The Laughing Gorilla (53 page)

Now Bayview.

The Old Mint had been the only banking institution to survive the 1906 quake and fire, when employees, armed with only a one-inch hose saved the building and $200 million in gold bars. Ironically, with widespread poverty all around, one-third of the nation’s gold reserve was stored there.

Frank Buck was an American collector of, and authority on, wild animals. He had collected more than twenty-five thousand specimens of wild animals, including gorillas; in 1931 he wrote the best-seller
Bring ’Em Back Alive
.

Plans were already under way to close the Mint and move operations to a new mint. During World War II, Dullea and a skeleton crew of officers would protect the Old Mint and even camouflage it in black paint to conceal it during any air raids.

Car engine oil, decayed blood, and long strands of black human hair.

Among the chiefs from forty-seven states set to attend the thirtieth annual convention at Buffalo, New York, on June 11, 1923, were Chief Harper; Joseph M. Quigley, chief of Rochester, New York, Police Department; Michael T. Long, chief of Newark, New Jersey, Police Department; John A. Curry of Niagara Falls, New York; and William P. Rutledge, superintendent of police in Detroit, Michigan.

By December 1935 the records would swell to 6,292,383. During the previous fiscal year, the FBI had made 304,033 successful criminal identifications from prints, a success rate Hoover gleefully estimated at 47.8 percent. Of the total prints identified 4,403 belonged to fugitives from justice.

On May 1, 1932, LAPD Chief Roy E. Steckel got his department its first FCC license.

Gargantua, the Ringling Brothers star ape and the 1933 film
King Kong
had excited Hollywood about gorillas. Both Republic and Columbia Pictures started off their movie serial production schedules with jungle films featuring gorillas and starred famed wild animal trainers Clyde Beatty and Frank Buck.

Prohibition began on January 16, 1920, with the Eighteenth Amendment and later reinforcement of the Volstead Act. It was repealed in December 1933, and the country made legally wet again.

1. Santo Batista: fractured skull, March 1934, aboard the
S.S. Susan V. Luckenback.
2. Vincent Torres was hurled to death from a window of the Ship Scalers’ Union in September. 3. Otto Blaczensky, deck engineer aboard the freighter
Minnesotan,
was drowned in mud. 4. William V. McConologue was murdered on the steamer
Cottoneva
.

The
Point Lobos
would strike a rock in heavy fog on June 22, 1939, and go to the bottom.

From 1927 to 1937 was San Francisco radio’s Golden Decade, when many nationwide network broadcasts originated there. Both NBC and CBS maintained production centers in the city, and a third NBC network, the Pacific Orange Network, re-created the same programs heard in the east on the Red Network.

The McDonoughs finally outsmarted themselves when they tried to pass legislation to corner the bail bond market in the state. In 1941 their tiny bail bond brokerage office at Clay and Kearney became just another dusty cigar store after Dullea and the newly-formed state insurance department made it a crime for anyone with a criminal record to run a bail bond operation.

The standard Mexican land measurement.

There were a couple of false alarms: On August 24, a man without hands and legs washed ashore onto Gordon Park Beach on the East Side. Strands of rotting rope were entangled around the stumps, but sharp rocks and boat propellers had severed his extremities, not a killer. An amputated right foot found in the city dump turned out to be hospital refuse.

Ecker had no idea what color G. V. Lyons’s test presumptive had revealed: pink, blue, or green. Reduced phenolphthalein, potassium hydroxide, and zinc produce a pink. Benzidine combines with sodium perborate, glacial acetic acid, and peroxidase to produce a vivid blue. The leuco malachite test makes a bright green. Ecker soaked the material in saltwater, added serum from an animal immunized with human blood to the test tube, and waited in vain for a color and white ring to appear.

After the October 1989 earthquake, the Ferry Building’s Big Clock would stop at the instant of the quake—5:07. In May 1992 the double-decked Embarcadero Freeway hiding the Ferry Building would be demolished as new ferries began steaming across San Francisco Bay to Marin again. Where the Bay Hotel had been, lush Justin Herman Plaza would stand, becoming a place where families could picnic. Farther down, the Bay Bridge still soared directly above where Officer Malcolm lost his life. Today the roar of cars passing above can be plainly heard, and if one looks closely traces of the great stain still remain.