After 103 years, '06 quake survivor steps forward

<p>Truth is, Rose Cliver doesn’t remember being rocked awake by the monster Bay Area earthquake of April 18, 1906. </p><p>And the prospect of being rousted from bed well before dawn for today’s memorial observances in San Francisco hasn’t had her jumping for joy. But she promised to be there and to put up with the VIP treatment that comes with being the oldest known San Francisco survivor of the historic quake and its attendant inferno.</p><p>Cliver — who’s wry, fastidious and remarkably nimble-minded — can be excused for not recalling much about the temblor. She was 3½-years-old on that day 103 years ago, which makes her 106½ now. </p><p>“All I remember is the fire,” said the native, near-lifelong San Franciscan. She’d still be living alone in her home near Stonestown Galleria but her son, Don, a retired beer truck driver, brought her to live with him and his wife in Santa Rosa after she took a scary fall while carrying laundry last summer.</p><p>In April of 1906, the former Rose Wyrsch and her 11 brothers and sisters (there was one more to come) lived with their Swiss immigrant parents in a house on Gates Street in Bernal Heights.</p><p>“That was really country then,” she said. “My father had chickens, a horse and a cow. Now it’s crowded there.”</p><p>She said the one thing she remembers about the ‘06 earthquake was the climb that she and her dad and siblings took to the top of their hill. From there they saw that much of downtown San Francisco was in flames.</p><p>“We were waiting for it to come up to us,” she said. “But it didn’t hit us, thank God.”</p><p>Oh, and there was something else she recalled.</p><p>“I remember being out in the backyard,” Cliver said. The fear that another big quake might strike and collapse the house prompted her dad to erect a tent out back.</p><p>Her mom cooked there and the family ate there, going back into the house pretty much only to sleep. Eventually, the fear of another temblor subsided and the clan took its life back indoors.</p><p>Cliver doesn’t think she was at all traumatized by the quake that devastated San Francisco — and wreaked even more havoc per capita in her future home of Santa Rosa.</p><p>“I was too little then. It didn’t bother me,” she said from her favorite recliner at her son and daughter-in-law’s comfortable mobile home off Fulton Road. The wheeled walker she relies on but curses was a few feet away. (“I have to push that around,” she kvetched.)</p><p>The people who organize San Francisco’s annual earthquake commemoration never knew about Cliver because the April 18 gatherings didn’t mean anything to her, so she didn’t attend. </p><p>“I never thought about it,” she said. “I grew up that way; you just go about your business.”</p><p>She’s been perfectly content to live all these years as an anonymous San Franciscan and a wife, mother and grandmother. She attended classes through the eighth grade at St. Anthony’s School — “No woman went to high school then, you went to work,” she said — and took a variety of jobs prior to starting a family with Charles Cliver, the cement-mixer driver she met at Muir Woods and married in 1923.</p><p>They lived a lifetime together, 62 years. Charles Cliver’s death in 1985 left his 83-year-old widow to make it on her own at their longtime home in the Ingleside neighborhood.</p><p>Rose Cliver is as surprised as any that at 106 she’s not only alive but hale, and she’d still be living at home on her own if it weren’t for the laundry-day fall last July. She wasn’t crazy about coming to Santa Rosa to live with her son and her daughter-in-law, who’s also named Rose Cliver, but they insisted.</p><p>In February, a relative sent son Don, 77, a copy of an obituary for ‘06 earthquake survivor Herbert Hamrol of Daly City. The story noted that Hamrol, 106, was the only survivor to show at last April’s earthquake memorial and nobody knew of any other quake survivors who are still alive.</p><p>Don Cliver dropped a note to San Francisco publicist Lee Housekeeper, the prime instigator behind the yearly earthquake memorial. Housekeeper was thrilled to learn that Cliver’s mother is a quake survivor and was game to attend this morning’s commemoration.</p><p>“She had breathed new life into this event,” Housekeeper said.</p><p>He also has heard about five other living survivors of the earthquake. One — 103-year-old William Del Monte of Marin County — has told Housekeeper that he’ll show up for today’s festivities, too.</p><p>It will be busy morning for him and Rose Cliver and the hundreds of people who are expected to come cheer them.</p><p>Everybody is to meet prior to the moment of the quake — 5:12 a.m. — at Lotta’s Fountain at Market and Kearny, which became a main meeting point during the chaos of ‘06. A wreath will be laid there, then there’s the ritualistic re-painting of a fire hydrant credited with saving the Mission District Churches, breakfast at Lefty O’Douls and lunch at John’s Grill.</p><p>Cliver said in Santa Rosa the other day that she’ll go along today, but she’ll go slowly because she sure doesn’t want to fall again. A twinkle in her eye seemed to give away that she’s sort of looking forward to being the grand dame of the earthquake party.</p><p>But she was clear that the bayside city she loved wasn’t destroyed in 1906 but was eroded by all the changes that have happened just in the decades that she’s been regarded as being old.</p><p>“San Francisco ain’t anything like it used to be,” the quake survivor said. “It’s gone with the wind.”</p>