San Francisco's “Titanic” Comes to Surface for Granddaughter

Dorothy Landucci never knew her grandfather, Thomas Edward Brady. Never even recalls seeing a picture of him. But 90 years into her life, his shadowy story and death still cling to the periphery like a thick fog.

“I don’t feel happy when I see waves rolling in,” Landucci said, perched on the couch of her San Mateo home. “I can’t explain.”

There’s no need to explain Landucci’s aversion to the tumultuous tides that bull rush through the Golden Gate strait, flowing endlessly beneath its famous bridge. Because just outside the bridge is where Brady's body lies, along with the remains of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro steamer ship that went down on a foggy morning, Feb. 22, 1901, killing 128.

“He was a second engineer,” Landucci recited, “and he kept the lights going when the ship hit this… whatever it hit.”

It must be said, the details Landucci relates about her grandfather’s death trickled down from old newspaper articles, books and nautical experts. Her grandmother didn’t talk about her grandfather much - and it was a generation where children weren’t encouraged to pose questions.

“I guess having remarried,” she said, “my grandmother didn’t want to rock the boat.”

The story Landucci pieced together, is that captain and pilot of the 350 foot steamer tried to enter San Francisco around 5 a.m. in a foggy soup. Instead, the ship smashed into the rocks off of Fort Point and went down in a hurry.

“I heard a story that my grandfather went to get the log,” Landucci said, “and that’s when the ship went down, because it went down in a matter of minutes.”

The ship carried more than 200 passengers, mostly Chinese and Japanese immigrants. Reports said Brady kept the ship’s lights on as long as he could, giving passengers precious extra minutes to escape. Italian fishermen helped pluck dozens of passengers from the frigid waters.

“Here this man was keeping the ship afloat for a lot of immigrants,” said Landucci’s son-in-law, Mark DePaula. “So to me, more for that time he was a real hero.”

The ship remained lost among the tides until NOAA researchers recently pinpointed the wreckage just off Baker Beach in 287 feet of water. The agency last week released new 3D sonar images showing the ship’s resting place in a thick layer of silt and mud. Following the wreck, rumors circulated the ship had gone down with a load of gold and silver. But later research debunked those theories.

Still, the fact the ship’s death toll marked the greatest loss of life in San Francisco’s nautical history, it was later referred to as the Titanic of the Golden Gate.

“Granted there wasn’t many people compared to what happened with the Titanic,” said DePaula, who researched accounts of the wreck. “But the tragedy of the amount of people that died.”

Brady’s death left Landucci’s grandmother alone to raise four children - she sent the two boys to St. Vincent’s School for Boys - and her memories of Brady seemingly to the bottom of the sea.

Landucci kept an early newspaper article of the wreck on the wall of her home, along with a framed picture of the ship beneath it.

But there is no pull to visit the site where the ship lies - or cast a wreath of flowers into the tides that flow over Brady’s watery grave. Even now, Landucci doesn’t care for the water.

“I think that had an affect on me,” she said.
 

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