Letters describe horrors of aftermath

By Bruce Barton, Town Crier Staff Writer

Longtime Los Altos resident Barbara Emerich remains proud of her father and his role in helping the injured in the wake of the Great Quake of 1906. The 100th anniversary of the infamous event was yesterday.

Emerich, a resident of Los Altos since 1952, showed the Town Crier last week samples of letters written by Rene Bine, a 23-year-old physician whose letters to an uncle in France described the aftermath of the April 18 quake in great detail. With the approach of the Great Quake centennial fresh on her mind, Emerich made her way to the California Historical Society in San Francisco, where the letters are archived, to obtain copies.

“These are letters I remember reading when I was at Stanford,” said Emerich, now 87. “I was doing a paper on them.” Bine wrote hundreds of pages, enough to fill two boxes of letter-size papers.

“Awful and horrible are inadequate words to describe our trouble,” wrote Bine, a commander of a refugee camp at Chrissie Field. “Five minutes after the quake, my dad’s pistol in hand, I stopped an auto in the street and made the chauffeur take me to the German (hospital). All along the way, houses down and injured people, some whom I stopped to bandage.

“A patrol wagon took me part way to the county hospital. Resolute as I was, I cried most of the way at the sights on the way and my inability to help. Valencia Street was lifted about 10 feet in places and a five-story lodging house on Valencia and 18th had come down with a crash without giving an inmate a chance for his life. Fire by 6 p.m. had caused 60 alarms to be sent in and mains having busted all over, no water at any place for use in extinguishing. ‘For God’s sake, get my husband to a hospital.’ ‘Oh doctor, see if my wife is still alive’ and ‘God, is my child killed?’ were but three in over hundreds of requests I could not stop to fill on my rush to the county.”

“He went two days without sleep,” Emerich said in reviewing the letters. “I never remembered my dad using a gun, a pistol, anything. And I don’t remember dad ever crying. He was emotional, but crying was something men didn’t do (in those days).”

Bine, whose home was badly damaged and whose father, Emerich’s grandfather, lost his business in the disaster, described utter pandemonium. The city was under martial law and “(It is said) hundreds have been killed for trying to interfere with orders,” Bine wrote. “I’m told many have been lined up against buildings and shot for trying to break through lines to get food ahead of the file. Anybody with a drop of liquor who refuses to destroy it is shot on sight and no explanations. The city is destroyed up to Van Ness Avenue, and everybody is more or less ruined.”

Like many others, Bine worked through tragedy and continued to live in San Francisco in the years following the quake. Emerich was born and raised in San Francisco. Bine died in 1956.

“I was very emotional, very touched by it,” Emerich said of her father’s experiences

in the letters. “He was a magnificent letter writer.”