INTO THE WEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 308, 29 December 1937, Page 5

INTO THE WEST.

BY GOLDEN GATE.

PICTURE OF CONTRASTS.

AVCXLANSER'S MEMORIES. The sight of the Clipper ships of the air soaring westward through San Francisco's Golden Gate to Honolulu and ports beyond must to-day make the city's "old-timers" shake their heads in wonderment.

To one of San Francisco's daughters, now living in Auckland, the sight would bring a mind picture of striking contrasts. For Miss Josephine Brooks, of Queen Mary Avenue, Epsom, has lived for all but six of her 73 years in the Californian city, and, although she left for New Zealand a year or two before the first air Clipper made its pioneering flight out of San Francisco Bay, the two visits this year of the Pan-American flying boat have been occasions of special interest to her.

The fact that she saw ships pass in and out of the Golden Gate when man was only dreaming of flight would by itself have been enough to make those occasions interesting for Miss Brooks. Yet there is more to the story than that. Her father, 'Robert C. Brooks, a Canadian who became one of San Francisco's pioneers, built in 185*2 the first steamer constructed on the Pacific Coast of the United States, and the first thus built to sail out of the Golden Gate.

Bared His Arm. Like many a boy, Robert Brooks had a love of ships, which finally he could not resist. But his father, giving him a good education, wanted him to become a doctor like himself. "One day my father bared his arm and showed his muscles," Miss Brooks related to-day. "To his father he said, 'Oh, no! I don't want to be a doctor— I want to build boats.' And he went down from Canada to New Orleans,| where he worked as a ship's carpentei^j

"Then, in the winter of '49 he chose five skilled fellow carpenters and went out to San Francisco to open the first shipyard on the Pacific Coast that built its own ships. His first was the John Ensign, the first steamer built on thei coast to sail out through the Golden? Gate. Later he,took as partner Ervk Hendrikson, and they built the Hensley. Then came the Paul Pry, atad my father took out his captain's papers and sailed this ship around the Horn." And now one may more fully i/hderstand what the visits of the dipper have meant to Miss Brooks. Her father built more ships before he left Ms craft to enter the distillery business. He died in the nineties at the a£e of 70 years, after sharing fully in, the ups and downs of the growing city. / Earthquake and F£re. Miss Brooks lived on in San Francisco, and saw the city partly destroyed in the earthquake and fipfe of 1906. Her memories of those trying times are vivid. "The heavy 'f|uake came at 5 o'clock in the morning," she said. "We heard the terrible rumbling and stood in the open doorway' of our home while chimneys tumbled , from the roofs of houses. Then the fire started, I believe, when a woman w]fto was cooking breakfast upset a kerosene lamp, and next thing a whole section of the city was in flames.

"The business area and the poorer part of the city w«re destroyed; but I think it was the best thing for San Francisco, for much of its ugliness was wiped out. Right away they started to build again, and to-day -the city is a beautiful one."