Back in the USA

Two weeks before Biddle’s arrival, USS Oriskany (CV-34), which had also been deployed to the Gulf of Tonkin, entered San Francisco Bay. Helps to have planes onboard to get an aerial photo of your entrance.

Biddle pulled into San Francisco Bay early on the morning of 5 December 1969. We passed under the Golden Gate Bridge at about 0600, in the dark. I remember watching on the radar screen. It had been 193 days since we had been in the continental United States.

After a couple of hours sleep that morning, according to my journal, I joined ENS Curran for several hours wandering around The City and even East Bay. We went to the top of the Fairmont Hotel’s Tower Building, rode a cablecar to Fisherman’s Wharf, and then went across the Bay to visit the campus of UC Berkeley. (I, of course, had no idea that 15 years later I would begin 12 years work on the Berkeley campus.)

I don’t remember it particularly, but at some point Biddle was open for public tours. Here’s a shot from the cruise book of missiles on the rail and the Port Authority building in the background.

Here’s a gallery of other photos from the cruise book section on San Francisco.

UPDATE: I found photos I took of San Francisco and Berkeley. Click on the image and you’ll see larger photos and captions.

Enough of the tourist thing, I was a sailor on liberty! That same evening, I joined LT Morris and LTJG Fauth on a reconnaissance mission to North Beach, the raunchy section of San Francisco then famous for topless performers such as Carol Doda and Yvonne D’Angers. But there was a new addition . . . or, should I say, subtraction. “Bottomless is craze now,” I wrote in my journal. “We went into just about every place on Broadway, until 0230.”

Broadway, North Beach, San Francisco
It’s even historic!

Ah, the good ol’ USA!