San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Salt water, sailors and Santa Claus in old S.F.
Like a lot of us, I grew up in San Francisco, where the salt water was just over the hill or at the end of the streets. I worked my way through college unloading mail at the old Ferry Annex post office and at Rincon Annex just off the waterfront. I was there every day for years. Christmas was our busiest time in the post office, so it was a season of hard work.
The San Francisco waterfront was in decline even then, but there were still ships loading cargo, freight trains on the Embarcadero, greasy spoons and bars so rough we were advised to stay away. The waterfront was a ghost of its former self, but the past still seemed to be in the air. It was before my time, but I was fascinated.
I came upon a little book published by the San Francisco Maritime Museum and later reprinted by the Bishop Museum of Honolulu. It was called “Christmas at Sea.”
It was written by Fred Klebingat, who was born in Germany in 1889 and came to San Francisco as a young man in 1908. He was a sailor all his life, later a master of sailing ships and steamers. He was also a master of that specialty of sailors: sea stories.
He thought the world of San Francisco. He wrote, “San Francisco in those days was known up and down the Pacific Coast as ‘the City.’ The Embarcadero was known as East Street and this part of town was known as the City Front … It was here that the work of the city was done.”
But that winter — it must have been about 1909 — Klebingat, then an able seaman, was on the beach, out of work. He and his pal, a sailor named Tommy, were standing in front of the Ferry Building at the foot of Market Street watching sourly as crowds of city people walked by: “throngs of Christmas shoppers, young and old … most loaded with parcels, presents for their loved ones, most of them in a hurry at the end of this Christmas buying spree. Jolly and gay was the mood of these people in their fine clothes …”
“The morning couldn’t have been much more dismal to those of us who were out of a job and hanging around the City Front,” he wrote. “Without lodging, we thought with dread of the night to come, when the pouring rain would drown us out of the coal bunkers, where, covered with newspapers, we had slept on nights past. And tomorrow would be Christmas Day; that was no consolation to those of us were broke and out of work.”
Klebingat and Tommy were out of luck, too. They’d missed the chance for a ticket to Christmas dinner at the Seaman’s Mission and didn’t even have a dime for two Yosemite beers, which entitled drinkers to a free lunch at an East Street hash house.
They talked about it. “Now if we could land a job that would be the best Christmas present we could get,” Tommy said. “There is but damn little chance of that however.”
This is a Christmas story, so you can guess how it ends. The two men walked up the waterfront to the Crowley launch landing at the foot of Vallejo Street. Their luck changed.
Up the gangway came Capt. Johann Von Dahlern, master of the barkentine S. N. Castle, just arrived from Tahiti. Von Dahlern had paid off his crew and anchored his ship in the bay just off Meiggs Wharf, not far from the present Fisherman’s Wharf, and was headed home for Christmas.
Klebingat had sailed with the old captain, and now Von Dahlern spotted the sailor on the dock. “‘You want a job?’ he asked, and gave me a penetrating look as though he had read my mind. ‘I’ll give you a dollar a day.’ ”
The job was to go aboard and take care of the anchored ship, to make sure it did not drift at anchor, keep the lights burning, and watch out for two other anchored sailing ships in the vicinity.
“No one could have looked more like Santa Claus to me than Capt. Von Dahlern,” Klebingat wrote.
Klebingat was to relieve the mate, Carl Hagen, “still a young man, steady and studious, polite always, and not given to strong drink.” The two men knew each other from a previous voyage.
Hagen, who had no friends or family in San Francisco, decided to stay aboard with Klebingat. “I do not know of a better place to celebrate Christmas,” he said.
Hagen was an officer and had just been paid, so money was no problem. He went ashore on the launch and brought Christmas back with him — a turkey, a big Christmas tree, some ornaments and some liquid cheer. He brought Klebingat’s pal Tommy as well, and the three men got ready to celebrate the holiday.
On Christmas Eve, the wind that had threatened to bring rain died down, and the ship rode easy at anchor. “After awhile, we went on deck to have a look around,” Klebingat wrote. “There under a starlight sky, was the city, with its many windowed houses, all aglow with lighted Christmas trees …” The bay itself was silent and dark. “A blaze of lights, a Sausalito ferry passed by, as if in a special hurry to get its passengers home. There could be heard the chuckchuck and slap of her paddle wheels and just visible above her hull was the moving walking beam. Then it turned quiet …”
A dark, clear night at anchor in the bay and on Christmas Day they had a feast: soup, turkey, pie and plum pudding. “Then Tommy and I toasted Capt. Von Dahlern and Hagen, the mate, with a glass of sparking burgundy… it was the best Christmas ever.”