Peninsula’s ties to San Francisco mystery

At the 1956 dinner near where Highway 101 and San Mateo Fire Station 24 are today, Billings referred to his own long  prison sentence — and said Morton Sobell should be spared that same injustice.

Billings had spent more than two decades at Folsom Prison after his murder conviction for the 1916 bombing of the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco. He was released in 1940 after a long campaign contending perjured testimony convicted Billings.

The San Mateo resident said he saw Sobell enjoying the same vindication.

“The day will come when nobody will believe the one witness who, trying to dodge a perjury charge, accused Sobell of being a spy,” Billings said in 1956 before the holiday dinner in San Mateo.

Billings’ efforts for Sobell are forgotten now — as is the July 22, 1916, parade bombing that sent Billings to Folsom Prison.

But in the early 20th century, few stories were bigger than Billings and his co-defendant Thomas Joseph Mooney, found guilty in the Market Street bombing that killed 10 people and wounded 40.

Mooney and Billings were seen as labor martyrs by millions. As many thought the pair were murderers.

Preparedness Day parades, to support American military preparedness amid the first world war, had been held without incident around America. But when the 1916 parade took place in San Francisco, the carnage followed.

Unsolved bombing

A suitcase bomb exploded near a saloon — the start of what is now considered San Francisco’s greatest mystery — and a decadeslong saga that included San Bruno, San Mateo and Redwood City.

A 2017 San Jose Mercury News story said, “The San Francisco Preparedness Day bombing remains an unsolved mystery.”

“The identity of the bomber will probably never be known,” the Library of Congress said in a story on its website.

The two men convicted and later pardoned of the crime came to California early in the 20th century.

The diminutive Billings stood 5 feet 5 inches, was a New York native and known as “Kid Billings” for his youthful appearance. Mooney, a native of Chicago, had been acquitted after three trials in Contra Costa County following his 1913 arrest on suspicion of possessing dynamite in a boat in the San Pablo Bay. He was suspected of planning to blow up Pacific Gas and Electric transmission lines in the East Bay, Mooney was missing half of a little finger after what he said was a banister accident at a hotel.

Prior events

Six weeks before the parade bombing July 22, 1916, Mooney held a meeting at the Woodmen Hall in San Francisco on 16th Street for United Railroad workers he sought to organize. Between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. the next day, three steel towers on San Bruno Mountain that supplied power to the railroad were dynamited — but the explosion failed to stop the railroad’s power supply. A suitcase with 40 sticks of dynamite and a timing device was later found near the Tanforan Race Track in San Bruno.

On July 20 at Dreamland, a skating rink and auditorium near Post Street in San Francisco, a protest meeting against the Preparedness Parade included a speaker who said soldiers should shoot their officers and go home to end war. Anonymous letters sent to newspapers said, “Our protests have been in vain in regards to this preparedness propaganda, so we are going to use a little direct action on the 22nd which will echo around the earth and show that Frisco really knows how and that militarism cannot be forced on us and our children without a violent protest.”

“We want to give only the hypocritical patriots who shout for war but never go, a real taste of war,” read the letter.

A bloody day

The 2:06 p.m. bombing at Steuart and Market streets, a block from the Ferry Building, took the life of Myrtle Van Loo, 38, watching the parade with her two young children.

A witness to the bombing would testify that he saw Van Loo’s body on the pavement, her head crushed.

The man asked a little boy who stood by why he was crying.

“That is my mamma,” the youth answered.

Among the wounded, 19-year-old Pearl Seeman of Oakland had to have a leg amputated because of the bombing.

Mooney was sentenced to hang, but won commutation to life imprisonment, the same sentence Billings received.

Fremont Older, the San Francisco Bulletin newspaper editor who lived on a ranch near Saratoga, first believed Mooney guilty.

“I’m sure Mooney did it,” he said.

But Older later championed his release after concluding Mooney and Billings were innocent and convicted by perjured testimony.

The Sacramento Bee was sure about Mooney’s responsibility for the crime. “He deserves no sympathy,” the paper said. Workers had been misled that Mooney was railroaded to San Quentin. He was a dynamiter, said the Bee.

A radical past

Mooney’s radical sympathies were no secret. In 1932, he wrote from San Quentin Prison to Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin.

“All hail to the Russian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m for it hook, line and sinker, without equivocation or reservation. Please accept my warm personal regards and best wishes, I am comradely yours, Tom Mooney.”

The Nation magazine linked Mooney’s murder conviction to politics.

“Tom Mooney was not simply picked out at random to be the victim of a frame-up in the hysterical days preceding America’s entry into the World War,” contended The Nation. “He was framed because he was a militant, left-wing labor leader, because he had bucked the big corporations which held San Francisco and California in their grip.”

Gov. Culbert Olson, the first Democrat elected to the California executive post in the 20th century, pardoned Mooney in 1939. A parade along Market Street, attended by thousands, followed.

The death of Mooney and Billings

Mooney died in 1942 at the age of 59 and is buried at Cypress Lawn Memorial Park in Colma.

Billings was released from Folsom Prison in 1939, but not pardoned for decades. His earlier conviction complicated his pardon bid.

He married Jospehine Rudolph in Reno in 1940. She met Billings by corresponding with him in prison, and had managed the Singer Sewing Machine agency in Burlingame, later operated a San Carlos restaurant and was part of a Works Progress Administration project at the San Mateo public library.

Billings, a former vice president and secretary of San Mateo Central Labor Council, was honored as the “grand old man” of the San Mateo labor movement at a 1971 dinner where former Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the guest speaker.

In 1972, Billings died at Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City. He was 79.

Innocent?

Mooney’s guilt or innocence in the parade bombing could still start an argument in a San Francisco bar, said a 1968 book — but the contemporary consensus is that he was falsely convicted. That’s despite several revelations starting in the 1970s.

Born and raised in Fresno, the writer William Saroyan had championed Mooney in the 1930s as “the symbol of international strength and growth of the working-class.”

But Saroyan, in a 1976 book, wrote about interviewing Mooney — and suggested that the parade bombing was not the puzzle it was often presented to be.

“Now, I know I have no right to say this and will be criticized for doing so, but I believe that Tom Mooney had me understand, willfully, that he had indeed had some vital connection with the explosion on Market Street that had taken so many lives. If not, then he certainly wished he had, or liked to pretend that he had.”

In the 1982 book “The Gentle Dynamiter,” a sympathetic biography published by Ramparts Press in Palo Alto, author Estolv Ward said Mooney admitted to dynamiting property — crimes he had always denied.

Colgate University Professor Richard Frost, whose book “The Mooney Case” is the most detailed account of the saga, wrote that ‘The Gentle Dynamiter’ offered an important new point about Tom Mooney.

“Tom privately admitted, after there was nothing to be gained or lost by frankness,” that “he had been a dynamiter, a saboteur of industrial installations,” though he was careful not to endanger lives.

“In view of Mooney’s suspect behavior and repeated trials for alleged dynamiting of PG&E power towers in 1913, this is entirely plausible,” wrote Frost.

Perhaps the most surprising assertion is by Grace Umrath, granddaughter of anarchists, in the 1995  book “Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America” published by Princeton University.    

Umrath had once asked an anarchist “if it was possible that Mooney and Billings were guilty of the bombing.”

“There’s a small possibility that they were innocent,” he answered.

Umrath said, “I believe that Mooney and Billings were framed but that they were also guilty. The prosecutor knew they did it but, not having sufficient evidence to convict them, purchased false testimony and other fraudulent evidence.”

“What happened, as I heard it, was that Billings had a suitcase rigged with dynamite, intended for a plant being struck,” said Umrath.

The parade prevented him from crossing Market Street, and “with the time bomb going, he panicked, put down the suitcase, and ran,” Umrath said she was told.

The Cold War era spying conviction of Morton Sobell in 1951, challenged by Billings at the Thanksgiving dinner in San Mateo, proved to be valid.

Sobell, released from prison in 1969, admitted in a 2008 New York Times interview that he had spied for the Soviets.

Ryan McCarthy is the author of the books “Blood on the Hops,” about a 1913 riot at a ranch outside Sacramento, and “In Love with the Revolution” about the Peoples Temple.