a bomb. So they had to use different powder charges to get the results they wanted. So they brought an ordnance powder man from Salt Lake City that happened to be the corps area command structure. He was a civilian. And he made up the various, different sizes of powder charges. We were going to fire a live, armor-piercing shell, but we deactivated --- the ordnance man deactivated the base fuse, which sets it off. They wanted just to get the simple penetration.
“The other problem was to aim a gun like that. The block is probably about 300 - or 400 yards away. I don’t remember the exact distance. So I could bore-sight the gun by pointing it at the target they put up --- first of all, you put a --- a wire across the muzzle, and you connect that with the wire screen on the block; and with the electrical noose[?], they can determine the actual velocity of the shell.”
Haller: “When the shell cut through the wire.”
Schonher: “When it cuts through the wire of the muzzle and when it penetrates the frame of wood with two --- chicken wire, it’s just chicken wire. And it wasn’t very big, and I had to aim at it. So I --- the other thing --”
Haller: “The chicken wire was on the target?”
Schonher: “Yeah.”
Haller: “Yeah. Got it.”
Schonher: “Yeah. It was in a frame, wooden frame. I don’t remember the exact size. It wasn’t very big. The only thing I remember from my college physics was ‘falling bodies, ½ GT2.’
“Now, an interesting thing, I remember this physics course that showed no matter what you shoot, no matter what its speed, it’s going to hit the ground at the same time as one dropped vertically; and they demonstrated with a sand table. So I remembered that formula, and I worked it out that I’d have to aim the gun about --- I don’t know --- about 18 or 20 inches above the target for a spot. So I traversed the gun until --- I had somebody do it while I was looking through the primer hole; and I had the cross-struts with the front of the barrel so I had an aiming point. That way, I could set the gun as far as azimuth. Then I went over to the range drum and put a little scratch there, because the readings on it weren’t that fine. So that --- that worked fine.
“There were a lot of other things involved with it. The Lockheed Aircraft Company provided the high-speed photography camera that could (inaudible) [expose – JM] about 3600 frames per minute … or second. I don’t know. It was a very high-speed camera. And so they rigged it up with the primer on the gun to have a few milliseconds’ delay to allow the camera to get up to speed before the guns fired. So, actually --- I just --- he [the cameraman] actually fired the gun, actually; ‘cause I’d tell him --- I’d just tell him fire, and he’d start the camera and then he’d press the button and the gun would fire.
“And the projectile hit right in the middle of the screen. It was okay. I mean, you know --- unfortunately, the muzzle velocity was too high. The shell penetrated the block completely and lodged in the dirt behind it. So I had to come down to a lower velocity.
“And the man that was doing it --- the powder bag --- you know, the powder bags were quite long. They had to end up with a very small one, about like a pancake, about maybe eight inches deep and greater than 16 inch, because the powder chamber is bigger than the shell. At any rate, he put that in last.
“So he closed the breech and he got ready to fire again and nothing happened. And I remember the captain said, ‘What the hell did I do wrong?’ I said, ‘Nah, nothing. I think it’s a misfire.’
“And I remember Colonel Fauville he says, ‘Well, why don’t you put a new primer in it?’ I says, ‘Well, regulation says that if the primer fires, you wait a full two minutes before you open the dang breech.’ So we waited and pulled the primer out. And the gun commander said ‘open the breech’ and looked in and said, ‘Is it still burning?’ I said, ‘Close it.’ I said --- and I waited. And I said, ‘There’s something wrong with it.’ I opened it up. Well, the base of that powder charge has got a red --- it’s painted red, and he thought that was --- all that happened was this thing collapsed in there, and the flames just skittled right off the powder charge, never ignited.”
Martini: “It started the bag smoldering, but it never --”
Schonher: “No, it didn’t even smolder. It was just no better than a scorch mark on it. Because when it collapsed, it was pretty flat; and the flame has to hit it directly.
“At any rate, I told the ordnance man --- I says, ‘What the heck difference does it make whether you put that at the end or put it in the middle?’ So he said, ‘Well, I guess it’s all right.’ He put it in the middle, so he had a full charge for the next time it went off. But, unfortunately, blew the counter-recoil cylinder on the darn thing; because nobody knew that this Navy gun, that you had to have --- reduce the pressure in the counter-recoil mechanism at the time. And we checked with the Navy and they said, ‘oh, just reduce the pressure; we do it all the time,’ because they didn’t fire a full (inaudible) [battery? –JM]. So the velocity stuck, creates much wear on the gun.
“So then when we finished the rest of that successfully, they --- after they (inaudible) the crater, they put the shell back in there and then it detonated to see what further happened to the concrete. And, unfortunately, it’s like a mortar that had struck. If you look at the top of the concrete up there [on top of casemate #1 – JM], there’s this chip mark up there that I could just --- when they’d detonate, I could hear the stuff rattling on the shield. See, they got to have a big, about three-inch-thick armor around --- spaced around so that there’s not fragments.
“Somebody was telling me that they had a black 155 regiment [the 54th CA Regiment – JM] down at Cronkhite at that time, and they furnished the guard for the --- for the area down there. And this guard happened to hear this thing a’whistling, and he started running and he stumbled down. And the fragment hit, you know, not far from him. And we had a .50-caliber machine gun that was positioned on top of the plotting room, and some of the stuff started raining down on them, too. So we --- so every time they detonated a shell, we had to get everybody to stand clear down in the Cronkhite area, because that stuff was just flying all over.”
Martini: “This is the shells that were still lodged in the concrete block?”
Schonher: “Well, they --- the shells actually dropped when they hit. And they had to hoist them back and put them in the crater, and then they had to electrically detonate ‘em.”
Martini: “Uh-huh. I see. So you actually had 16-inch shells bouncing off those concrete blocks.”
Schonher: “Well, they bounced back. Every one of them bounced back, yeah, you know, because --”
Martini: “Like the expression the path of the least resistance. It just blew it right back at them.”
Schonher: “-- they have a very, very blunt armor-piercing steel front.”
Haller: “Right.”
Martini: “Yes.”
Schonher: [Describing the shape of a 16-inch projectile – JM] “That --- that long thing that you see sticking out is just a windshield. Dynamic, yeah.”
Haller: “Got it.”
Schonher: “Aerodynamics.
“In fact, those things didn’t even break up into pieces. We put one on top of a post on top of the battery there for a gas alarm. It made a nice bell sound. In fact, one of the guards, on a foggy night, he thought that was a person. He challenged; nothing happened, so he fired his rifle at it. He found out it was just this shell sticking on a post. It looked like a man in the fog.”
Haller: “So let me ask you one question having to do with this test. And that is, I am reminded of the fact that the Japanese used battleship shells with aerial fins on them to drop on Battleship Row. Was --- did anybody ever make the connection between that and your tests?”
Schonher: “I don’t know.”
Haller: “You don’t; okay.”
Schonher: “I don’t know that. I --- I --- I don’t know what’s like that. That’s --- that’s the same type of thing that they were going to hunt Saddam Hussein, too, was a --- was a shell to penetrate the bunker where he was supposed to be hiding.”
Schonher: “But, anyway --- and we had --- we had USO groups come up to the battery, some of these famous actors and --”
Haller: “Like who?”
Schonher: “I can’t remember ‘em.”
Haller: “But they were pretty famous?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes. The only one I can remember is this funny fellow that had the big bug eyes, and I can’t think of his --”
Haller: “Jerry Colonna?”
Schonher: “Colonna, Jerry Colonna.
“And one of those girls that they had --- there were two women actors --- actresses that had the same last name. I can’t think of them. Anyway, they --- it went pretty well.
“We had a lot of rain that winter. And one of the base-end stations out --- the last one up north near Drakes Bay, we couldn’t even get to them with a truck. They were marooned for several days. So we went out with a truck and we took several people along. We just carried the rations in about the last quarter mile. But the --- they had good quarters at these base-end stations. They had --- and we supplied them. They did their own cooking. In fact, a couple of them, I think, got a deer or so.”
Haller: “How long were the guys on duty at the base-end station?”
Schonher: “All the time. All the time. They were there constantly. At the first part of the war, they --- they just lived there. They had bunks there.”
Haller: “Yeah, but for how long? Did you rotate them or --”
Schonher: “No, they --- they stayed.”
Haller: “They stayed for weeks on end.”
Schonher: “Yes, yes.”
Haller: “Okay.”
Schonher: “This --- this --- of course, the latter stages, I don’t remember just when we --- whether we completely --- all occupied or not. I don’t remember.”
Haller: “Now, you say --- so CO of Battery E, in this case, you were responsible for not only, then, the two guns and --- Battery Townsley and its two guns, but obviously, then, also for all the base-end stations, then?”
Schonher: “Yes. They were all part of the same personnel.”
Haller: “Supplied firing data for Townsley?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes. We had --- we had fire up there in Drakes Bay and we have down past Point Montara. We had clear down to Devil’s Slide. It’s just a little pinnacle of land just on the seaward side of the highway.”
Haller: “I know it. I was afraid to walk out to it about three or four weeks ago.”
Schonher: “And then, of course, we had to have plans for defense of the land around us.”
Haller: “So, then, you were responsible for the --”
Schonher: “Oh, yes.”
Haller: “-- for the antiaircraft --- for the machine-gun nests around Townsley, as well?”
Schonher: “Yeah. And at the early --- somewhere in the early past of my battery commander, Secretary of War McCloy [N.B., Assistant Secretary of War – JM] came out personally.”
Haller: “Did he?”
Schonher: “He came out. I showed him around the --- you know, battery commander --- the battalion commander doesn’t --- he just goes along. It’s up to me to take him around. And he decided that the --- the defensive area wasn’t satisfactory. He wanted barbed wire entanglements put up. So we put them down on the beach there at Rodeo Lagoon and we put it up on the hillside, on the north side of the hill above the powder magazine. It stretched out for --- I don’t know how far.”
Martini: “This was --”
Schonher: “Because of his visit, that’s why they put out the --- and so battery personnel did the labor for it.”
Martini: “Was it like a fence or barbed-wire entanglements?”
Schonher: “Yeah, it was just barbed-wire entanglements, where you put posts underground. They’re like a triangle, as I remember; very formidable. Barbed wire was wrapped with --- was dipped in some kind of tar-like substance to retard rusting in that salt air.
“Anything else that’s interesting there at the time --”
Haller: “If that’s the case, hold on for a second; because we’re near the end of this side.” [End of Side 2, Tape 1.]
Colonel John Schonher Part 2
A discussion of San Francisco Harbor Defense between Colonel John Schoner and Golden Gate National Park Historians Stephen Haller and John Martini conducted in 1995.
Haller: “Could you tell us a little, Colonel Schonher, about the relationship of your Battery E and Battery Townsley, which it manned, to the higher echelons, the group --- groupment and the structure of the harbor defenses in San Francisco?”
Schonher: “The --- as far as the organization, there’s the battalion organization and then there’s the group --- the group was major caliber and the lighter caliber and the mines. There was really three units.”
Haller: “Three groups of the harbor defenses of San Francisco.”
Schonher: “Yes. The major caliber included Davis and Townsley and Wallace. And I never kept up too much on the six-inch gun batteries.
“To go back for the regional --- year before Pearl Harbor, we had the 6th Coast Artillery; we had the 2nd Battalion, 18th Coast Artillery; and we had the 56th, which was tractor-drawn. Of course, these were gradually withdrawn as time went on. The 18th was deactivated. And the officers, I think, went to either antiaircraft or Field Artillery; and I guess the enlisted personnel went into the Infantry. And this was what happened to the --- we also had an antiaircraft battalion. When it was activated was when I became a lieutenant colonel. Captain Mormon was also a lieutenant colonel, and he had --- he had command of the antiaircraft battalion. But that was finally deactivated.”
Haller: “Antiaircraft battalion of the 6th Coast Artillery?”
Schonher: “No. It was the 65th Coast Artillery. It was a separate battalion.
“They divorced antiaircraft from Coast Artillery. They were trying to integrate it --- at least, I thought they were in the beginning --- but they --- you could see there were distinct differences. ‘Cause most of the antiaircraft was mobile. Of course, there were fixed installations, too.
“But all these units were gradually cut down as time went on. And, again, at different periods of time after I’d been promoted to lieutenant colonel, they took out a cadre of one lieutenant colonel and one major to activate antiaircraft battalions. And this is where a good deal of the officer personnel left. And then Colonel Mormon was assigned to a Field Artillery.
“Very interesting about his unit --”
Haller: “Colonel Norman’s unit?”
Schonher: “Mormon.”
Haller: “Mormon’s unit, uh-huh.”
Schonher: “His picture’s in here. He was a captain when this was done. I’ll just save that.
“At any rate, one of the courses that I went to in 1943, I guess, they decided that field officers, who would make inspections of motor vehicles, would know what to look for. So they had a school down at the ordnance, people that had Santa --- had occupied Santa Anita racetrack. So Colonel Mormon, whatever, went down on one week’s tour of duty there to learn all the intricacies of what makes a --- what maintenance is required for motor vehicles. Before that, most any --- well, I can remember the regimental commander, all he did is look to see that everything was clean and take a look at the dipstick. That’s all they’d ever do. And (inaudible) was just coming in, was this modern detergent-type of oil; and it doesn’t look like the other. (inaudible), and he didn’t believe me. He got the motor-pool sergeant, said, ‘Oh, that’s new.’ So he finally gave in. That’s how much he knew about inspecting a motor.
“But, at any rate, while we were there, we saw a very interesting gun parked over there. It was an eight-inch field artillery gun. They didn’t know that it existed. It was just something new. It took a huge vehicle to move it. The strange thing about it is when I got a letter from Colonel Mormon and he said, ‘You’re’ --- and he had a battalion of those eight-inch guns.”
Haller: “Did he?”
Schonher: “He said all they’d do was set up and move, set up and move. He says, ‘I haven’t fired any shots yet.’ He didn’t know what to do with it, so they --- they phased that gun out anyway.”
Haller: “I wanted to ask you, because you were talking, very interestingly, about the overall scope of the duties of the company commander and how you were responsible for the perimeter defenses and laying barbed wire and the like.
“How about camouflage? What did you do to camouflage --- what could you do?”
Schonher: “Well, yeah. We couldn’t --- this was already being planned before I took over command of the battery. And they had strung out these cables from the top of the parapet to anchor bolts in the ground, and they put a great net that we could collapse very quickly and tow these cables out of the way to get the gun in a position to fire. And, of course, they had something different for the three-inch guns. There were flat things with cables running out of them. I don’t --- I’m not too familiar with them.
“I had an opportunity --- the Harbor Defense commander said they had arranged with the Navy to take a ride in one of the blimps, just to look at the camouflage. They had a blimp out all the time for patrol in the daytime for the antisubmarine alerts. So we --- I went down --- I guess I was the only one; yeah, I guess I was the only one --- they let me sit in the bottom of the air seat, which was fine; because it was right in the center of gravity, and I never got air sick.”
Haller: “I hear it was quite a ride.”
Schonher: “And here’s this plastic dome, you could look right down. And I remember coming up from off the field and we got over San Francisco and I said, ‘My God, these houses do have back yards in them.’”
Haller: “You’d never know from looking at the front.”
Schonher: “At any rate, we went over to the --- and the camouflage looked pretty good. Of course, I knew what I was looking for, so I could --- but it blended in very nicely. They put the right number of streamers, the right colors, in there. It looked very good.”
Haller: “Were there any other camouflage measures that you took?”
Schonher: “That’s all. That’s all. The --- the base-end stations had a certain amount --- they had the steel visors, they painted them with camouflage. And you look at them from a distance, you couldn’t distinguish them very well.”
Haller: “Speaking of paint, do you recall what color the battery was painted?”
Schonher: “They were sort of browns and greens, dull greens, you know.”
Haller: “On the base-end stations.”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “How about Battery Townsley?”
Schonher: “I don’t remember. I don’t remember.
“At any rate, talking about --- then we had to --- we had one --- one or two incidents where our authority checked our alertness by making dummy attacks, you know. But they never --- never affected me. Most of it was done on the San Francisco side because it was a lot easier, I guess.
“But it was interesting, because the people making reports of what they saw were pretty bad. Creating intelligence is really an exact science. You have to be exact in what you’re saying. Somebody says there’s a million of ‘em over there, you know, that’s stupid. Have to get about 17 or 20 of them, people in summer camouflage uniform. But these are things that were very interesting.
“Then the --- there were --- the regular Army officers were just being drawn off constantly, being that they had better background than the Reserve personnel and certainly were more qualified for what they were doing. Of course, they were --- as far as I could tell, they were equal --- equal. I felt that I did just as well as the battalion commander. We’d have been in bad shape without Reserve officers, so --- something a little under 300,000. You can understand how pitifully small the regular Army personnel was, very small. And even now, the ROTC provides more officer candidates than the academies do now, although they are expanded. Army, all through the Cold War.
“At any rate, I gradually moved up --- Captain Kramer got promoted to major. I was still a captain, finally got --- my first promotion was delayed because of this hang-up between our organization. I finally got to be a lieutenant colonel in January ’43, I think it was.”
Haller: “So what assignment were you --”
Schonher: “Oh, I had the --- well, I was a senior officer in the north post, so I had command of all the forts. I had general responsibility for them. Of course, you have quartermaster, all the other people that do all the housekeeping anyway.”
Martini: “You said --- you used the term “north post.” Were all of Baker, Barry and Cronkhite considered part of the same post?”
Schonher: “Well, no. They were all --- remained --- kept separately, as far as names are concerned. They were not important so much as --- as the armaments was concerned. I had the --- of course, I had Battery Wallace and Townsley and I had Battery Davis to the south. There was quite a bit of distance between them. And I had, also, command of the searchlight battery. And that was in the battalion, too; because it provided the illumination for the major caliber and for the others, too.”
Haller: “So as major caliber commander here on the north side, was your station --- action station then referred to as the Group Barry command post on Wolf Ridge?”
Schonher: “Well, there was a command post there, which I didn’t spend much time in. I hardly even remember --- I remember when we had target practice with … when I was battalion commander … with Battery Townsley. Captain Garth, I think, was in charge then. So I just stood outside of his command station and gave him his orders for his target --- because I wanted a place right there where I could see what’s going on and could see the guns fired that I’d never fired in a target practice.”
Haller: “I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. I was just asking, was that --”
Schonher: “As far as administrative post, I --- I had that Fort Baker headquarters building, that little building up at the end of the parade ground. And when alert status got down much lower, why, I spent time there for administrative problems. And then the rest of the time, it was just a matter of inspections and constant supervision on what’s going on, which wasn’t --- it wasn’t a big chore, really.”
Haller: “But clarify for me, on high alert status, where were you supposed to be?”
Schonher: “Well --- I’m trying to remember. By the time I was battalion commander, I don’t think we ever had any Class A alerts. In June of 1942, of course, we had broken the Japanese code and we knew about the attacks on Alaska and Midway. They gave us that same information, because we wouldn’t know. Might have to do some kind of diversion even on the coast. So we knew about it in advance. But I don’t think that we had any real immediate alert. Maybe we were Class B, ready to go in 15 minutes. I just don’t remember. It was such a long period that we were there; and, yet, we spent so much of it in a rather relaxed state of readiness. Nothing was a threat.
“When I became battalion commander, Colonel Eustis was regimental commander at the time. He was a very competent officer. I admired him. He was a West Point graduate, and he went back in Reserve. He was Ford motor company executive in Richmond, and he came back as a lieutenant colonel. He was first the mine commander and he was promoted to colonel. And then he got a little itchy for something more. He wanted to get something in Europe or something. And, finally, he ended up --- he was provost marshal in North Africa.”
Haller: “Really.
“Do you mind --”
Schonher: “He came back for a visit afterwards, and he didn’t think much. He says, ‘You can’t believe what our troops can do.’”
Haller: “Did you ever feel itchy for another assignment?”
Schonher: “Yes, oh, yes. They were --- as I say, in --- when Colonel Eustis was the regimental commander --- and that’s 1943, at least, if I can remember --- they were taking out lieutenant colonels and majors for activating antiaircraft battalions almost every month or two. And Colonel Eustis said, ‘No,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to go.’ He just wouldn’t let me go. So that’s what happened there.
“Then the other time I ever had was in August of ’45, I was picked on what they call ‘Shipment X-ray” about 2,000 officers, to set up for the invasion of Honshu.”
Haller: “You were?”
Schonher: “Yeah. Yeah. There was about 2,000 officers there. They had to --- had to come up with a different type of organization, a much more massive type of situation, I guess, Japan. So I --- at headquarters on the post, I had to do something for the family and start to scurry around to find a place for them to rent, which was difficult. About the second day, Colonel Lefrenz(?) called me and says, ‘Ah, forget it.’ He says, ‘Somebody down at Presidio has bumped you off.’
“So the irony of it was they went out on the ship. I knew when they were going out. They went out of the Golden Gate Bridge on VJ Day. They kept going.”
Haller: “With this --- with this group of X-ray officers.”
Schonher: “Yeah, about 2,000 --- about 2,000 officers.”
Haller: “It was pretty ironic, indeed.”
Schonher: “Well, I thought that was so ironic.”
Haller: “What was VJ Day like for you?”
Schonher: “What?”
Haller: “Do you remember vividly events of VJ Day? Was that special?”
Schonher: “Oh, yes, yes. Oh, yes, yes. I --- I went down --- I went, actually, down to San Francisco that day, that afternoon; and the activities were really starting. There was --- everybody was out on the street. More sailors around than servicemen, really, and doing a lot of crazy things. I remember one was --- a couple of ‘em --- one sailor was doing a handstand on the Emporium building. I saw that, figured he was probably drunk anyway. But, at any rate, that was the big celebration.
“And then --- then we had the 6th Coast Artillery stage a large parade, VJ Day parade, about --- I don’t remember --- a day or so later.”
Martini: “After Market Street calmed down.”
Haller: “Was that in San Francisco or that was --”
Schonher: “Yeah, I was in command of the regiment, whatever, what was left of it, for the parade. It was interesting.”
Haller: “Where --- where did you parade?”
Schonher: “We started down on one of the side streets on Market --- down at the foot of Market Street. I don’t know how far we went up Market Street. I think up to Civic Center, at least. The Army outranks the Navy, so we led the parade.”
Martini: “You touched on something back there a little bit, when Steve was asking about units --- or the outlying posts from the actual battery itself, of Battery Townsley. What was your relationship to those cluster of three-inch guns on the hill above the battery? Were those directly under you or did they have their own command structure?”
Schonher: “They had their own command structure. They were a separate battalion. They weren’t part of the 6th Coast Artillery Regiment I think at that time. At one time, I remember going on active duty in 1939, that there was some unit --- I don’t know what it was … the 6th Coast Artillery manned those antiaircraft guns.”
Haller: “But only at the beginning of the war.”
Schonher: “Only at the very beginning.”
Martini: “My understanding is that they were there to protect you --”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Martini: “-- from air attacks.
“Did you coordinate with them?”
Schonher: “No. That --- they --- no, there was no --- they were under the command of the battalion commander. It was a Colonel Mormon at the time, and they were in touch with the radar setup that they had.”
Martini: “There were both --- as I understand it, both antiaircraft radar and surface-craft-detecting radar out in that area. Did you get input from the radar stations or did you rely on the base-end stations?”
Schonher: “Well, the radar for gun control didn’t come into being until way late, somewhere in ’44, --- ’45, I guess. Needless to say, we relied on the plotting board and a visual tracking of the target.”
Martini: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And, generally, that was thought quite acceptable because the navy couldn’t do any better with the fog than we could. But they did develop the radar to the point where they could track a target. And we actually had a firing of it.
“By that time, they had --- before the plotting board, you either had a deflection angle on a sight that --- which would come far enough ahead of the target to reach it when the target gets there; or you could use the azimuth circle underneath the decepticon and then --- then you’d range drop for the range. Then they developed these synchronous motors to set a moving dial for elevation and a moving dial for the azimuth in connection with radar tracking of the target.
“And we actually conducted one with Battery Davis. As a safety officer for it, I don’t remember that I was too well prepared for it, because nobody gave me much information. But, at any rate, we’d picked a foggy day, we couldn’t see the mine planter towing the target target. They had a special reflector on the target that gave a good signal for the radar. And they started firing, and nobody could see anything. And the target, of course, was out where they could see the --- they were under the overcast. They could see the target being towed. So they could just plot the positions of the shots.
“But I never did remember --- or hear what the final results were. They weren’t --- they weren’t as accurate as they were with the other method. But this was --- needed more fine tuning, I would imagine.”
Martini: “So who was --- the crew on the gun was actually getting a readout to follow as they set the --”
Schonher: “Yes. They just --- at the elevation, there was a moveable pointer. All they had to do is keep --- keep the gun pointed to match the pointer. And on azimuth, all they had to do --- there’s a control that controls the motor turning that big turntable. All they had to do was match the pointer, and that’s all --- and they don’t have to wait for the bell to fire. They could fire any time. That data’s good continuously. At other times, you had to fire on the bell; because that’s --- that was your predictive point.”
Martini: “The time-interval bell?”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Martini: “Yeah. Now, your plotting room behind Battery Townsley --”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “-- and even inside the battery itself, certain areas were gas-proofed; and there was air locks and everything else.
“Was that a big fear?”
Schonher: “The plotting room did have that, that they could seal it and they could keep pressure inside, yeah. We didn’t use it, but it was there to use. I don’t remember much about it now.”
Martini: “So that wasn’t something that was preying on your mind, poison-gas attacks?”
Schonher: “No, we didn’t take that as a --- with the way the wind blows there all the time, we didn’t think that we had much problem with the gas.”
Martini: “There’s a --- there was an article written in National Geographic magazine in 1943. A woman writer wrote a big story about San Francisco, and it was titled something dramatic like “The Gibraltar of the Pacific.” And she writes about a visit to Battery Townsley, although she never uses its name. Do you remember that --- the visit or the --”
Schonher: “No, I don’t remember that visit. Now, that might have been --- well, I would have --- even as a battalion commander, I imagine I would have been apprised of it to be there. As I say, we had very few visitors. As I say, [Assistant –JM] Secretary of War McCloy.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And then we had a Mexican general come by. I guess he was interested in seacoast.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “And photographers --- we had several air patrol officers there for a while that watched one firing. I don’t know why they were there, but they were invited to watch.”
Martini: “The fellows who were living up at the battery itself when you first moved in cots and all, it almost seems like the engineers or the planners who designed the batteries, the old type, like Battery Mendell and Chester and even the new ones, like Townsley, they never built in permanent living quarters. It seems like everybody had to kind of invent it after the war started.
“Wasn’t there any anticipation that in a modern war, there might be 24-hour crews out there?”
Schonher: “That, I don’t know. This is --- I don’t know. They didn’t --- I guess they thought maybe they could just live in shelter halves just like the Infantry. I don’t know.”
Martini: “It’s cold up there.”
Schonher: “Yeah. Well, the Infantry’s faced the same problem.”
Martini: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “The Infantry’s faced the same problem. But they --- I think they always felt that this was just going to be a one-time thing. You know, they can attack; you either repel them, they’re going to go away, or the Navy catches up with them and finally finishes them off. Anyway, they didn’t think there was going to be any long-term situation like this was. I think that’s --- that’s the thought there.
“You know, Fort Sumter, of course, they put their barracks inside and they caught on fire. And that ruined their --- actually, it was to the powder magazines and they couldn’t even fire; and they didn’t have the guns set up anyway.”
Martini: “Did the --- the other fellows from your battery, when they lived up there, they remember definitely living in those bunks suspended from the walls and all?”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “Remember when you and I and the other group visited last year, we went in that big access gate.”
Schonher: “Yes.”
Haller: “None of the other veterans I’ve ever taken up there remember going in that way. They all remember entering through the generator room.
“Do you remember any standard procedures for entering or leaving the battery?”
Schonher: “Well, we had gates --- there was a big kind of gate with a smaller gate back of each gun, get in that way. That, I know we had access to that; and that’s where the troops went out mostly, that I can remember; because it was right at the end of the corridors for both ways to go out. I think this is the way they went in and out.”
Martini: “Okay.”
Schonher: “We had --- we kept on with our retreat ceremony every day. That’s just part of living in the military.”
Martini: “You held retreats?”
Schonher: “Yeah. That’s --- well, yeah.”
Martini: “Did you have a flag staff?”
Schonher: “You go out. It’s a chance to inspect everybody, inspect their weapons; see if they’re tidy, their hygiene’s okay, uniform’s okay. It’s part of military life.”
Martini: “But where’d you have formation?”
Schonher: “Right out there in the road right in back on the battery.”
Martini: “Again, did you have a flag staff or did you --”
Schonher: “No, not that. No. They --- they had a --- they had --- later on, I think they did hold --- you could hear it from down at the battery --- at the barracks area. I’m not sure.
Martini: “Sounds like you had your [battery] parade out there.”
Schonher: “I just don’t remember. You always have --- you could play a retreat, you know, and play --- that’s what we did at Miley. We had a bugler do the ceremonies for us, and we had the two men take the flag down and go through the whole ceremony.”
Martini: “That was a question, too, about --- back when you were with Battery D, before you got up there, at Battery Chester, you made passing mention that you had two 12-inch disappearing guns.”
Schonher: “Yeah.”
Martini: “You had that one old barbette gun. Was the --- was the barbette gun --- were you actively using that one, also?”
Schonher: “Oh, well, we just trained on it. We --- we only did it for fun, really --”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “-- because we didn’t have enough personnel, I don’t think, that we could have used it.
“It was just something else that could be used. And we --- for that reason, we did train on how to --- how to load it and so on. I remember when --- of course, necessary training periods, there’s --- inspections are going on all the time. Everybody’s --- that’s where I started for --- based my rapport with the battalion commander that checked my training. He was a --- he was a real beater himself. I mean, you know, first lieutenant colonel. And he apprised what I was doing correctly, and that’s why I was sent to take care of Battery E.
“But, at any rate, I remember this one group --- I don’t know who they were --- inspectors, maybe from Fourth Army. And we’re talking about --- oh, one of the officers --- I think he was a major in one of the juniors of the group --- he said, ‘Did you ever fire these guns?’ I said, ‘Look at that --- Sutro Baths down there, they’re all glass roofs.’ I said, ‘You know what would happen if we fire the gun?’ He said, ‘Well, we could pay for it.’
“As far as I know --- I don’t know if those guns --- they were fired. I --- not when Sutro Baths were there.”
[End of Tape 2, Side 1.]
Schonher: “-- Fort Baker, and he came up with some interesting papers there about some of the things that went on on the post in the late 1800s.
“Like some sergeant had gotten a letter reminding him to keep his cows off the parapets because they were eroding the earthwork parapets, the vibration of the cows.
“And they had one coal scuttle for the whole Officers’ Row, and the big fight was always who --- what senior would get the brass coal (inaudible.)
“And another one, some officer was reprimanded because he was late getting on the bus in Sausalito. The bus was an escort wagon, horse-drawn, but they had regular service for the personnel to go to Sausalito.”
Haller: “Now, up until its last years, the Presidio was, you know --- for Sixth Army, that was considered to be a really good post. Was Fort Scott considered a good Coast Artillery post?”
Schonher: “Yes, yes. They --- I look back on it. I don’t know if I agree with it. All those peacetime years, there was so little money for training, that the troops --- they had skeletonized troops, maybe 90 men in a battery. A lot of their time was spent just on housekeeping duties; mowing the grass or policing, guard duty.
“And the officers concerned had no ability to train. They’d go down to the --- the captain would go down and sign the morning report in the morning and then go out do something and he’d go back to his quarters, if he wanted to, I guess. You know, this is --- this is boredom. And I think this --- we got a real bad situation, as far as serving that theater.
“And this is why some younger people, like Eisenhower, moved upward. Too many of the older people were too set in their ways and had very little imagination and very little knowledge of what to do, even. And so that’s the way I see it.”
Haller: “How do you see --”
Schonher: “And then we --- you brought up a group of Reserve officers were highly motivated to get going and they all --- well, they’re college graduates, mostly. I think they did yeoman’s duty as far as the Harbor Defense. And I’m sure 35th Infantry was the same way. I know that one of my classmates in high school was captain of the 35th Infantry and very competent; graduate of Oregon State.”
Haller: “How do you see the contribution that you made to the defenses of San Francisco and how do you feel about that, in the context of World War II, as you look back upon it after the passage of some 50 years?”
Schonher: “Well, I --- I’m confident that I certainly had been able to perform my duty very capably. I don’t see any problem with what I had to do. It’s just a matter of training and responsibility that --- I think the CCC training I had helped me a lot with dealing with people as a captain.
“Incidentally, I always look back on it as sort of a rewarding time. Because you were responsible for 200 men, and there are a lot of things you can do for them.
“I remember one of the --- our best trainee, as far as knowledge of what he was doing, was a man that had badly crossed eyes; very conscious of it himself. You’d go talk to him, his eyes would start dancing and he’d look very nervous. But found out the inspectors that come by, they’d picked him out right away; and the hands are just like that (indicating). So I put him in the front rank every time, and every time they’d hit him. And he had every --- never asked anybody else.
“At any rate, he had some problem with his eye and started going to the post infirmary. He went to Letterman, which was handy, and sent a number of people over there simply because they had more specialists, more doctors --- a lot of --- lot of Reserve medical doctors on active duty. They were very competent people. And the man that saw him was an eye surgeon. And whatever it was, he finally up --- he said, ‘You know, I can correct your eyes.’ And he’d like to do it to keep his hand in, you know, instead of just taking sick call.
“So when he came --- the man came back, he came and asked me what to do about it. I said, ‘Sure, go right ahead.’ I said --- ‘It costs money.’ ‘I mean, I’ll send you’ --- ‘How can anybody afford it?’ I said, ‘It’s a very simple operation.’
“And they did correct it. It’s hardly noticeable, and it changed his whole character. He became --- lost his nervousness. His eyes didn’t dance. He was very confident. He was one of our first sergeants --- the first man I promoted to sergeant.
“See, as a battery commander, you --- you have pretty much a freelance of who you promote. You just send in your recommendation to headquarters, and they issue an order and that’s it. The battalion commander generally has some say about the first sergeant --- the top very first sergeants, but I had no trouble with mine.
“I can remember a first sergeant, who was a man who was ready for retirement, he’d been a caretaker at Fort Miley for years and years, where it was just a caretaker place because they kept the armament there. And he also had an interesting story about --- it’s right next to the golf course there, and these golf balls keep coming over; and he had a hard time keeping the kids out. And he told me about one time he locked one of them up in of the data booths there at the mortar battery. You wouldn’t dare do a thing like that now, but that scared him silly. But he said he got enough golf balls to buy a used car. Just go down to the pro shop.
“But, anyway, the --- I remember on my inspection --- on the morning inspection of the barracks, that the sergeant, staff sergeant, had his own little room at the end of the barracks. Up on his shelf, he had about eight --- eight or nine books on English history, mathematics. And I tried to ask him about it, and he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘everybody’s right from high school, but,’ he says, ‘I’ve studied all these books.’ And he was later my first sergeant. And he was topnotch. He was --- he could be an officer any day.”
Martini: “Do you remember his name?”
Schonher: “Matthews.
“And, of course, we were sending a lot of people out --- you know, even the Reserve personnel wasn’t enough, their officer personnel. We sent a lot of men to Officers Candidate School. It’s still in operation. And I kept nagging him for that, and he kept saying about another sergeant. He said, ‘How about’ --- he says, ‘How about Hatten, he got washed out.’ And I said, ‘Well, I know why he got washed out; because he’s got a short fuse, and you can’t be that way and be an officer.’ I said, ‘He blew up one day and they just washed him out.’ Well, he wouldn’t take it and wouldn’t take it.
“Then he went out later with, I guess --- I don’t know --- Infantry, I guess, in the South Pacific. Anyway, he got a battlefield promotion, second lieutenant. You couldn’t miss that man, that’s what I ---
“So I thought this was --- Battery E had quite a few people that went to Officers Candidate School. In fact, the --- my battalion executive officer was a first sergeant before the war; and I think he may have been a warrant officer. I’m not sure. But he went to Officers Candidate School, and he was never --- never even graduated high school. But he was a real leader and very competent. And he finally end up at SHAEF, where they’ve got that --- in New York, the --- the construction --- with the construction Quartermaster. He was a --- he had a real knack at getting things done. This was a doer. And the last thing I heard, he had retired. Well, when he went back, the Sixth Army asked for him by name to come there. And so he came there and retired, Sixth Army. Well, he was one of the people that are very interesting.
“And the other incident that happened --- you know, about the captain’s responsibility --- was Monday morning, I got a call that three of my men were in the --- were arrested by the police. So I --- I guess the MPs told me about it. I said, ‘When are they going to be in court?’ And they said in the morning. I said, ‘Okay. I’ll be down there.’
“So I went down to the court and Hall of Justice. In those days, I could park the car near it. At any rate, Theresa Michael is the judge, I guess, the municipal. She had a very nice reputation. So before anybody --- the court started, I went up to her and said who I was and what I was there for. And she says, ‘Well, just wait here by the --- by the bench and we’ll see what’s going on.’
“They finally brought in the three boys, and the patrolman got up to testify. And he was rambling on about the boisterous comments. The judge told me, she says, ‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ She said, ‘Case dismissed.’ So I picked ‘em up and took ‘em back.
“All they were doing was --- they hadn’t even been drinking. They was just feeling good and they were happy-go-lucky on one of the avenues out there in the Richmond district. They were on foot because they could walk to Fort Miley. They were arrested for --- I don’t know --- no reason at all.
“This is the public’s visualization of military people before the war. I know we had problems in Sausalito, and they wanted --- the military police took over most of the problems in San Francisco that --- the police didn’t do anything. They got out of the picture. The Marin County, they didn’t like military personnel in public, I guess. And they were trying to angle, I think, for MPs to take over duty in Marin County; and they didn’t want it. They were stretched too much.
“I know one of my sergeants, he was driving in Sausalito and he was trying to find an address. The car --- I guess he might have weaved a little there, but the patrolman arrested him, yeah. They --- I remember that call. They finally let him go. They didn’t charge him with anything. But there was that sentiment that --- I remember I talked with someone. I said, ‘These are your sons that are here.’ I said, ‘What did they do that for?’
“But particularly Mill Valley was kind of a --- what you call an upscale English background? I don’t know. They had their own feelings about that, and it wasn’t too good. But it changed. It changed as war progressed. As people were making sacrifices, they --- they changed. Everybody changed.”
Martini: “Everybody knew someone who was in the military.”
Schonher: “Well, they know --- they can understand the pain of anybody losing their husbands and their sons.”
Haller: “Well, now that you visit the park 50 --- 50 years later, you still see the gun batteries out there; and the public still comes to visit the park. And some of them know a lot about gun batteries and --- not very many of them, though probably most of them know very little.
“So the point I’m getting at is, is what --- what would you have us tell the public, in just the few words that we may have, that would really capture the essence of what you were trying to do out there in those days?”
Schonher: “Well, we were responsible for the defense of San Francisco Bay area from an enemy attack, and this was a possibility in view of the fact that we had no Navy to protect us, which would be our first line of defense. And there was always a chance --- what happens in the future, you don’t know. And we have to take conscious of the fact that --- could make a serious threat to us, and we were prepared. We were prepared.”
Martini: “Especially those first days after --”
Schonher: “Right.”
“But even --- even --- even in June, they attacked Midway and Pearl --- they had the capability of going anywhere they wanted. And the fact that we had cracked the code, there could have been a disaster there, both Midway and in Alaska. And they had --- the Japanese had very realistic thoughts of dictating a peace in Washington. That’s what they said.
“Another interesting thing, I think --- I don’t know if I mentioned this --- we had a lot of submarine alerts. I remember the first --- first night or so, we got notice that they had --- the Navy and shore patrol had detected a submarine coming in the Golden Gate. And I think this is before the net was down. They had a submarine net down. Well, that was a little bit of excitement, but that finally filtered out that it wasn’t --- they had a lot of, I’m sure, false alerts.
“But I remember after the war was over --- and I stayed on until 1946, in June, was still there. And one of the officers that had been on duty there was in Japan, and he was present at some of the debriefing of some of the Japanese officers. And one Japanese sub commander mentioned that he had approached the Golden Gate, gave the date and time. And so we rushed down to the harbor defense patrol post and looked up in the log and, sure enough, it checked with one of the alerts. So that’s the only thing we ever confirmed.
“We had a tragic accident when one of the PBYs --- PBYs from Treasure Island went out on a submarine alert, crashing on Wolf Ridge. As I remember, I got word of somebody --- two survivors who had been ejected from the bubbles on the side. They were kind of skinned up, lacerated, but they made it down the hill to the road; and they were taken to the station hospital, and they --- and that was the first word we had of it. We didn’t know about it. And I picked up one of the medical officers and we drove --- I drove the --- we were able to drive the staff car right up to it. And I picked up the guard at the post there. Really didn’t need it (inaudible) get there anyway. But, at any rate, the plane was burned out by then. The motors and the depth charges had ended up down in the brush. It just missed the --- the ridge was rather shallow, and you could see the mark where the float of the plane scars it.
“The survivor said, ‘The only thing I remember was the intercom and somebody said, ‘Commander, watch your air speed.’ So he must have been dropping a little bit. And the plane didn’t go very far after it hit. It just --- the pilot was dead. He was --- the grass burned around about a hundred feet around out there. He was halfway in and halfway out. He had a compound fracture of one leg, but he might have survived if that fire hadn’t caught up with him. The rest of them were all burned in the middle of the plane --- you know, the whole central part just burns up.”
Martini: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “So that was the --- one of the only real accidents, I guess, with the submarine alerts.”
Martini: “Did you handle that or did the Navy come in --”
Schonher: “No. I just waited there until the --- it happened to be payday and bills scattered all over. I gathered it in stocking caps and gathered up everything I could and waited there until the Navy personnel from Treasure Island got there on the bus that came in from the other way.
“And you could just see the sentiment, you know, the feeling on their faces, you know; because they’d just seen these people, a few hours before, take off. Very tragic.
“Now, another interesting thing, we --- the United Nations Committee For International Organization took place in San Francisco at the opera house in, I think, about May, June --- it was before --- it was after VE Day, I guess, or VJ Day. Anyway, President Truman came out --”
Haller: “Yeah. They came out in May, June --- May and June, I think, in ’45.”
Schonher: “It was after VE Day, I think.”
Haller: “Mm-hm.”
Schonher: “Anyway, I was able to see him one night. Went down to --- we got a --- they gave us a free pass to go to one session of the --- at the opera house and saw Statineus (phonetic) make up the --- whatever the business of the day. But we also held a reception at the Presidio Officers Club for the military personnel of the --- of the participants. And that was very interesting, to meet all these officers from all these countries.
“There was one lieutenant general --- British lieutenant general from India; an Air Force man from Egypt; very tall, very dark-skinned man, very precise, British --- English-speaking --- of course, educated --- Turkish officer. And had one captain, an officer from Soviet Union, a captain with these baggy pants, you know. He had picked up some sergeant at Sixth Army that knew Russian as an interpreter. So everybody’s formed around to talk to him; because they were --- actually, they were supposedly our ally during the war. And they didn’t get too much out of him.
“Later on, I was talking to this British lieutenant general and I said, ‘You know, it’s hard talking to a person with an interpreter.’ He says, “Ah, hell, that son-of-a-bitch knows how to speak and understand English. He’s just using that as a cover.’ I just about exploded.”
Haller: “In --- I guess in our last 10 minutes or so, what --- what was your career like after VJ Day?”
Schonher: “VJ Day? Well, I could leave, but I still --- I was debating whether to stay in the service at the time. I didn’t know what the future would be. My children were in school at the time; and I thought, well, at least I’ll wait until June. I said, ‘I will sign up for another six months if you’ll let me stay here.’ Well, they agreed.
“Well, the Infantry --- my children went to school up on Pacific Heights area. And during that United Nations conference, they could --- in the morning, when they’d go to class, they’d see Molotov and his staff going out for a walk right near the school. They had a --- rented a house up there by that place. Every once in a while, going downtown, I’d get on Van Ness Avenue, you could see the entourage with Molotov’s big sedan on his way to his quarters.
“But, at any rate, they did offer a chance to get a permanent commission in the Army. And --- but, in the meantime, I wanted to get out --- I had to go out in June. So I went to Camp Biel for separation.”
Martini: “Which one?”
Schonher: “Camp Biel.”
Martini: “Oh, Camp Biel, yeah.”
Haller: “Oh, yeah.”
Schonher: “At that time, I did --- I put in an application, but there weren’t very many openings in the regular service for lieutenant colonels from the Coast Artillery. So I didn’t --- I wasn’t accepted at that time. I think they did take a few officers that went into the --- what amounted to the --- what finally became the Air Force and these ballistic missiles, because they felt some relationship with artillery, but there were very few. I know one of the --- one of the (inaudible) I knew went down there to Texas.”
Martini: “Fort Bliss?”
Schonher: “Out of White Sands; White Sands.
“At any rate, I went back to my work with the Franchise Tax Board as a supervising auditor, and I finally retired in 1972 as a tax administrator. I did go --- I did continue, of course, activity in the Reserve because I wanted to stay available. And in the Reserve, your retirement age is 60. And I finally got my retirement there with --- I got almost 10 years of active duty, so I apparently got extra compensation on the retirement there.
“They did --- they did put out a letter, asking that any colonels that wanted to go on active duty for the Korean War as an inspector general. And I got one because I was working with taxes. But at that time, I thought, well, that’s only temporary and I’ve got a career here. So I didn’t --- I didn’t apply for it.”
Martini: “Do you keep in touch with any of the men that you knew back from the harbor defenses?”
Schonher: “No. I --- no. One of these men here, Bedford --”
Martini: “Bedford, yes.”
Schonher: “-- Bedford, he was a classmate of mine at Berkeley, I think.”
Martini: “Bedford Boyes?”
Schonher: “No. The last name is Bedford.
“And the other one --- and the only other one I knew was in the infantry, and I knew him (inaudible). He’s still alive. His wife died. I see him at the commissary occasionally. I can’t think of his name right off hand. Those are the only two.
“Let’s see. Now, in the Reserve organization here, I went on a command general staff, teaching. I went back to the school itself and completed the command general staff course. The last tour was at --- command staff --- general staff college. And the only reason I’m thinking about --- they have the federal prison there.”
Haller: “Yeah.”
Schonher: “We had --- we had one real problem with one enlisted man, an escape artist. That was when I was commander out there. And we had a guardhouse set at [Fort] Barry. And this man --- I don’t remember what he was first charged with, but he was working out there at the garbage dump. And he had --- he would influence other people. He got somebody to get the driver of the dump truck to stop and get some liquor in Sausalito, and then he finally took the truck himself and drove to San Francisco to pick up his wife; and I guess he had a child.
“We spread the alarm right away. I got a hold of our military police at Fort Scott, and they notified the Highway Patrol. They stopped this kid driving this dump truck --”
Haller: “Dump truck.”
Schonher: “-- down the peninsula.”
Martini: “That’s a give-away.”
Schonher: “Got him back, put him back in the guardhouse. And we told the sergeant of the guard that one man was (inaudible). And I got word, finally, that he was trying to file out the bar in the cell. I made an inspection of it and, sure enough, the bar had been cut in half. And then the guard was out with him, just a single man, picking up litter along the road there towards the tunnel. And I guess the fella decided the guard wasn’t too alert and he just took off. So he was gone again. So we alerted and, finally, they followed his wife to a motel in San Diego, searched it. They looked underneath the sink, and he was curled up underneath the sink. So this time they sent him to Levenworth. And then he tried to escape there and they killed him.”
Martini: “Oh, geez.”
Schonher: “Those guards --”
Martini: “Yeah --- well --”
Schonher: “But it’s unfortunate --- he was --- he was looking at that man in uniform, he was just the best, clean-cut fellow you ever imagined. He conned everybody. His father was in San Quentin (inaudible) to this fellow, his father was (inaudible). You know, he had the wrong slant on life completely.”
Haller: “I guess so.
“We’re about to run out of tape. So I was just wondering, are there any final words that you’d like to say to us at the end of this very interesting interview?”
Schonher: “Well, I’ll take a look here at my notes. I get rambling here and I don’t know what I’m saying sometimes.”
Martini: “Let me pause and put in the last bit.”
Haller: “Okay.”
[End of interview of Colonel John Schonher, Retired.]
Battery Chamberlin
Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives, GOGA 35339
"There were two disappearing and one barbette, but that's when Pearl Harbor was bombed. That's where I was stationed at Fort Miley." -Peter Tirpik
Peter Tirpik
This interview was conducted between Park Rangers and Peter Tirpik for the general collection at Golden Gate National Recreation Area. The interview was conducted at the informant’s home. Mr. Peter Tirpik served in the United States Army 18th Coast Artillery Regiment at Batteries Mendell and Chester during World War II.
Martini: (silence). How did you happen to see the ad and everything to get in touch? Which newspaper was that in? Tirpik: Well, no. One of the fellas down at the [inaudible], Charlie Rogers, got a letter from you guys and it said in the letter if he knew of anybody that fired the guns or anything, so he asked me. He says, "You was here during the war." I say, "Yeah." Then he showed me the letter and I said, "Well, I'll give you a call." Martini: How did you get into the Coast Artillery? Tirpik: [Laughs] I was drafted into it. Martini: Did you get any choice which army you were going to go into or did you pick the Coast Artillery? Tirpik: No. No, see, I was into one of the first drafts. I got in January of '41. That was just about 11 months before Pearl Harbor, I got drafted. So, there had a bunch that went out of our county, Sullivan. They got to Fort Sheridan and they just scattered all over. Some went into the Air Force, some went into the Navy, some went here, some went there. And I think it was two out of our group that stayed there until the last minute. And when they finally told us, "You're going to be in Battery A of 18th Coast Artillery in San Francisco." So we were kind of happy about that because we wanted to get down here. Martini: Really? Probably beat being overseas? Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Well, if you're drafted in '41, you could have ended up down in Corregidor in the Philippines or something. Tirpik: Well, I was supposed to go to Corregidor. Martini: Yeah? Tirpik: Because that was when I was working for the artillery engineers and we were working on some old piece stations, way up by Russian River, up in there along the Coast. And they called in for some number one and number two breach men. And my name was chosen on the thing, but they couldn't find me. They couldn't get in touch with me because I was way up there. They took somebody else. Martini: After you got in, the training school for the Coast Artillery, was that out here? On the job training? Tirpik: Yeah, it was battery... We trained at Fort Winfield Scott, that was Battery Saffold, I think it was 12-inch Barbette guns. Martini: Yeah. Hold on a second. I brought all kinds of things. These are some of the ones I brought. This is Battery Mendell, which is 12-inch breech loading. Tirpik: Mendell? Now that sounds really familiar. Martini: It's over in the Marin Headlands in Fort Cronkhite. Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Yeah. You call those things OP's [Observation Post]? Tirpik: Yeah. I worked on those too. Martini: These are some photos of the way it is now. Tirpik: They sure let them go, didn't they? Martini: Sure did. That's why we're trying to stop it now. Park Service took them over. Tirpik: At OP/ Station [Observation Post], that was on the... That's probably one of the disappearing guns, isn't it? Martini: Yeah. Tirpik: Yeah. What's that Fort- Martini: No, that's 12 inch. Tirpik: That's 12 inch. Yeah? That's the ones we fired over at Fort Barry. Martini: Yeah. Tirpik: Yeah. I'll never forget that because we loaded those things and we fired two rounds from each gun, through zeroing in, and then they said load, you're going to fire for effect and found out that one of the shots that hit the cable, the tow cable, and the target had stopped and we already ran the projectile in there and the barrel was hot, from the first two rounds. And when he ran that one in there, it stuck in there after the barrel cooled off. And we tried for two weeks with two... I mean the telephone pole would a big plate on the end, trying to get that thing out. It wouldn't come out, no way it would come up. As soon as the fog lifted and we could fire again, we just loaded it up and blew it out of there. Martini: The only way. Tirpik: It was sealed in there so tight, I guess it had extra range or something because when we fired that one over the target, that first one went way over. Must have been a mile off course. Martini: Did you get to fire the things very often or was that kind of- Tirpik: No, we didn't get the fire too often. Now what they did was later on, they put a... I don't know whether you're familiar with it. It was a smaller caliber inside the gun. Martini: Sub caliber. Tirpik: Yeah. We fired a lot of those sub caliber. Martini: Was that to save the gun or was that save money? Tirpik: Save money, I guess, because those projectiles, I think were 2100 pounds. Martini: Yeah. Something like that. Tirpik: And about 200 and some odd pounds a powder. I think if I remember right, 265 or something like that, Martini: Physically, these guns were put in about 1906 or 1907, were they pretty sad shape when you guys were working on were they kept up good all the time? Tirpik: Well, when we took over at Battery Saffold, they were all Cosmolined. Yeah. Well, they were greased up good. It took us a couple of weeks to get all that cut off of them. And then we chipped a lot of the old paint away and repainted them. I did a lot of work on them. Martini: Were you the first guys to work the guns for a while? Tirpik: Yeah. I don't think anybody has been there since they last vacated them, I guess. Martini: Yeah. I don't know too much about the ones at Barry, but I know that they did something along effective equivalent of mothballing some of the guns out of Fort Miley in the '20s, and they weren't touched again till late '30s, early '40s. It might've been done all over, those cutbacks during the Depression. Tirpik: Yeah. We had two disappearing 12-inch there and the one barbette, it was three guns. There were two disappearing and one barbette, but that's when Pearl Harbor was bombed. That's where I was stationed at Fort Miley. Martini: At Fort Miley? Yeah. What did they do? Put you on red alert when Pearl Harbor happened? Tirpik: We was on the rifle range of Fort Funston when Pearl Harbor was being bombed. And we finally got the notice when they told us that Pearl Harbor was being bombed. Boy, they just cut us off the firing range of back to the outfit we went and I never filled so many sandbags in my whole life [laughing]. Martini: Waiting for them to come right over the hills at ya. Tirpik: Oh God. Well, no, we had all the magazine doors and everything we had to sandbag them up. Martini: I think some of your sandbags are still there. Tirpik: They are? Martini: We keep digging them out. There's sandbags every place out there. Tirpik: Well, the sandbags started rotting, with the sand, and it was getting wet and the burlap didn't last too long. So what we did was we mixed cement with them and made it so they wouldn't collapse. Martini: Yeah. Those are the ones who are having the most problem with because it's like a solid block shaped like a- Tirpik: They were mixed with cement. Martini: Okay. Now I know who's responsible for it. I'll tell my maintenance guys. Tirpik: Yeah. We shoveled sandbag after sandbag. Martini: Let's see, you said you were a breech block operator? Tirpik: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Martini: Was that a one-man operation for that thing? Was it that well-balanced or were there a couple of guys on that? Tirpik: Well, one did this. I don't know if I remember right. When was these pictures taken? Martini: Summer in 1941. This is the Battery Commander over there at Mendell. I don't know if you know him. Tirpik: Nuh-uh (negative). That guy looks familiar. That's [Gearhart Schultz]. Martini: Gearhart Schultz. Tirpik: That would have to be me because that was my job right there. Martini: That's you? Tirpik: It would have to be. Martini: Let's see. Is there another one in that same series? There's... Yeah. [crosstalk]. Speaker 3: Pictures and everything. How about that? Come on, dog. Get over here. Martini: I don't know what group that was out there at the time because the pictures weren't captioned. Tirpik: Yeah. Looks like Gearhart Schultz right there. And if that's Gearhart Schultz, that should have been me right there because that was my job. Speaker 3: Well, the pants are too short. It probably is. [Laughter] Martini: Would you like a copy of that picture? Tirpik: Yeah. I would. Martini: Why don't you keep that one? Because we've got more at work. Speaker 3: Yeah? That’s neat picture huh? Martini: That's great. Speaker 3: Isn't that funny? [inaudible] nice looking back then [inaudible. Tirpik: [crosstalk] Okay. Yeah. Martini: I like those nice fitting uniforms too. Speaker 3: Oh yeah. Tirpik: This is when you ran that thing in there. And then this thing was supposed to be full of powder and then run that up there. And then this tray had all the powder and he just flipped it onto the same buggy and ran that one right behind. Martini: Okay. That explains some. In the old photos, shells up here in the powders down there, I'm thinking that they have to horse those things in by hand? Tirpik: No, no, it just had a swivel thing. You just picked it up and it landed right on the tray. Martini: Okay. So there's no powder, this is just a dry run? This thing? Tirpik: Yeah. Well, they had bags there, but I think they had sawdust in them or something. They never did have any powder in them. And then the last bag had the igniter in it, they had four bags and their last bag had a little thing with a fast igniter in it. When that went off, the whole bags went off, otherwise it would burn too slow. And this one, sort of like a blasting cap, in other words, it was, Martini: Sure. With a thing all loaded like this, the old books that I have say something about... I know the shells came up on an elevator, it said the powder came up on its own separate elevators, because the same mechanism wouldn't work. Tirpik: Because the projectiles were in one magazine and the powder was in another. The gun was sitting here to projectiles would be here and the powdered be here and vice versa, and never had the powder and the projectiles in the same magazine. So one came up on one elevator and other one came up on the other and it came up in different elevators. Martini: I thought each gun had its own elevator assembled, but they- Tirpik: They do. But each gun had two elevators, actually one for powder, one for... Well, it was a continuous thing. It's like a chain deal. Martini: Yeah. Battery Mandell over there's kind of suffering now starting to slide down the cliff into the ocean, the whole front of the thing is skipped big crack, et cetera. Tirpik: I'll never forget this. I think that guy, his name is Mittelstadt. Martini: The guy standing up [crosstalk]. Tirpik: He was supposed to be the gun pointer. We went on a firing range... This is going to sound funny to you. We went out on the firing range to fire a rifle and of course, I being from Michigan, I was firing a rifle when I was just out of diapers. I always fired the rifles. So we went out there and I got the highest score in the Harbor Defense. I had a war bond for it for a long time. I kept it until it matured, then I turned it in. But that's what they gave me for having the highest score. And this guy out of a possible, 120 points, he only got two. [Laughing] He only got two points, and then they'd make him a gun pointer. This is a funny part of it that I could never understand that. Martini: Maybe he had good eyes. Tirpik: But actually, he had nothing to do with firing the gun. Martini: He was just supposed to observe the fall or something. Tirpik: He observed the splash and everything. Martini: The real guys doing all the work were the guys downstairs with the computers. Tirpik: In here in the plotting room. They tell you what the range is going to be. You set the range and then you set the, azimuth is the direction. And that all comes in there. And that's what this guy is sitting right here. He's watching the azimuth. Martini: The guy right behind you? Tirpik: Yeah. Right there. So he's got that... There's a big scale on this thing around here. And he's watching that azimuth to make sure the gun's the right azimuth. And then, I don't see where. . .there’s supposed to be one guy on the other side is supposed to be watching the range. Martini: Maybe that up here. Tirpik: So, I mean, that all comes from the plotting room. When that comes in the plotting room where it's all set and then wonder once that gun is tripped that goes up prior to that, well, they can change. I think I probably remember right. Interval belt came like 15 seconds. Martini: That's so like a continuous sighting thing to plot. Tirpik: Yeah. The integral bell comes on, it goes beep, beep, beep. And then 15 seconds later, it goes, beep, beep, beep again. And I think we fired the shot every minute and a half, I think it was. And then the plotting room as they go by the intervals too, later. And then if the target's moving, they'll send you a different reading as the targets moving from one end of our belt to another. Martini: Did you ever get out in the plotting rooms? Were you ever posted out there? The OP’s [Observation Post]? Tirpik: Well, we learned it, but they had special crews for those. I mean, I guess it's the guys that really had a little more education than I did. It's not hard to learn it, it's fairly easy to learn. It's just that you got two observation posts and they both got their telescopes, their range finders on a certain target. And he's measuring from here and you're measuring from there. So he knows exactly where that target is, where it crosses. And then they get the range and the direction and everything from them. Martini: It's pretty simple geometry until you start getting into things like a density of the air and the wind velocity and stuff like that. Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Yeah. Of all the guns look like that they had around the country, over the period, I guess from about 1895, 1945, and they were using the disappearing style. There's only four left right now. And three of them were already in parks. Fort Casey up in Washington has two 10-inch guns, one in the battery position, one in the out of battery and loading position right next to each other. So that's kind of interesting, half a million people a year go up there and see those things. Tirpik: They don't have any here? Martini: No, we've been offered a six-inch caliber one, which we're thinking of getting and putting in the Presidio, but that's the only one left of the four. Tirpik: And you put that down in that place by Baker Beach- Martini: Chamberlin. Tirpik: Chamberlin, that's what it was. Yeah. Martini: On a really technical question, I guess is after the thing was loaded, rammed home, breechblock set, about how long would it be raised above the parapet before firing? Was it just a couple of seconds? Tirpik: Yeah. Everything is set as the gun is in this position. And when it's tripped and whoever fires it has a long cord, a lanyard. Martini: They weren't doing it electrically; it was still with a lanyard? Tirpik: I mean, after it was tripped, it was in firing position, but they could change all there data while it was in the trip position. It didn't make any difference. It could change it because it was interval. Bells came in every 15 seconds and you get new range, a new azimuth, continued every 15 seconds. If they give you a new one, as the targets moving they give you a new one. So this all changes. Martini: Was there a talker on the telephone relaying the information? Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: So how long can you remember where you at each one of the posts like how long at Barry and how long at Scott? Things like that? Tirpik: We was at Fort Scott, I think for... Well, it must've been there almost a year. Then we went to Fort Miley. I guess we were at Scott, maybe about seven or eight months. And we went to Fort Miley, because that was at Fort Miley when Pearl Harbor was bombed so it must've been, yeah, I guess about seven, eight months maybe. Martini: When you were at these places, you guys were living in the barracks, you never lived in the emplacements yourself. Did you? Tirpik: No, we lived in barracks. [crosstalk]. At Miley, the guns were down towards the beach. And then we had to walk through the hospital yard, go through the hospital yard. Martini: Your barracks were over by the mortar battery? Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Where the mortars still there, were they still being used? Tirpik: No, they were all taken out. Martini: Yeah. Tirpik: That's where we used to get all the golf balls from. Guys used to slice over that fence. [Laughter] You sell them back to them. Martini: All right. I was down there once when the golf ball came in. So I picked me up and I threw it back up on the golf course. I don’t know what the guy thought when it disappeared over the fence and then came back. Tirpik: Yeah, when we walked garden, that post over there, used to pick up all kinds of golf clubs, I mean golf balls. Martini: So now, you've mentioned that you were a Battery Davis and Battery Townsley, the 16-incher positions? Tirpik: Well, mostly the 16-inch positions here, I had mostly to do with when I worked for the artillery engineers and my job was to see that they were properly camouflaged. That was my main job, camouflaging those installations. Martini: Painting or a camouflage net or? Tirpik: Yeah, nets. Mostly nets. And painting the concrete, making it look like regular foliage. Martini: That's what we ought to do again, I guess, cover up the graffiti and camouflage back on, it’s all spray painted now. Well, you were out here during, I think at ‘43 and ‘44, they started to scrap the big guns. Were you in any of that when they cut them up and sold? Tirpik: No. I have nothing to do with that. I was surprised that they even came to cut it up. I mean, made me kind of sick to see that, that was saw that the Battery Saffold, when they went over there, and they cut that barrel up in chunks. And after we spent so much time chipping the paint and cleaning it all up and everything, then they come over and cut it all up in chunks. Martini: I think I talked to a guy who was in the Coast Artillery out there. Name was Graver. I think he was an Ordnance Sergeant or something. And he was the guy put out the bids for selling them. And they only got one bid in which a scrapper would even pay the government. Every other bid that came in, wanted the government to pay the scrappers, to pull them out. So they sold all the guns at Scott for $50,000. All the remaining mortars and the disappearing guns, and everything, somebody made a killing. Tirpik: There was another battery at Fort Scott too, I can't recall it. It's right by the... Like you come through the Toll Plaza and you make the turn in there, and I think there was a gun battery right in there. I forget what the name of that was. Martini: Disappearing or Barbette? Tirpik: I think it was six-inch disappearing. Martini: Six-inch disappearing. Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Battery Crosby. Chamberlin? Tirpik: Sounds familiar. Crosby sounds familiar. Martini: Godfrey? Tirpik: It's hard to remember those things. Martini: Marcus? Tirpik: So many of them. Martini: I know, worked it out on paper. There's about 60 gun emplacements around San Francisco that were used at one time or another. Tirpik: What are you going to do? You're going to have a guided tours through there or something? Martini: Yeah. Well, if it works out, I think we'll do- [tape pauses] Tirpik: At Pearl Harbor, we went back there what, five, six years ago. And I tried to find it, I couldn't even find it. Martini: Was it still on army property or was it- Tirpik: Well, the cane field was all the way around it. Sugar cane all the way around it. Just this little rock in the middle of the cane field. I said, "That's got to be it," but you could see the concrete emplacement yet, but they took all that out. A lot of money wasted there. Martini: Yeah. The Nike missiles, the ones that's kind of replaced all these things, they've pulled all them out now too. They're all totally obsolete. Tirpik: Yeah. What are they using now? Martini: Those Ajax missiles or whatever, the ones that are buried in the silos below ground. Yeah. I think the nearest placement of those is someplace like Arizona or New Mexico, that and fighters is all we have now. I don't think there's even any mobile battery station around San Francisco. Tirpik: Yeah. They replaced these with the mobile units. If they could move the mobile units around, wouldn't be no fixed emplacements, and they had almost the same range as we did. Martini: Eight miles, something like that. Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: That should be the 155-caliber gun? Tirpik: Yeah. I think that's what they were, 155. Martini: There were some of those down at Funston too. They’re mounted on concrete pads and the guy would just tow it up, bolted down, swing it around. After San Francisco, you were in Hawaii, over there? Tirpik: Yeah. Martini: Coast Artillery too? Tirpik: Yeah. And they broke that up, but not many, then we went to different places. Everybody, some went down South Pacific, some went here, some went there, it busted us all up and they made a... I went into the ordnance when I was working in the motor pool. And most of the time, we're hauling ammunition on these different beachheads that they were taking over. We were hauling a lot of ammunition around, did a lot of that, but we're jumping from one place to another, just like a bunch of lost sheep that didn't know what to do with this. Martini: At Battery Mendell up there on the hill, there's the main battery structure itself. And I don't know if you've been back there, but right behind it, only a couple of feet, there's a small concrete structure down near the head at the South end of the battery. We can't get into it, we don't know what it is or anything else. It's just a curious things. Tirpik: It might be an OP/Station [Observation Post]. Has it got a front on it, an open front on it? Martini: No, just a square concrete building with two doors, no windows. Would you be interested in coming out to the Headlands sometime and walking around the place out there? Tirpik: I'd love to. Martini: Great. Tirpik: I'd love to.
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