Berkeleyeans faced a New Year with the nation at war 75 years ago. “The usual pulsing undercurrent of excitement that precedes the end of one year and the start of another was missing today,” the Berkeley Daily Gazette reported Dec. 31, 1941. “Blackouts and submarine attacks have brought the war close to West Coast residents. Outdoor revelry will be frowned upon tonight. Berkeleyeans are urged to keep their automobiles off the streets as much as possible. The shriek of sirens and whistles at midnight is forbidden.”

The Gazette continued, “Proud to be in the ‘front line,’ at least in what the Army has designated a ‘zone of combat,’ citizens of the Pacific slope planned to greet the New Year at their own homes or in dimly lighted night clubs and save their confetti, voices, horns and psychopathic conduct for a grand blowoff when victory comes …”

“Last night the Army … restricted gatherings to 5,000 persons as a military precaution for the duration of the present military situation.”

The Rose Bowl had already been moved to Durham, North Carolina, and the East-West Shrine Game to New Orleans.

Intruder

Mrs. Otto P. Sonderman of 1414 McGee Ave. got a scare Dec. 30 when she heard “frightened screams” from her back yard and “as she peered into the night … a masked stranger snatched open there back door, brushed past Mrs. Sonderman and headed up the attic steps.”

Family, neighbors, and police gathered and “surrounded the intruder and quickly subdued him.” The screams were from a goose. The intruder was a raccoon. Reporters presumably love to write these stories.

Hawaiian news

Current Honolulu police chief, and former Berkeley police lieutenant, William A Gabrielsson wrote home from the islands to friends two weeks after Pearl Harbor. The Gazette printed excerpts from the letter on Dec. 30, 1941.

He said that “martial law is now in force, hence the Police Department is placed under the Provost Marshal. Oh yes, we are getting a lot of justice now with the military court sitting. There is no longer any ‘monkey business,’ no shyster lawyers and no continuous postponement of cases.”

He noted that, “Since the war started we have had very little crime; in fact it has been reduced to practically nil.”

There was another Berkeley-related piece of news from Hawaii. Admiral Chester Nimitz had taken command of the Pacific Fleet. When younger, Nimitz had established the Naval ROTC program at the UC Berkeley campus.

After the war, he and his wife would live in Berkeley, which perhaps has more of a claim to a Nimitz connection than the honorary Nimitz Freeway in Oakland, although the Internet tells us that Admiral Nimitz stood atop the Cypress Structure part of his namesake highway in 1959 and cut the ribbon to open it. Thirty years later it would collapse in the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Contraband collected

Enemy aliens — citizens of the nations with which the United States was now at war — were ordered to turn in “contraband” belongings to the Berkeley police by Dec. 29, 1941.

“More than 300 individual Japanese, Germans and Italians have deposited 1,000-odd cameras, radio sets and guns with the alien property custodian, Berkeley police estimated today.” One Japanese-American man turned in a vintage 1863 musket, which had hung with an American flag in his home.

Another year

This edition concludes another year of writing this column. As always, I remember my predecessors, Carl Wilson who began the column in the 1980s, and Ken Cardwell who ably continued it. Thank you also to the readers and to Chris Treadway who is an excellent editor and a thoughtful and very knowledgeable historian.