COPY BOY AT THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
(3 of 3)
December 7, 1941
The Examiner was usually quiet on Sunday mornings, but
one Sunday I got a call from the paper to get down right away. The Japanese
had attacked Pearl Harbor.
I had never seen the City Room in
such chaos. Phones ringing constantly. Every reporter banging
away on stories, others coming in from an assignment; telling City Editor Josh Eppinger* what they had.
*Josh's son, Yank, wrote me that his
father worked for the Examiner for
52 years and passed away in 1979. Josh was the
quintessential San Francisco newspaperman.
Pop was kept busy in the Telegraph
Room. The Morse sounder never quiet as Mr. Hearst sent instruction after
instruction.
Nobody went out for lunch and Breen's
became the source for sandwiches brought up by the copy boys.
As night fell we heard rumors
the Japanese Fleet was approaching the Pacific Coast. The San Francisco
Police Radio was on. The loudspeaker in the City Room never silent. Then
it crackled with an ominous message:
"Japanese planes approaching the Pacific
Coast."
A few minutes later..
"Japanese planes over Daly City."
I was summoned from the bench and
told to go with a photographer to the roof of the Hearst Building and bring
down the plates of what we were sure would be the bombing of San Francisco.
It was cold on the roof and I was
afraid. Then the wail of air raid sirens blasted the night all over San
Francisco. This was it.
I looked around as the lights began
to go out: Downtown, Nob Hill, the Mission, the Western Addition, my home;
I thought about my mother.
The city was soon in total darkness,
except for the sodium vapor lights of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
which remained on throughout the warning. A Japanese pilot could not have
asked for a better beacon.
The bridge lights were the only thing
the photographer shot that night and it was in the paper the next day with
a story on how San Francisco was totally unprepared.
A few months later I left the Examiner
and went off to the war; never to sit on the bench again, never to be a
reporter.
Bill Roddy