Careful Thought

In honor of the 1906 shaker that almost erased San Francisco a hundred years ago, FoxNews.com posts the following Wild and Wacky Tales From the 1906 Earthquake.

- One man, long paralyzed from the neck down before the earthquake, regained the ability to move when a looter tried stealing his bags from beside him in a park, where he was placed by friends after rescue. Enraged, the man’s first act of mobility was to crack the criminal over the head with a plank of wood.- Eyewitnesses in Tomales Bay reported seeing a cow’s tail protruding from a crack in the ground after the earthquake ? as if the earth had opened, swallowed it whole, and then closed up again. No word on whether the Earth would have perhaps preferred its meal medium, or even well done.

- As San Francisco threatened to descend into lawless mayhem, Mayor E.E. Schmitz enforced a shoot-to-kill policy against looters. Taking the orders too far, one officer shot a thirsty horse that was “looting” water leaking from a broken hydrant.

- Forty-six workers at the U.S. Post Office defied orders to evacuate and battled the fire that threatened their building with mail sacks soaked in water. Incredibly, not a single piece of mail was lost in the blaze, although many of the addresses to which they were meant to be sent no longer existed.

- Of all the major buildings in San Francisco, the well-built U.S. Mint (at the time holding $300 million in assets in its vaults) survived with the least amount of damage. Today it sits empty and unused ? because it doesn’t meet modern earthquake codes.

Why doesn’t that surprise me?

- Despite being packed with one of nature’s fuels, another building to survive the quake and fire unscathed was A.P. Hotaling’s whiskey warehouse. The odd miracle prompted a local poet to create this famous ditty:

If, as some say, God spanked the town,
For being frisky,
Why did He burn the churches down
And save Hotaling’s Whiskey?