Chapter One: BeginningONEBEGINNING JOHN DAY WAS A DIFFICULT man. A southerner of modest means, he had come North in his early twenties to make a living and find a wife, which he did, but his enthusiasm over the course of his married life was often directed less toward career advancement or family and more toward his race horses, professional sports, gambling, male bonding, the bottle, and nights on the town. And, on occasion, other women. Sharp-tongued and opinionated, "Judge Day," as he liked being called in later years (for no other reason than his demeanor and tendency to pronouncements), was used to being deferred to. Born in Cleveland, Tennessee, in 1870, he grew up in a Scots-Irish family that claimed a distant kinship to Daniel Boone and Sam Houston; his father had served the Confederacy as a surgeon and been taken prisoner in the last weeks of the conflict. In the recollection of his eldest daughter, Dorothy, John Day was a man not given to self-doubt or displays of paternal affection, and he shared many of the biases of his place of birth, his time, and his class. He was "intemperate," in her generous words, about foreigners and African Americans. He had no use for religion.

As a Republican, he had even less use for political radicalism. It was a supreme irony that John Day lived to see three of his five children--two of them his girls, no less--become as critical of capitalist America, as politically radical, as it was possible to be in the United States in the early twentieth century. Della, his youngest daughter, was a longtime supporter of Margaret Sanger''s birth control crusade and walked the picket line in Boston the day the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed. John, his youngest son and namesake, became a Communist in the 1930s. And Dorothy, his middle child, was to follow a path entirely beyond his grasp--one for which he felt nothing but amazement and a deep revulsion. Grace Satterlee, his wife, came from a different background and had a very different temperament. Born in 1870 in upstate New York, she was the youngest of six and was put to work in a Poughkeepsie shirt factory at the age of nine when her father died, never having fully recovered from wounds incurred fighting for the Union in the Civil War. Like John Day''s father, he had been captured by the enemy and spent time in a prisoner of war camp.

When a government pension belatedly came through, Grace was able to return to school. Family finances didn''t allow for any misplaced notions of gentility for this young woman in want of a career, and it was while attending a branch of the Eastman Business School in New York City that Grace met John Day. About their courtship, we know very little. Grace must have been impressed with her suitor''s self-assurance, southern drawl, and sandy-haired good looks. Eight months after they were married on September 19, 1894, in an Episcopal church on Perry Street in Greenwich Village, their first child was born. Though the groom had been raised a Congregationalist and the bride an Episcopalian, neither was more than nominally religious, and their wedding day was the last occasion for some time that either set foot in a house of worship. None of their children was baptized. The first three of those children came in rapid succession: Donald in 1895, Sam Houston in 1896, and Dorothy in 1897, on November 8.

Grace Delafield, known for most of her life as Della, was born in 1899, and the last child, John, Jr., was born in 1912 after a series of miscarriages. The family was living at 71 Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights when Dorothy was born, suggesting a level of gentility that Day''s income as a sportswriter for the New York Morning Telegraph could not support for long, and they moved a year or two later to Bath Beach, a neighborhood at the other end of the borough near today''s Coney Island. A good deal less expensive, Bath Beach had the additional advantage of being closer to the Gravesend Race Track, John Day''s second home. Dorothy would remember frolicsome hours on the beach with her brothers when she wasn''t in school, fishing for eels in a nearby creek, running through open fields, hiding with a cousin in an abandoned shack by Fort Hamilton. More vivid still were the memories that followed the family''s move from the East Coast to the West Coast when her father decided to leave his job in New York, for reasons unknown, to try his luck with a San Francisco newspaper. John went on ahead to begin work and find a house; in the interim, which was longer than expected, Grace was forced to take in boarders in the Bath Beach house to make ends meet. Finally, they were there, reunited, renting furnished lodgings in Berkeley while they waited for their own furniture to arrive by ship, living in a house with a garden filled with roses, violets, and calla lilies.

The girls would fashion dolls out of the lilies, crushing flowers into a bottle of water to make perfume for themselves and their babies. "Even now," Dorothy wrote in adulthood thirty years later, "I can remember the peculiar, delicious, pungent smell" of those flowers. The move to a permanent home in Oakland, or what was supposed to be their permanent home, brought the Days into an even more bucolic setting, "near open fields and woods, where the windows looked out to the hills" and where periodic forest fires cast a delicate haze over the landscape. For an eight-year-old with two only slightly older brothers who were a rough-and-tumble pair themselves and not averse (at that stage) to letting their sister tag along, unburdened by parents who gave much thought to their oldest daughter''s pronounced lack of daintiness, freedom from convention was a source of great joy. Her closest friend in Oakland, Naomi Reed, was told by her mother to stop playing with Dorothy after hearing the language she used in an altercation with Donald over ownership of the family''s guinea pigs. ("I threw things besides," Dorothy added about that incident.) The Reeds were strict Methodists and felt that their daughter''s friendship with a tomboy whose parents failed to respect the Sabbath had gone far enough. Dorothy had been joining the Reeds for church on Sunday for a while, enjoying the hymns and Naomi''s company, but when that came to an abrupt end, she took comfort in being adopted by the "tough gang" of the neighborhood, adolescent boys who stayed out after dark, didn''t listen to their parents, and did their best to sneak into Idora Park, avoiding the ten-cent admission, to watch the Ferris wheel or cadge a ride on the mountain slide or the circle swing.

In The Eleventh Virgin , a somewhat autobiographical novel Dorothy would publish in 1924, she wrote about her protagonist, June, a girl at just the same age, playing in the late-summer weeds in the lots near her house, weeds "so high that June could tunnel her way through them, making large green-roofed caves here and there. One of the boys let her share his cave with him, and some afternoons when the others weren''t around, he took her in his arms and kissed her, pressing himself up against her. He was one of the big boys, fourteen." Though flattered by the attention, "there was wickedness in it," she allowed. At the same time, she felt, "it was exciting." To a child like Dorothy, life in California seemed good, or good enough to hope it would last forever. Her mother found it hard to make friends in their new home, but that wasn''t something any of her children was aware of. Grace was adept at putting others'' needs first and at masking her own disappointments.

John was out most of the day--given his flares of temper, something everyone in the bungalow counted as a blessing. When he wasn''t in San Francisco at the paper, he was at the Oakland Trotting Park or the stable where he kept a race horse. Money was flush, and he envisioned owning a string of horses. That hope ended, however, in the early morning hours of April 18, 1906. The night before, John Day had noticed that the horses in the stable seemed unusually restless, neighing and stamping in their stalls. He thought no more about it. At 5:12 the next morning, the rumbling started and the family was awakened, Dorothy wrote, as "the earth became a sea," rocking their house tumultuously for what was less than a minute but seemed an eternity. The windmill and water tank at the back of the house started to totter, throwing water across the roof.

The panicked children were hustled out of their beds and into the front yard. By the time the quake ended, the house was standing but scarcely habitable. Cracks ran from the floor to the ceiling, the chandeliers had been smashed, every glass and dish broken, the chimney toppled. The flames visible from across the bay indicated that, bad as the damage was there, Oakland had been spared the worst of the disaster, and throughout the next few days residents greeted thousands of families from the city pouring over on the ferry and in private boats. Idora Park and the racetrack were now turned into campgrounds filled with cots, and anyone with a solid roof overhead invited strangers in to stay. Grace joined her neighbors, from morning until nightfall, cooking for the displaced San Franciscans at the refugee sites, and the family went back into the house when it seemed safe to gather up what clothes and blankets they could to give to those who had nothing. The tragedy became personal to the Days as well when they.