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Opening Day of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition San Francisco, February 20, 1915 Excerpts from The Day Begins, 6 a.m. The physical awakening of the city was one of those episodes that thrill the heart and unite whole peoples in a common bond of sympathy. The shrieks of whistles and steam sirens, the clamor of horns, the shrilling and throbbing of the fife-and-drum corps, the iron clangor of belabored trolley poles, burst forth at six in the morning with an appalling din which had something primordial and soul-shaking in it. A few minutes later people all over town were going out their doorsteps and calling to their neighbors, and bustling about, and hurrying one another into general activity. The parade was supposed to form, and the head of it did form, on Van Ness at Broadway. But when the head of it reached the Scott Street entrance of the Exposition, its rear was two and one-half miles away. At the head marched Mayor Rolph, and Marshall Hale, joined later by Governor Johnson. The Mayor almost broke into a run and had to restrained by Hale. There followed six carriages of pioneers, men that had seen the city grow from a few shacks at the edge of a cove that has long since disappeared. Gone were the days of division and doubt, of criticism, of skepticism. The democracy of the breadline, in the days just after the fire came back again. Merchants, bankers, clerks, stevedores, high-salaried corporation managers, factory hands, all marched in the same columns, in the same ranks. Ladies that infrequently went downtown except in their limousines marched out to the Van Ness gate in the midst of the promiscuous crowd, trudged along with the girls from the cannery and enjoyed it. Every distinction was forgotten except that of being in the parade that was going out to open the Exposition. One
hundred and fifty thousand marched that day... and never forgot it.
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