All Intensive Purposes

Happy Birthday to Lucille Meyer, who turns 109 today. She was nine years old when San Francisco burned down after the earthquake:

She was Lucille Kilhofer then, staying with family friends on Easter vacation in San Mateo, in the country. Just before dawn, she and the other little girls were awakened by the great earthquake, knocked out of bed. "I could see the swinging of the lamps, back and forth,'' she said.

It was clear, even to a young girl, that something terrible was happening, and later in the day, the people in San Mateo saw San Francisco burning. "You could see all the smoke from the city,'' she said, "You could see bits of ashes coming down from the sky.''

Her parents were at the family home at Seventh and Mission streets in the city, and one of her brothers was in Alameda staying with friends. "I didn't know if my folks were alive or dead,'' she said. There was no way of knowing, either. Not long afterward, her father showed up at the door to bring her back to the city; she was a San Franciscan, after all, and they had a place to stay.

Though the family home had burned to the ground, a friend owned a vacant house on Precita Avenue, near Bernal Heights, outside the zone burned by the fire. The family -- father, mother, Lucille and four brothers -- moved in.

It wasn't bad. Others had to live in Precita Park in tents and later in tiny houses provided by the city.

But San Francisco was a mess, and she remembers it clearly, even after nearly a century. "Everything was flattened from the Ferry Building to 20th Street,'' she said, shaking her head. "I don't want to see that again.''

"Every time we get a little quake,'' she said, "I get shaky.''