Christmas fell on a Thursday in 1941. “California today greets its first Christmas Eve as a war area since 1848,” a Dec. 24 article in the Berkeley Daily Gazette remarked. “Householders who planned holiday parties made sure that their blackout curtains were ready,” and toy shops in San Francisco “reported the heaviest sale in history of miniature planes, tanks, anti-aircraft guns and battleships.”

Headlines announced that a freighter and an oil tanker were torpedoed off the California coast on Christmas Eve, and a Japanese submarine was sunk off the coast on Christmas Day. A 15-year-old Berkeley boy died Christmas Day when his car was hit broadside by an Army truck at Allston and Grant.

“More than 1500 boys and girls of Berkeley and Albany enjoyed the annual Hink’s Children’s Christmas party, sponsored by J.F. Hink and Son’s store” on Dec. 20, 1941. The event was held at the United Artists Theater. “Because of the war emergency, police and fire department details augmented the theater’s staff of usherettes,” the Gazette noted.

They saw “Law of the Pampas,” three cartoons, and “sports reels and news events.” Santa Claus appeared with “a bag of candy for every youngster present.”

A whopping 4,000 people attended the Mayor’s Christmas Party on Sunday Dec. 21, held at the Men’s Gymnasium on the UC Berkeley campus. Entertainment included the Young People’s Symphony, “three elementary (school) choirs,” the “Toy drill animals and soldiers of Franklin School,” and the appearance of Santa to the delight of children “screaming in excitement.” Santa gave each child at the event a peppermint stick and an apple.

A special soloist was “sixteen year old Negro musician Robert Owens,” who was attending Berkeley High School and planning to train for a career as a concert pianist. He played a piece of his own composition. and received two ovations from the crowd. (Owens graduated from Berkeley High in 1942, served in the military, and then moved to Europe, where he pursued a half-century career as a musician and composer. Among other accomplishments he set poems of Langston Hughes to music. I found a good biography of him, including his Berkeley origins, at afrovoices.com)

Pearl Harbor

Two more Berkeley casualties from Pearl Harbor were reported Dec. 22 in the Gazette. Seaman First Class Frank Nye, 20, was missing in action. (Today, he appears in lists of those later confirmed dead aboard the battleship Arizona.) One of his brothers graduated from Berkeley High School that December; another had just finished a naval ROTC program at Northwestern University.

The family lived at 1735 Parker St., where Nye’s stepfather, James Logsdon, told his own war story of serving in the French Foreign Legion, then a U.S. Army unit, in World War I. Severely wounded, he had been misidentified and reported “missing in action” for two months.

Sterling Brooks Winfield, 22, was a Navy radio man also reported missing. His wife was living with her mother in Berkeley. Today, a “Starring” (sic) Winfield, radio man, appears in the lists of the 415 men killed aboard the battleship Oklahoma.

Bomb shelters

On Dec. 20, 1941, the Gazette ran an article headlined “construction of bomb shelter is an exact science.” The source was Lt. Jaime Colome, “who fought for three years with the Spanish Republican Army in Spain,” and whose wife was an assistant professor of art at UC Berkeley. Colome told the Gazette that cement bomb shelters in France had often collapsed, trapping or killing their occupants, and that “effective bomb shelters should be simply designed and constructed so as to vibrate and sway rather than crack and collapse.”