Here They Come

Though it had a gold rush, a shattering earthquake, Jack London and two world's fairs in its past, San Francisco looked forward with interest to the World Security conference. Last week, as the vanguard of a small army of delegates and correspondents began arriving, the city was ready to do its part to set the stage of history.

There would be good weather--in April San Francisco's summer fogs are only beginning to roll in from the Pacific, and there are days in which the bay is blue, and the city's fabled hills stand in sun-filled haze. There would be plenty of liquor, and San Francisco, a city with Irish street names, expected the great men to have a drink when they felt like it. There would be good food from the city's famed restaurants, and every comfort that hotels, clubs and citizens' committees could provide.

The Palace Hotel would have fresh California fruit in its rooms each day; the Mark Hopkins sternly warned its bellhops not to raise an eyebrow at foreign customs. It also cautioned them that some guests might not even tip them.

Gift of Tongues. Everywhere waiters, clerks and plain citizens who could speak foreign languages were suddenly popular. The Yellow Cab company announced that it had 70 drivers capable of conversing in alien tongues, including Assyrian. Correspondents would be offered every help in the way of workrooms, telegraph service, reference material--even a volunteer corps of ex-newspapermen ready and anxious to substitute as rewrite men for correspondents bowled over by the bottle. The city was prepared to offer them plenty of entertainment--cocktail parties, ferry and airplane rides, press cards good for squaring minor infractions of the law.

A civic committee, picked by San Francisco's businessman mayor--golfing, gregarious Roger Lapham--would introduce delegates to the city's social life at a reception, take them to museums, find them seats for symphony concerts and baseball games.

No delegate would feel that San Francisco was lacking in the manifestations of hospitality and good will.

The World, The West. In the American tradition, San Francisco had boomed into being--in the stampede which followed the discovery of a gold nugget at Sutter's Mill. The town had grown richer in the raw, exciting days of the Comstock and Mother Lodes. Proud of the independence its riches brought, it had still reached for contact with the eastern U.S., first by stagecoach, then by the pony express, then by the transcontinental railroad.

It had sent ships to the ports of the world. The Chinese, the Irish, the Italians, Russians and men of other tongues had made it cosmopolitan. But San Francisco remained a western American city. There, where enthusiastic miners once tossed gold nuggets at Actress Lotta Crabtree--who presented the town with a memorial fountain ("Lotta's Fountain")--the old atmosphere of violence, love of opulence, independence and friendliness has thinned. But it has never been dissipated.

If delegates missed the import of the city's past, they would hardly miss the significance of San Francisco in 1945--metropolis, arsenal, base of vast Pacific air and sea communications. To men from weary countries the men & women on the quaint cable cars, on the city's automobile-lined streets would seem incredibly fresh, well-dressed, well-fed. The great shipyards around San Francisco Bay would launch another small fleet before they departed. And along the Embarcadero they would see Harry Bridges' longshoremen loading ships with tanks, guns, food and clothing by the endless trainload.

Secure and powerful, the New World's San Francisco awaited the men of all nations with hospitality and friendliness. The city which had rebuilt itself from the ruins of a great earthquake did not expect to be disappointed.

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