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.”
Ah, the good ol’ USA!