Blog: Nothing Left But Dust

As we commemorate the 106th anniversary of the Great Earthquake of 1906 today, April 18, I ponder how something so long ago that no one now living remembers still affects us all so profoundly in the Bay Area.

I call it the Great Earthquake, rather than the San Francisco Earthquake, because being a San Jose native and history buff, I know that its devastating effects ranged far outside that particular city by the Bay.

San Jose's downtown suffered major damage, effects are still visible in the mountains near Los Gatos.

Agnews Hospital was reduced to rubble and Stanford fared badly as well. And, to a great degree, everything we locals think about and talk about related to earthquakes still bears the shadow of 1906.

I recall as a younger man seeing the stories each year of the survivors gathering at Lotta's Fountain in San Francisco to commemorate their survival, their numbers dwindling year by year until at last there were none to gather.

But there are still survivors of the 1906 quake among us. The old courthouse, St. Joseph's and the art museum in downtown San Jose lived to tell the tale. A few old homes survive in Los Gatos and other communities. But the real living survivors are the cities and towns themselves, beat but not beaten, that rebuilt to become the envy of the world.

The spirit of those Californians who refused to give up is best reflected in a favorite poem of mine that enjoyed great popularity just following the earthquake. It is Larry Harris' "The Damnedest Finest Ruins"

Put me somewhere west of East Street where there's nothing left but dust

And the boys are all a bustling and everything's gone bust

And the buildings still left standing sort of blink and blindly stare

At the damnedest finest ruins ever gazed on anywhere.

Bully ruins, brick and wall, through the night I've heard you call

Sort of sorry for each other 'cause you had to burn and fall.

From the Ferry to Van Ness you're a God-forsaken mess

But you're the damnedest finest ruins, nothing more and nothing less.

And the rubes who come a-rubbering, and hunting souvenirs

And the fools who try to tell us it will take a hundred years

Before we've even started, and why don't we come to live

And build our homes in Oakland on the land they've got to give.

Got to give! Why, believe me on my soul, I would rather bore a hole

And live right in those ashes than to go to Oakland Mole.

And if they gave me my pick of their buildings fine and slick

In those damnedest, finest ruins, I would rather be a brick!

We have faced adversity before and surely will again. I hope that we can also show the indomitable spirit that took "nothing left but dust" and built what we enjoy today.