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It's 10:30 a.m., the last Sunday before the last Thanksgiving Day of the 1900s, 65 degrees, blue sky, puffy clouds, and Point Loman Katherine Ann, age 4, marvels as nine crewmen climb the mainmast of the Star of India like they did 100 years ago. Southwest Airlines passengers roar off Lindbergh Field, the "Beatles Brunch" plays on 94.9 FM and passengers aboard Holland America's Statendam feast at the Embarcadero. One America Plaza rises above, a mighty monument adorned at its base with trolleys, trains, cars, bicyclists and strollers from the waterfront to the Santa Fe Depot. Atop the tower, Nicholas Applegate's computers monitor billions of dollars throughout the world.
So much has changed in 100 years, some of it evolutionary, some revolutionary, but not everything is different. The Jessops and Burnhams are still here and the San Diego County Gas and Electricity Company still operates as Sempra just a few blocks from where it stood at the last turn of the century. Local governments still operate nearby, and the produce distributors still bustle in the morning darkness on lower Sixth and Seventh avenues. Fishing isn’t what it used to be in the 1960s, although the fleet remaining off the G Street Mole resembles its numbers of a century ago.
The United States Navy is an advent of the 20th century, its seacraft, aircraft and spacecraft, nuclear power and nuclear weapons, its wireless communications bristling from antennae and satellite dishes. The Navy merely visited San Diego a century ago but shortly afterward homeported here and grew. And grew.
The poor Indians of 100 years ago were not necessarily the direct descendants of those aboriginal wanderers of 1,000 or 2,000 years ago, but the Native Americans of 100 years later are San Diego’s nouveau riche. That's nearly revolutionary.
Like 100 years ago, Spanish and Asian languages are spoken here, but mostly English. San Diego’s metropolitan population today, excluding Tijuana, is 50 percent greater than California's entire population at the turn of the last century. Including Tijuana, this region's contiguous metropolitan population is double California's population of 100 years ago. The San Diego of today is larger than any U.S. city other than New York was in 1900.
Accommodating rapid population growth explains a lot about San Diego/Tijuana in the 20th century. Our people and growth have been embraced by a warm climate, mobilized by improving transportation and instant communication, and sustained by creating and operating the technology to fight and prevent distant wars, hot and cold. Everything we 4 million people do is a basic act of survival or a luxury, sometimes both, adding up to another $90 billion of business and another 40,000-or-so people every year in recent years.
One-hundred years ago, a small child's life expectancy in San Diego was 45-ish. Today her life expectancy is 80-something, a most wonderful difference.
Yet nurturing a 4-year-old Point Loma girl, today and 100 years ago, is remarkably similar, and still there are matters far more compelling than nine crewmen climbing the mainmast of the Star: "Daddy, pwetend I’m a dog," says Katherine Ann. "Pwetend I was sweeping and I woke up and you heard me and you said, 'I didn’t know there was a dog.' And then you feed me Cheerio bones. OK, Daddy?"
OK, Katherine. And so we play on the edge of the bay before Thanksgiving Day at the turn of one century.
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