Navy submarine snags fishing boat
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1992
June 30: The crew of the fishing boat Diana was netting rock cod last Saturday when suddenly the trawler was pulled backward toward the sea by some mysterious force. The startled crew soon discovered that a U.S. Navy submarine had snared the nets of the 81-foot vessel about 40 miles southwest of San Francisco. Surprise quickly turned to gutwrenching fear when the crew of the Diana realized they could capsize, recalled Giuseppe Pennisi, the skipper of the 300-ton trawler. “If this thing comes up under us, we’d be toothpicks,” he remembered thinking. His fears were well founded, as the submarine, the Parche, which had snagged the nets, is 302 feet long, the length of a football field, displaces 5,000 tons and can travel beneath the surface at speeds of 30 knots, 34.5 miles per hour.
Incredibly, it was the second time in 10 months that Pennisi had had the same problem. Last August his other fishing boat, the San Giovanni, received $65,000 in damages after a submarine snared its nets near the same location. Pennisi said the encounter made him think of the mysterious disappearance of the Crescent Lady. Many Bay Area fishermen are convinced that the 62-foot commercial fishing boat, which disappeared north of Monterey bay with three crewmembers in January 1985, was dragged under by a submarine. “I don’t want to rag against the Navy because this is our country, but in today’s electronic age, what kind of chicken— operation do they have going on if they can’t spot us?” Pennisi said.
— Martin Halstuk
1967
July 1: Anton LaVey stood in the parlor of his home in the Richmond district yesterday and conjured up the memory of his last “session” with Jayne. Jayne Mansfield, the film siren who died so violently two days ago, was, it seems, a devotee of the Black Arts, one of Sorcerer Anton LaVey’s most dedicated pupils. LaVey produced a large greeting card — one of the humorous kind with a cartoon picture of a devil. Inside was inscribed, “To my Satanic friend ... my probing for truth may be satisfied by my high priest.” LaVey insists Miss Mansfield took her Devil worship seriously. An indication of how seriously, he feels, is the fact she refused to “get any publicity value out of her new religion.”
1942
June 27: The right of Japanese and other persons of Asiatic ancestry to hold American citizenship went under fire yesterday in a Federal Court action aimed at disenfranchising 70,000 persons evacuated from the West Coast’s Military area No. 1. Appearing on behalf of John T. Regan, secretary of the Native Sons of the Golden West, (Ulysses S.) Webb, former Attorney General of California, urged Judge A.F. St. Sure to decide a test case contrary to a United States Supreme Court decision of 44 years ago. Webb described the decision in the Wong Kim Ark case of 1898, upholding the right to citizenship of a Chinese born in this country, as “one of the most injurious and unfortunate decisions” ever handed down by the court. Webb based his argument on the thesis that our naturalization laws and also the Fourteenth Amendment were meant to bar from citizenship persons other than the “whites,” except for American Negroes.
Said Webb: “The legal question is ‘a member of the Japanese race, born in the United States, a citizen of the United States?’ The question involves the citizenship and the right to citizenship of all peoples who do not fall into the characterization of White people.” Yesterday’s hearing was on a suit against Cameron King, registrar of voters, to strike from the election rolls the names of American-born Japanese who voted by mail at a recent municipal election. Harold Sawyer, appearing as a friend of the court, told Judge St. Sure: “If you had taken the authorities cited by General Webb and changed the word ‘white’ to Aryan you would have the same language as in Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf.’ An attack on the right to be a citizen is not democratic. We are fighting a democratic war and cannot adopt fascist principles.”
1917
July 1: Vandals in San Francisco have been tearing down recruiting posters from billboards as fast as they can be put up by officers of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps. “Some of these posters have been glued on, and to remove them takes time,” one recruiting officer said yesterday. “In the East there have been many arrests for tearing down posters, but here the police don’t seem to care.” In one night fifty posters were torn down from a fence near the new Southern Pacific company office building at the foot of Market Street. The persons who tore them down wrote in their places messages insulting the flag and the armed services. In one case a Marine Corps poster carrying a reproduction of the flag was torn down and left on the sidewalk where hundreds of persons walked over it.