|
In all of the annals of Santa Claus lore that has been held as tradition around the world for centuries, the story of Santa’s 28-year stint on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island has never been told, until now. However, after years of in-depth sleuthing by Lighthouse Digest’s crack research team, we now have indisputable visual evidence that Santa was seen for almost three decades at Christmastime on Alcatraz Island, and that was solely because of Alcatraz Island Lighthouse keeper, Edward H. Schneider.
Edward Herman Schneider was born on September 18, 1898 in Chicago, Illinois. His family moved west to the San Francisco Bay area of California by 1910 where Ed became an auto mechanic prior to World War I. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the war and afterwards returned to his mechanic profession for the next decade. However, during the Great Depression, auto mechanics had a hard time getting work, so Ed Schneider joined the U.S. Lighthouse Service in 1930 as a 4th assistant lighthouse keeper and was stationed out at St. George Reef Light, one of the most isolated and difficult posts in the service.
As Ed remarked in a 1952 San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article, “That’s where I broke in. It’s 10 miles offshore from Crescent City. Tough to get to, and tough to leave like the Farallones.” Additionally, St. George Reef Lighthouse was a stag station, so Ed had to leave his wife of eight years, Beatrice, and their three-year-old daughter, Jacquelyn, behind.
This was only for a short time, however, as he soon transferred to Alcatraz Island Lighthouse as 2nd assistant in 1931. Here, the family could be together, and as keeper Schneider later noted, “This is a good station. There’s not the isolation you find at most lights. Here’s a view that can’t be matched and the city is only 15 minutes away by boat.”
Every third day, Ed was able to go ashore in the prison launch and spend time with his sister’s family in Oakland; and they were free to visit him any time they wished on Alcatraz with the sole restriction that he’d meet them at the boat landing and escort them back to the lighthouse.
The article further mentioned that, “Schneider has had only long-range contact with the inmates. This occurs when he makes his periodic inspection of the fog siren at the north end of the island. To do so, he has to go through the prison and goes briskly along a carefully established route.
“During his long tenure, the lightkeeper can recall only a couple of ships getting into trouble – and neither time was their mishap due to a failure of the navigational aids he services so faithfully.”
Ed also recalled the violent circumstances during the “Battle of Alcatraz” in 1946, when prisoners made an unsuccessful escape attempt that resulted in the deaths of two prison guards and three convicts over a three-day period in May of 1946. Cell block D, where it occurred, was only 100 yards around the corner from the lighthouse. “We didn’t venture outside,” Schneider recounted. “Our entrance was out of the line-of-fire, though, and so guards would come over for a bit of food and then dash back into the prison.”
However, the Alcatraz station logbook entries presented a much more harrowing account. On May 2, it reads: “1430 hrs Convict on the loose with submachine gun, entire prison held at bay, shooting is almost continuous. Island surrounded by Coast Guard & Navy boats...The U S Marines landed on the north end of Island at this writing…more wounded guards were removed to the city . . . firing is still heavy . . .Total 13 wounded 2 deaths.”
After threatening to blow up the cell blocks with TNT, more gunfire, and dropping hand grenades through holes in the roof which reduced the prison “to a shambles,” the log book finally recorded on May 4: “1030 It’s all over. D Block has been taken with 26 live convicts. The end of 44 hours of living hell.”
This type of acutely stressful situation was extremely rare, however, for generally speaking, life at Alcatraz Lighthouse, and in the Island community of all who lived and worked there who were not inmates, was rather pleasant. As Edward H. Schneider recalled, “Bet you people on the mainland think we can’t have a good time here. Why, we have a club and get together for bingo and movies and sponsor dances for the juniors.”
Ed’s daughter, Jacquelyn Schneider Campbell, made an audio tape for her family of her many memories growing up on Alcatraz that recounted some of these fun times, starting with the early 1930s when it was an army disciplinary barracks before it became a federal prison.
She narrated: “I suppose growing up on Alcatraz was very much like growing up in a small town. There were about 200 families over there. Most of them were prison guards. In the lighthouse, there were three keepers. My father, at first, was just one of the minor keepers. He ended up as the head keeper, and, in fact, they even kept the lighthouse open there until he retired. But it was fun.
“Every two weeks or something like that, they used to have movies and . . . they were there in the jail. They had these long backless benches and on those benches the prisoners would sit. They were all dressed with their white pants and their white shirts and their navy-blue jackets because they were what was known as the ‘house boys’ for all the army officers – everybody had a house boy on the island except the lighthouse and they were everybody’s friend.
“They were like glorified babysitters, so when we would go to movies, our parents would sit up in back in these nice big soft squashy chairs and all of the kids would sit down in front with the prisoners because we got to sit on their laps to watch the movies and they would tell us all about them and it was just great fun. That was one of the hardest things for me when we stopped having those movies when the Federal boys came in 1934 and the army disappeared. They put up fences – ugly chain link fences – I’d never liked them and they had rolls of barbed wire all across the top and as far as I was concerned it just totally ruined my life.
“You didn’t have bicycles because where could you bicycle there? I was up on the tier that included the doctor and his family, the warden, the jail, and the lighthouse. And then [on] the second tier, you had to go through all those gates, so it wouldn’t do you any good to have a bicycle. By the time you got through all the gates, you’d be all out of the mood of why you were going down there.
“[But] we had roller skates . . . When I was little, I broke my arm roller skating which I wasn’t supposed to do. My mother had told me not to roller skate unless she was there and so I did anyway, naturally; but the skates were too big, so I tied them on with a rope which flipped me. I broke my arm and they had to haul me over to the jail to take x-rays because the arm was so broken and the bone was jutting through and looked so unfriendly. Then, they had to run a special launch to take me back to the mainland to San Francisco so I could go have my arm set. Needless to say, I was in a little trouble.
“You never thought about the prisoners as prisoners – they were just somebody there; and, of course, we were not allowed to speak to them. My father had a very succinct way of getting that point across to me.
“He told me I was not to speak to Elmer, who was one of the warden’s houseboys, because I used to go through their backyard and . . . he would sometimes be out in the garden. My father knew that I probably would, since I talked to everybody all the time anyway. He got the point across by saying, ‘Elmer doesn’t like females that talk. In fact, the reason he’s here is because his wife talked too much and he cut her head off with an ax.’ Needless to say, I never spoke a word to Elmer. I was terrified of him.
“Speaking of my father, he had duties as a lighthouse keeper that were not at all like people do today, because when he first went to the island as a lighthouse keeper, there were three of them. There was the head keeper and then there were two underlings – my father and a bachelor gentleman.
“One of his duties was when the coal came, because we had a coal stove that was the only heat we had other than a little fireplace which also took coal. The electricity was DC instead of AC, so you didn’t have any appliances like you did later on. This was between when we moved there in the 30s up until 1946 when they finally upgraded us a little in the lighthouse there.
“But anyway, the coal would come would come over on a coal barge; then somehow, they managed by truck or something to get it up to the lighthouse and one of my father’s duties was to shovel the coal out of the truck and into the basement.
“After I had broken my arm, they didn’t have what they called therapy in those days, but they told my father that since my arm was definitely not straight at all, that I was supposed to every day strengthen it by taking a bucket of coal. So, my father would have me fill up a bucket of coal and move it from one side of the basement to the other side; and then, when I had several buckets full over there, I could take my little buckets and bring them back again.
“And I did this every day until finally the arm became straight again and everything was fine. I don’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t been a lighthouse keeper with coal for me to shovel. But their job as lighthouse keepers was to maintain the foghorns and the light; and, of course, as a little kid, I loved going up into the lighthouse tower with my father and helping him polish the brass. Because the lightbulb itself wasn’t very big, but all of the magnification around it was huge, and everything, of course, was brass up there that trimmed everything, so I got to play with cleaning the brass with him.
“I thought that was wonderful and as a treat then, he would let me go out on the outside part of the tower in the raging wind; and, of course, just a one-rail little thing you could lean on when you got out there; and I was skinny and little and could have slipped through at any time, but fortunately for me, I didn’t. My mother was not pleased every time I would go up there and she would berate my father that I was going to be killed at any moment, but he just said, ‘Nah, she’ll be all right,’ and fortunately I was.
“But it was just like a small town. We had dances for the teenagers and we had parties – Halloween – that was one of the biggest things you looked forward to every year to making your costume. We didn’t do any trick or treating, obviously, but we had a big party and dance and everything down in the rec hall. Then we had a great big party there and music and everything else at Christmastime, so it was like I said- just kind of like a small little town. But it was fun.”
And the most memorable fun for the whole Alcatraz Island community during the Christmas season was when mild-mannered Edward H. Schneider stepped out of his role as diligent lighthouse keeper to become the one and only Santa Claus for all the children on the island. It seems this was the real role he was born to play as you could tell he was Santa by just looking at him, no matter what clothes he was wearing, besides the fact that he was known for having a “jolly” personality.
In January of 1960, an article was published in the Foghorn, the appropriately named publication for the staff and residents of Alcatraz, to bid a fond farewell to Edward the month following his retirement. It was written of him that, “Of the many ways which Ed added to the sum of human joy, as pianist for quartets, as accompanist at social functions, as an active participant in the Officer’s Club calendar, his finest and fondest contribution was to the happiness of the children.
“His love for them enhanced with a natural talent and embellished by the necessary physical attributes made him a model Santa Claus that must have been a duplicate of the original. How the children loved his homely attention, his friendly glow and his ability to make each one feel as though Christmas was celebrated especially for his [or her] own personal joy. And when he would roar with laughter clasping much of his 270 pounds in his two hands, a friendly feeling of camaraderie would surge throughout the entire assemblage and Christmas cheer would fairly ooze from out the hearts of all. Ed was more than a Santa Claus; he was a loved and loving father, friend and counselor.”
When keeper Edward H. Schneider retired from the U.S. Lighthouse Service on December 31, 1959, he was awarded the Albert Gallatin Award for his “faithful and meritorious service in the Federal Government” as a civilian lighthouse keeper for 29 years. He spent the next eight years living ashore with his sister, Mae Burnett, and her family, who by then had moved to nearby Pleasant Hill.
Unfortunately, Mae died in January of 1967, leaving Ed bereft. As his granddaughter Chellie Hamecs records, “He took the death of his sister extremely hard. During this time, he also was suffering from severe stomach and back pain. Fearing he had cancer and not wanting to be a burden on the family, he took his life on October 16, 1967 by shooting himself in the head. He left a suicide note stating, ‘I can’t stand the pain and I feel I am slowly becoming a burden.’ Medical test results reported after his death found he did not have cancer.”
However, perhaps this was just a transition to a new job for Edward Schneider. As the Foghorn article concluded, “And in the Hereafter, when each will have returned to his Maker and take his chosen seat, we will see Ed once again in a favored position near the right hand of God bouncing children on his knee.”
At least, that is how we would like to remember him.
This story appeared in the
Nov/Dec 2021 edition of Lighthouse Digest Magazine. The print edition contains more stories than our internet edition, and each story generally contains more photographs - often many more - in the print edition. For subscription information about the print edition, click here.
All contents copyright © 1995-2024 by Lighthouse Digest®, Inc. No story, photograph, or any other item on this website may be reprinted or reproduced without the express permission of Lighthouse Digest. For contact information, click here.
|
