Jane Troutman was 18 when she inherited boxes of her beloved Aunt Leonie’s belongings in 1944. She thought little of them, assuming they contained academic work from the various universities her aunt had attended, and stashed them in the family attic.
Decades later, Troutman, now 85 and living in Beverly Hills, opened the boxes and found the bounty of an extraordinary life. Among the discoveries were artifacts from her adventurous aunt’s solo journeys in her Model T across the Western United States; souvenirs from trips to Alaska and Europe; diplomas, business cards and dental instruments; photographs of Leonie in high fashion; and thousands of pages of an autobiography typed out on onionskin paper.
Leonie von Zesch, the daughter of a German countess, graduated in 1902 at age 19 from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, San Francisco, and built a thriving dental practice in the city prior to the great quake and fires of 1906. Among the typewritten pages bequeathed to her niece was a description of the disaster as it eerily unfolded around her. She would lose almost everything, including her home and office.
But on the evening of April 17, 1906, just hours before San Francisco crumbled, Dr. Leonie von Zesch, 23, thought only of the new outfit she planned to wear to her Market Street dental office in the morning. It would be a grass-green, instep-length pleated dress and an Eton jacket with three-quarter sleeves. “A small, flat chip hat covered in flowers with a long black quill standing from the crown was to be tilted over the eyes,” she wrote. “I looked forward with a good deal of interest to the appearance I should make the next day; it would give a lift to one which would be otherwise like too many others.”
Troutman says her aunt always hoped her writing would be published. Now, 105 years to the day after Leonie von Zesch envisioned her decorative attire, she has her wish.
A little after five in the morning, the house began to tremble. Only those who have experienced earthquakes know that weird, helpless feeling that follows the first unnatural shake. Simultaneously Mother and I cried, “Earthquake!” I crooked my knees to put my feet on the floor, but before my toes had touched the carpet, my head was back on the pillow. The house rocked violently and I rocked with it, unable to uncrook my knees or straighten my spine until the first series of turbulent tremors was over.
Above Mother’s bed hung a picture thirty-six inches long, popular at that time, called “A Yard of Roses.” This swung out from the wall time and again; each moment I expected to see it fall on Mother’s head. The bureau, opposite the foot of my bed, on which I kept an aquarium with goldfish, lurched across the room, bringing it up against the bed with the goldfish gasping in a half inch of water.
On the mantel above the tiled fireplace were several dozen assorted china after-dinner coffee cups and saucers. These inched to the mantel edge, dropped over, and slivered to pieces on the tiles. In the kitchen empty Mason jars fell from the pantry shelves in a series of crashes, crockery and canned goods following. And all the while, a seeming eternity of a few minutes, there was an unforgettable humming, grinding sound that not even the walls shut out, the grinding and breaking of myriad things all over the city.
When finally the tremors stopped, we got up and dressed. I put my right shoe on my left foot and vice versa for the only time in my life, and didn’t know it until later. Then we hurried up to the roof to look down over the city. The humming sound increased as we got outdoors.
The city looked quite as usual from where we were on top of the hill, except for a gas tank near the waterfront south of Market Street. This was one of those immense Pacific Gas & Electric storage tanks. A cloud of black smoke like an anchored balloon funneled from its top. It had sprung a leak, and it was from such places that the fire started.
xcept for two loose bricks on one of our chimneys, we could see no damage to the structure of our house. We went downstairs again and looked out on Sutter Street. Diagonally across from us, on the corner of Leavenworth Street, was the Granada, a showy hotel decked with prism-glass chandeliers and much brass. It now looked like one of those furniture store advertisements so popular at that time. It had broken in half. The front now lay on the sidewalk, exposing a tier of rooms. I remember particularly an ornate brass bedstead that stood on the very edge of what was left of a third story chamber floor, with a puffy satin comforter hanging negligently from it into the apartment below. Miraculously no one in this hotel was injured; how the occupants of those sleeping rooms escaped has always puzzled me.
We did not immediately think of eating, and by the time the thought came a man had been sent out by the gas company to warn citizens that they must not light gas stoves because all the mains were broken and the escaping gas would ignite. Very much in a hurry, we breakfasted on a cold snack for we had decided to walk downtown to see whether anything had happened to the tall buildings. No one, as yet, seemed to have the remotest idea of the magnitude of the disaster.
We were particularly interested in the Call Building because, while it was being erected, a good deal of fun was made by other newspapers of its tall, slim structure. They cartooned it as swaying under the stress of an earthquake like an angleworm standing on its tail and waving about in the air.
Walking through the best shopping district, we saw the plate glass show windows of the City of Paris slivered on the sidewalk so that beautiful handmade lingerie and the finest table linens lay within arm’s reach, a half block on each street. The same at the White House. Hugenin’s, a custom jewelry shop, was equally exposed. It was a paradise for shoplifters until later in the day when soldiers took severe measures to stop looting.
By the time we had made our way down to the Call, Examiner and Chronicle Buildings, the exodus from the south was in full swing because there the fire had already started. Vehicles of all descriptions carried all kinds of people and what seemed to be the most dilapidated chattels they owned. Panic-stricken humans make strange choices – parrots and canaries, dogs and cats, ducks and chickens. Tottering old men, uncombed, unwashed and ragged, led equally tottering old women. One hugged a puppy to her chest and he had a kitten hanging from a coat pocket, their belongings tied in a red handkerchief.
Some people seemed to have become totally deranged. I touched Mother’s elbow, “Look!” A man stark naked stood for an instant in a window, then leaped from the second story of a hotel behind the Call Building when he could just as well have put on some garment and walked down the stairs.
Army friends of ours, a general and his wife, staying at the Occidental Hotel, were in their night garments when plaster began to fall on them, and doors to jam.
“We took our clothes on our arms and walked to a vacant lot on Golden Gate Avenue near St. Boniface Church, and dressed there,” they told us later. “This was a promenade of several miles. No one so much as glanced our way!”
While we stood at Market and Kearny Streets at seven in the morning, word came that Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan had been killed, that all the water mains were broken, and that there was no way of quenching the fire. The Palace Hotel was already burning and with it all the luggage of the grand opera stars who had come into town the night before. The smoke from the burning Palace was beautifully colored, comparable to nothing except the aurora borealis that I was to see in Alaska years later.
At Portsmouth Square, where Mother and I went to see how the old Hall of Justice had weathered the disaster, the crowd was so dense, what with sightseers and people escaping from their dwellings, that one could hardly walk. Sometimes I was lifted from my feet and carried forward by the tight-pressed shoulders of the hordes.
In spite of the horror, the air was electric with a sort of holiday spirit, either because the disaster was a novel experience which released people from the humdrum of everyday life, or because they were in a mood of thanksgiving and glad to be alive.
There was something of hysteria in it too. To Mother and me, everything was fearfully exciting. We did not anticipate personal loss. Our own home on Hyde, now rented, was out of the supposed fire zone; the Sutter place where we lived, of course, would not burn! Why we and thousands of others were so optimistic, I’d like to know. The water mains were broken. People all over town were daring to light gas stoves. The wind was blowing. How could the city fail to burn?
I can still see pieces of red-hot, corrugated iron rattling and flapping on the roof and walls of the Hall of Justice, then breaking and soaring away on heat waves. I can see the swallows darting frantically about, only to fall exhausted.
It soon became evident to those who were fighting the fire that only by dynamiting the buildings in the vanguard of the racing flames could any part of the city be saved. Mother and I were on Kearny Street when there came into view an army wagon drawn by eight sleek but lathering mules and driven by a soldier in uniform. It bore a heaping load of dynamite on top of which sat a great man, General Frederick Funston. To him, and to his assistants, but to the General first of all, is due the credit for saving as much of San Francisco as remained. But for his outstanding ability in combining time, place and methods, the city would have been completely destroyed.
Evidently recognizing him as a great and brave leader, the people yelled, threw up their hats, and applauded. Many followed the wagon down the street. The air was scorching hot and the way dim with smoke and flying cinders. Men with blistered hands and faces ran in and out of buildings carrying all sorts of burdens. Firemen, regular and volunteer, dragged, pushed, and pulled fire-fighting equipment. Great, strong-hearted horses, dripping sweat and lather, hauled hook and ladder wagons. Flames from the street below Kearny could already be seen against the sky.
Then the dynamiting began. It may be thought that rapid and continuous explosions are something new, to be heard only in war zones. We learned that day all about noise and concussions, heat, smells, and general destruction. Men were carried away on stretchers. Others fell exhausted in the street and lay there. Owners of buildings, tears streaming down their faces, consented to the dynamiting for the good of the cause. Others refused; their buildings went anyway.
Hammersmith and Field, Kearny Street jewelers, removed their most valuable merchandise and then, when they saw that they could save nothing more, invited the soldiers on guard outside the store to help themselves to all they could carry. One young man, to whom we talked later, had forty-two Swiss watches encrusted with pearls and diamonds and numbers of jeweled rings and bracelets.
At last, Mother and I turned toward home. Everywhere we passed people carrying away their belongings. Some hurried as if they meant to go back for more; others trudged along as if they had come to the end of their endurance. Whole families had moved from their houses to the street, starting housekeeping on the sidewalks. People were afraid to remain in dwellings that had suffered considerable damage because constant tremors were reducing them to powdered mortar and broken bricks, or to splintered lumber.
No early settlers could have been more ingenious in adapting to their purposes whatever means were at hand. Some had set up wood and coal stoves just off the sidewalk. Many had fixed a pipe to one end of a five-gallon kerosene can, and these cans laying lengthwise on the ground served as stoves. Everyone talked to everyone else. All barriers of race and creed, color and social station were let down. In a way it was like a picnic of some vast fraternal organization.
Inside: Excerpt from von Zesch’s manuscript, recounting Wednesday, April 18, 1906, on pages A12-A13.
Excerpted from “Leonie: A Woman Ahead of Her Time,” by Leonie von Zesch, to be published in May by Lime Orchard Publications (leoniethebook.com).
The quake series
Coming Monday: Dr. Leonie von Zesch spends a final night at home before walking through the city in her grass-green dress as the flames sweep Market Street.
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The Del Monte Family 