Re: Alcatraz-Angel Island Memories

06/12/10 - posted by Frank Dunnigan

Living on an island in SF Bay is a unique experience that was once limited to those of a prior generation, though now it’s possible to be a resident of Treasure Island.

Mom's 1932 classmate at St. Peter's in the Mission District was a girl named Alice Mooney (later, Curran) who lived with her family on Angel Island and took the ferry to school each day. My own friend and neighbor Bernice Garcia Gerland also grew up in a family that spent several years living on the island, and she took the ferry to Sherman School in the Marina. In both cases, their fathers were employees of the Immigration Station.

Bernice and her brother Phil, later a USF basketball star, both became long-time residents of the Sunset (there’s the Outsidelands tie-in for Woody), raising their families here—Phil was a USF basketball star in his younger days, and his son is columnist Ken Garcia. Their childhood recollections were told to an oral historian in early 2001, and appeared on pages 4-5 of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation newsletter that summer:

http://www.aiisf.org/pdf/Passages_2001_Summer.pdf

The living conditions must have been healthful, since all the people interviewed for that article lived to their late 80s and beyond. I believe that my neighbor Bernice was the last of the group when she died earlier this year, just shy of her 97th birthday.