On the day before the Great San Francisco Earthquake, tongues were wagging in the City by the Bay. Emblazoned across the front of the April 17th edition of The Call-Bulletin, the Spreckels-owned newspaper, was the headline that an investigation into the city's corruption had just been launched. It was the storm before the quake.

Rudolph Spreckels, youngest of the Spreckels siblings (John D., owner of the Hotel del Coronado, was the eldest of the four surviving offspring of sugar-king Claus Spreckels) had led a delegation to meet with President Teddy Roosevelt to complain of the city's graft. Roosevelt made available his "Top G-man," William Burns to lead the investigation into payouts to labor lawyer Abraham Ruef who had installed Musician Union President Eugene Schmitz as his puppet mayor. Spreckels agreed to pick up the $213,000 check for Burns' contract (equivalent to more than $4 million today). A year later the city's entire 19-member board of supervisors would be indicted, Ruef began a seven-year prison term, and Mayor Schmitz would spend a year in jail before getting off on a technicality.

In society circles, the Spreckels family was receiving fewer and fewer invitations as Rudolph was potentially disrupting many family monopolies. And then there was that nasty episode between brother Adolph Spreckels and rival newspaperman Michael deYoung, after deYoung accused Claus Spreckels of exporting West Coast women to delight King Kalakaua as part of his negotiating strategy to purchase Hawaiian land for his sugar empire. Adolph announced himself at deYoung's office as being there for the purpose of "shooting Mr. deYoung," which he proceeded to do, wounding the newspaperman. When brought to trial for attempted murder, Adolph was found innocent by reason of justifiable cause. Perhaps graft and corruption rubbed two ways.

The fourth largest city in the nation and the largest west of the Mississippi was just emerging from a rowdy adolescence into young adulthood and respectability. It had grown quickly, beginning its heady rise in 1949 as the jumping-off point for the 49ers who were seeking their wealth in California's gold fields. Whether the 49ers got rich was hit or miss, but San Francisco didn't miss a trick in mining the miner's pockets for everything that money could buy...gambling houses, liquor and women, chief among their wares. The Gold Rush is what originally brought Claus Spreckels to the city - the grocer from the East entered the beer business and dispensed it in great quantities in the West. And because sugar is one of beer's main ingredients, he went on to found his sugar refinery, eventually owning a third of the island of Maui.

On the evening of April 17, San Francisco high society was a-gog and a-glitter: Italian tenor Enrico Caruso was headlining the New York Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen. In the audience was the up-and-coming movie star John Barrymore.

After the opera, Barrymore retired to his room at the St. Francis, and after reading rave reviews, Caruso retired at 3 a.m. His dreams would last just a couple of hours.

On this calm and still evening, following a day full of news and a night filled with stars, the 460,000 residents of San Francisco were ready for a longspringtime nap.

It was not to be. At 5:12 a.m., the earth began rumbling, and the shaking grew in intensity. The thundering lasted 47 seconds - an extremely long duration for an earthquake - and, like waves in the ocean, entire streets undulated up and down. The city's predominantly wooden buildings began straining, splintering and collapsing; water mains split; gas lines ruptured. And that led to the fires, fires that would rage for three days and destroy 90 percent of the city.

And more bad luck...

In addition to nature's fury, the city was hit with two other pieces of bad luck. First was the death of the city's fire chief, Dennis Sullivan. Sullivan and his wife slept on the fourth floor of the Bush Street firehouse. A cupola from the neighboring California Hotel crashed into the firehouse and Sullivan's wife, in bed, plummeted four stories into the basement. Sullivan, awake in the next room, raced into the bedroom and fell through the hole, landing next to a boiler in the basement; he succumbed to his injuries four days later. (His wife, cushioned by her mattresses, survived with minor injuries).

If Sullivan had lived, it is unlikely he would have ordered the dynamiting of the city to fend the spread of the fires. Sullivan had been a firefighter in the Baltimore Fire of 1904 and witnessed the devastating effects dynamiting had in that city: employed to fell great buildings and thereby create fire breaks, dynamite actually sparked far more fires than it impeded.

The second piece of bad luck was that San Francisco's chief military officer was attending his daughter's wedding in Chicago. That left Brigadier General Frederick Funston, a Medal of Honor recipient who had distinguished himself during the Spanish-American War, as the man who took charge of the city and the fire department, which he did with militaristic zeal.

He immediately instituted Marshall Law, despite the fact that only the President of the United States has the right to do so, and was given control of more than 700 troops who were dispatched to the city. Funston ordered evacuations of every neighborhood and took charge of dynamiting; aided by a proclamation signed by the mayor announcing that citizens not following orders would be killed.

While Funston was saluted as a hero of his time, later historians have raised questions about his actions. Would it have not been wiser to have organized the military in "bucket brigades" to import water from the bay that surrounded the city rather than to patrol bars? Citizen bucket brigades were successfully employed to unearth survivors of the toppled World Trade Center after 9/11. And citizens have repeatedly demonstrated their tenacity in saving their own property, which may have been wiser than ordering early evacuations.

Charles Richter's famous scale would not come into being until the 1930s, but seismologists have estimated the San Francisco quake's magnitude at 8.3. And, like the events of this century whereupon hurricanes in the Gulf Coast followed tumultuous earthquakes and tsunamis in Southeast Asia, the San Francisco earthquake was not an isolated event. In January of 1906 a monstrous earthquake, possibly an 8.9, hit off Ecuador; a month later, a series of quakes hit in the Caribbean. And on April 6, Mt. Vesuvius erupted for the first time in 300 years; vulconologists estimate it may have been a more powerful eruption than the one that buried Pompeii in 79 AD. In August 1906, an earthquake off the coast of Chile killed more than 20,000.

Spreckels Hightails it South

John Spreckels, or "J.D." as he was known, had been ailing in early 1906 - a rare intestinal flu had reduced his body to skeletal proportions. He had been spending less time visiting his Hotel del Coronado, less time convening with his San Diego business cohorts and less time sailing. It had been 19 years since he had first entered San Diego Bay to reprovision his yacht, The Lurline. That's when the San Diego's City Fathers - all developers including Coronado Island speculators Frank Babcock and Elisha Babcock had made a pitch to the young shipping and sugar tycoon to set up shop at this southernmost tip of the nation. Spreckels had taken the bait and loaned Babcock and Story $500,000 to complete their hotel; they later defaulted and Spreckels became the owner of the hotel, the island and several accoutrements including the water system, railroad, ferry, and gas and electric company that supplied the island's power.

Now, as he surveyed the devastation that surrounded him in San Francisco - including his family's 16-story newspaper building with its distinctive bell-shaped dome - Spreckels was as rattled as the landscape around him. Was more devastation to come?

The earthquake was just the shot of adrenaline Spreckels needed to recover from his illness. He hustled his family, including eight children, onto The Lurline, which was anchored in San Francisco Bay. He telegraphed the Hotel del Coronado to dismantle Tent City and send the tents north to house the evacuees. Then he set sail for Coronado, where he made his home for the remainder of his life, much to the benefit of Coronado and San Diego in subsequent years.

His first order of business was to create a safe haven for his family, and Spreckels retained noted architect Harrison Albright of Los Angeles - a pioneer in a new kind of construction using steelreinforced concrete. Albright designed and built twin houses for Spreckels - his Bay House, across the street from his Hotel del Coronado, facing Glorietta Bay, and his Beach House, a block north of the hotel. The Bay House is today fully restored as The Mansion at Glorietta Bay Inn, and is reminiscent of the Edwardian period of Spreckels' residency. It features the original central staircase, with brass handrails intact, and Spreckels' favorite gathering spot, the oval Music Room, where columnar pediments feature cherubs that bear the likenesses of Spreckels' grandchildren (he loved music and children in equal proportions). In the lobby, one can still spy the ceiling spokes for what was once the front-porch swing from which J.D. and his children swayed to and fro.

Spreckels' beach home was bestowed upon his eldest son, Claus, as a wedding present in 1910. After Claus's death his widow Ellie continued to reside at the estate, remarried noted area physician Dr. Clarence Moon, and the estate became a site for several society fetes and was a Designer Showcase home in 1983.

Spreckels' active presence in Coronado set off a small building boom in the city, with several businesses setting up operation along Orange Avenue during the period. Residential development followed Spreckels' lead, including The 1906 Lodge on Adella Avenue, which later became a rooming house and is now being renovated and revitalized to its original purpose.

In 1917, J.D. and Adolph once again retained Albright to design Coronado's signature downtown building, a curvilinear three-story structure also of steelreinforced concrete. Today, the Spreckels Building is home to Lamb's Players Theatre, fine dining establishments and boutiques.

Spreckels' presence in San Diego and Coronado had other major and fortuitous repercussions for the region. As a shipping magnate, Spreckels appreciated the magnitude of the coming of the Panama Canal: San Diego was ideally situated to be the first point of entry for goods coming into the country via the canal, as well as the egress point for U.S.- produced goods. He championed the cause of letting the world take notice of San Diego, serving as first vice president of the 1915 California-Panama Exposition?s planning board (Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., who was opening his hotel in 1911 in San Diego, was president).

The focal point of the Exposition would be a new park - Balboa Park, whose Spanish Colonial buildings were designed by Irving Gill protege Richard Requa.

Spreckels gifted the Exposition with an Organ Pavilion, which he had originally planned for the terminus of his street-car line in what is today University City. The Spreckels Organ Pavilion continues operating today, with free Sunday summer concerts.

In 1915 the world's attention was indeed focused on San Diego. A delegation of City Fathers and Washington politicos led the Opening Day festivities across the Laurel Street Bridge, past the new San Diego Museum (today the San Diego Museum of Man) and onto the park grounds.

Chief among the prominent Washingtonians was the Secretary of the Navy. It was his first visit to San Diego, and from the exposition's hillsides he could survey San Diego's great natural bay and Coronado?s North and South Islands. San Diego would be the ideal spot to base West Coast Navy operations, suggested the City Fathers. Yes indeed, agreed the Secretary of the Navy - Franklin Delano Roosevelt - and he ordered it done.

Suppose there had not been a San Francisco earthquake? would San Diego's future have played out in much the same way? Would Spreckels have moved south to Coronado anyway? Would the Exposition have taken place with or without his influence? Would the Navy have found its way to our shores just the same?

One thing is for sure, San Francisco's earth-shaking event of 1906 had strong reverberations that are still felt today in San Diego...and Coronado.