CALIFORNIA: The Bench on Nob Hill

The world was in a frightful condition on the night of Dec. 26, 1942, but the place where 22-year-old Army Lieut. John Meredith Langstaff sat seemed remote from strife. He was sitting on a San Francisco park bench on Nob Hill. With him was a pert, leggy girl named Diane Guggenheim, 18, of the copper Guggenheims.

He proposed. She said yes. Next day, in hard sunlight, the bench still seemed a thing of excellence and charm. Before leaving the city the young couple took off their shoes, gravely lined them up beneath its slats and took a picture of it.

Fortnight ago San Francisco’s swank Pacific Union Club received a letter from the debarkation hospital at California’s Hamilton Field. It read:

“Dear Sir: This letter may seem to hold … a strange request . . . but I am in earnest. I am an infantry line officer . . . wounded at Okinawa. I am anxious to buy one of the green benches in . . . the little park adjoining the . . . club. A couple of years ago I became engaged to a New York girl one evening while sitting on [it]. We were later married and before I went overseas I . . . got to know a small daughter. I have always promised myself that I would try to get the bench for our garden in our home in New York. I hope you understand. . . . John Langstaff, ist Lieut., Infantry.”

Enclosed was a sketch of the park, an “X” designating the bench.

Transactions of this nature are seldom handled in the Pacific Union Club. And anyhow, the park belongs to the city. Nevertheless the club’s manager asked Club member Lewis Lapham, the mayor’s son, to do something about it. Lapham took the letter to the city Park Commission.

The commissioners engaged in a decent interval of protest and speech. Finally, beaming, they agreed to send the bench, and even (despite Langstaff’s insistence on paying for it) to give it and pay the cost of shipping themselves. Then they discovered that the bench had been removed from the park. They organized a search, discovered it, among some discarded machinery, in Golden Gate Park.

Last week, disassembled and crated, it was on its way east to be installed in Lieut. Langstaff’s tiny yard on Manhattan’s East 62nd Street. And in both the Pacific Union Club and the City Hall a casual visitor might have been puzzled to observe a fleeting and apparently inexplicable smile on the faces of some solid, civic and all-too-greying men.