San Francisco Earthquake

CALIFORNIANS HAVE long been cavalier about history. Does anyone remember the McNamara brothers, Caryl Chessman, the collapse of the San Francisquito Canyon dam? No. In the phrase of social theorist Norman M. Klein, ours is a "history of forgetting," where more often than not, the past gets disregarded, overlooked. There is, however, a notable exception to the culture of erasure, one event we have never quite let slip away. This was the magnitude 7.

For his children, the mystery surrounding Joe Yee's past started with his name. Growing up in Sacramento, Steve Yee, now 56, remembers piling into his father's big Pontiac Streamliner to visit the Ong family association. The group's members welcomed his father in a Cantonese dialect and addressed him as one of their own. But Joe Yee never explained to his six American-born children why, if he were part of the group, his last name was not Ong. Odder still, their father claimed to be an only son, with no surviving relatives in China or America.

As Americans followed in horror the anarchy, looting and mounting death toll in the wake of the New Orleans flooding, California historians compared that city's devastation with another disaster of nearly a century ago: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. In both cases, they say, cities crucial to the U.S. economy of the era -- San Francisco's financial might and New Orleans' offshore oil reserves -- were hit by a natural disaster: one by an 8.

Deborah Howell Veteran journalist Deborah Howell, 68, a former Washington Post ombudsman and veteran editor who helped lead two news organizations to three Pulitzer Prizes, died Saturday after being struck by a car while vacationing in New Zealand, stepson Nick Coleman said. Born in San Antonio, Howell was raised in Texas, where her father was a newspaper reporter, editor and broadcaster and her mother had been editor of her high school newspaper. Howell graduated from the University of Texas and worked for newspapers in the state before moving to Minnesota in 1965 to be a reporter and editor at the Minneapolis Star.

"Disaster!" serves history and the reader ill. It opens with an account of the geology and geography of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that is flat wrong. It closes with an estimate of the number of dead that stretches the truth until it is broken. And in between, as to the facts, who knows? Certainly Dan Kurzman has assembled every cliche ever penned about earthquakes and fires and dumped it here willy-nilly.

Like millions of other Californians, Oxnard resident Jeanne LaFever never thought an earthquake would change her life as completely as did the Oct. 17 San Francisco temblor. That quake killed her 22-year-old son, Derek Van Alstyne, plunging LaFever into grief and then into earthquake preparedness as a full-time job. "Earthquakes didn't seem to have that much to do with me. But when this happened, I thought, 'What could be done to try and make some good come of this?'

Lorraine Gowans, who survived the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and was one of the city's oldest residents, died Sunday at her home there. She was 106.

A fire nearly destroyed one of the city's oldest churches early Sunday. St. Peter's Catholic Church, dedicated in 1885, was one of the few churches to survive the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The Mission District church's roof was destroyed in the three-hour blaze. Engineers will be brought in to determine whether the building can be saved. Investigators said preliminary findings indicate the fire was accidental, ignited either by candles or by an electrical malfunction.

The producers of PBS' historical series "The American Experience" have decided to substitute the new installment that was to have aired Tuesday with a repeat of a documentary from last season about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Host David McCullough will tape a new introduction pegged to Tuesday's disaster. The program that was to have aired, "Great War: 1918," was rescheduled for Oct. 31.

The other night as I helplessly watched the victims of the San Francisco earthquake and heard the Red Cross pleading for blood, water, electricity, heat and shelter, I looked out my window and there was the answer: my motor home, and thousands of other motor homes around the country. As I look at television and see those thousands of people who are still suffering, I wonder why they are not in our thousands of motor homes. VAN POMEROY Newport Beach

New Orleans aid: Comic Relief, founded 20 years ago to help the homeless, is returning after an eight-year hiatus to help children and animals recover from Hurricane Katrina. Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal will host the event on Nov. 18, to be broadcast on HBO, TBS and AOL. Katie's swan song: The goodbye party for Katie Couric on Wednesday attracted an average of 8.

AMONG THE MANY aftershocks of the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 is one that I am observing this centennial week with equal measures of gravity and gratitude. Just six weeks after the disaster, a wedding party that included four Chinese men and their American brides set off from the Oakland train depot, prepared to violate California law. That small band of romantic rebels included my grandparents. My grandfather Liu Ch'eng-yu was then 31.

CALIFORNIANS HAVE long been cavalier about history. Does anyone remember the McNamara brothers, Caryl Chessman, the collapse of the San Francisquito Canyon dam? No. In the phrase of social theorist Norman M. Klein, ours is a "history of forgetting," where more often than not, the past gets disregarded, overlooked. There is, however, a notable exception to the culture of erasure, one event we have never quite let slip away. This was the magnitude 7.

EARTHQUAKES are an unremarkable fact of life in California. The point is made in "L.A. Story," Steve Martin's affectionate parody of life in Los Angeles, when we see the diners in a chic restaurant go on chatting, sipping and nibbling as the glassware begins to rattle ominously. Indeed, those of us who live in earthquake country possess a certain swagger about being able to ride the occasional shudder along the San Andreas fault and put the inevitable Big One out of our minds.

THE first time I visited San Francisco, I spent every minute filling my nose with the burnt-wood smell of cable-car brakes. I squeezed into Chinatown shops that sold jade Buddhas, drank Irish coffee at the wood-paneled Buena Vista. I climbed to the top of Hyde Street, gasping fog-tinged air, and gazed down at the sunlight sparkling on the water around Alcatraz.

During the height of the Cold War, the San Francisco artist Bruce Conner became so unnerved by the possibility of nuclear Armageddon that he moved to Mexico to escape it. Many years later he told me, "Mexico is a wonderful place to go if you're running away from death, because they celebrate it." It seems San Francisco itself is currently celebrating death, with all the ruckus around the centennial of the 1906 earthquake and fire that destroyed much of the city. If it's death we're celebrating.

Tightfisted Orange County residents ought to be ashamed after reading your article "Fate of UCI Medical Center Is in Doubt," Feb. 12. Given the area's domination by right-wing politics, however, it is no surprise. The solution? Immediately reactivate the quarter-cent sales tax we became accustomed to paying after the San Francisco earthquake, using a large share to either build a county hospital or to help UCI's current financial burden. LORRAINE DIAMOND, Orange

New Orleans aid: Comic Relief, founded 20 years ago to help the homeless, is returning after an eight-year hiatus to help children and animals recover from Hurricane Katrina. Robin Williams, Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Crystal will host the event on Nov. 18, to be broadcast on HBO, TBS and AOL. Katie's swan song: The goodbye party for Katie Couric on Wednesday attracted an average of 8.

HOW do you fit Hell on Earth into a museum? Ask Corey Keller, assistant photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and she'll point out an old anonymous shot of stoic San Franciscans on a fractured city street after the great quake and fires of 1906. "I love this picture," Keller says, looking at the scene of off-kilter homes and buckled pavement along Dore Street. "Can you see the guy who's in the sidewalk? It's up to his neck.

VISITORS to San Francisco will find several new attractions and incentives. Among them: * Duck Tours offers land-sea tours aboard an open-air amphibious vehicle, a renovated World War II transport that holds 30 passengers. The 90-minute journey, which leaves several times daily from Fisherman's Wharf, rolls through Chinatown, North Beach, Union Square and other districts, then on to China Basin, where it splashes into San Francisco Bay for a skyline view.