![]() ![]() ![]() But for Americans starved for news of the disaster, it became the germ of a legend. He caught the first thing smoking out of Oakland and hightailed it back to New York, “where I know I shall find a ship to take me to my beautiful Italy and my wife and my little boys.”Ī fairly unremarkable account, really: I came, I saw, I ran. The valet found someone with a wagon who was willing to take them and Caruso’s baggage to the Oakland Ferry, “for a certain sum.” On the short trip to the Ferry Building, “We pass terrible scenes,” Caruso wrote, “buildings in ruins, and everywhere there seems to be smoke and dust.” He did not stay to calm the masses - another apocryphal tale had him singing to the newly homeless gathered in Golden Gate Park, like Lincoln walking among the wounded after battle, or James Brown performing at the Boston Garden the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination. ![]() ![]() He remembers me and makes the man who takes an interest in my baggage ‘skiddoo’ as Americans say.” Fame has its privilege. “I tell him that this man wants to take my trunks, and that I am Caruso, the artist who sang in Carmen the night before. “Then a soldier comes up to me,” Caruso recalled. Like Jeeves, the valet is the unsung hero of Caruso’s story once he had his master outside, observing the chaotic aftermath of the earthquake, he returned to get the singer’s luggage: 54 steamer trunks in all, which someone tried to abscond with almost immediately. “I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children.”Įnter the valet, who tells the singer, ‘It is nothing.’ But all the same he advises me to dress quickly and go into the open, lest the hotel fall and crush us to powder.” “And what I see makes me tremble with fear,” he wrote. Remarkably, Caruso tried to go back to sleep until he decided to look out the window and see what was happening. ![]()
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