Golden Gate

San Francisco celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge yesterday. 

Smack in the middle of our 1969-1970 WestPac cruise, USS TRIPOLI (LPH-10) was found to have a cracked propeller. We were loaded up with Marines heading home from the Vietnam War and sent to homeport San Diego, thence to San Francisco for a month in Hunters Point Naval Shipyard for repairs. While the ship was in San Diego for a few days, everyone who wanted to take a car to San Francisco drove it down to the pier to be loaded onto the hangar deck. Including my 1959 Volkswagen.

It was Spring 1970 when TRIPOLI sailed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and wonderful to have my car in San Francisco that month. Touring the city from top to bottom, one end to the other, Chinatown, Fisherman’s Wharf, Japanese shops and restaurants, driving across Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito; across the Oakland Bay Bridge to Berkeley. One of my best things to do was go to a sushi parlor, order a box of my favorites, buy a quart bottle of Kirin, drive up to Lincoln Boulevard, park on a high grassy spot overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge, and enjoy my sushi and beer in total peace.

During that month, Linda and Malinda and Joe came up to San Francisco and we had a long weekend in one of the guest cottages high on a hill at the shipyard. From there we could look down into the stadium lights at Candlestick Park to the south, and watch the dozens of planes at night, stacked ascending as far as the eye could see, in landing pattern gliding down to San Francisco International Airport. Life Is Good now, and life was very good indeed that month.

The other weekends we were in Hunters Point, I flew home to San Diego in the ship's helicopter every Friday at liberty call, and back to the ship in time for muster on Monday morning. TRIPOLI returned to WestPac after the month in drydock. Sea duty and Vietnam War memories are not my happiest, but having my family at the guest cottage that weekend; and parking the VW on Lincoln way up high, Pacific Ocean in front of me, Golden Gate Bridge to my right, sushi, ice cold Kirin -- fond memories this Memorial Day Weekend. 

Our first time in San Francisco had been July 1963, enroute to Japan. And then that Spring 1970 month when TRIPOLI was in drydock to have the screw replaced, sail back out under the Golden Gate Bridge, home to San Diego, then back to the War. Years later, while on Navy shore duty, and then after retiring and starting my business, life took me back to San Francisco many times until we moved to Apalachicola in 1984. 

There have been only a few places besides St. Andrews Bay that I might choose to live. Sydney, Australia. Seattle. San Francisco. 

TW