Growing Up at the Humboldt Bay Fog Signal Station: Lighthouse Memories

It was around the latter part of January 1932, my dad, T. J. Allen, told my mother, Martha, and me that we were going to move to northern California. He had been accepted into the United States Lighthouse Service as a 2nd Assistant Keeper [at the Humboldt Bay Fog Signal Station]. Prior to this, as far back as I can recall, he was chief engineer on the Southern Pacific Ferry boats that ran between Oakland and San Francisco before the Bay Bridge was built. Knowing this that the bridge was in the near future and that many of the ferries would be inactivated [construction began in 1933 and was completed in November 1936], gave him the reason for joining the lighthouse Service. Since I was raised and educated in Berkeley, this was to prove quite an adventure for me in the years to come.