Today, the last survivor of the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906 passed away. As reported by the Associated Press, William A. “Bill” Del Monte died at a retirement home in the Marin County. He was 11 days away from his 110th birthday.
Bill was three months old when the quake struck and forced his family into the streets to escape in a horse-drawn buck board with fire burning on both sides, Barroca said. The family crossed the bay to Alameda County but came back to the city after the home was rebuilt.
His father Angelo, who was part of the mid-1800 Italian migration to the US, had opened the famous Fior d’Italia on Broadway in 1886 that was destroyed in the quake but reopened in a tent not long after. By 1915 the Italian restaurant was prospering again.
Del Monte attended San Francisco schools and after graduation went to work briefly for his father at his North Beach restaurant. But even in his teens he was interested in playing the stock market. And he was good at it.
He lost the money but around the same time he gained a wife: a knockout known as Vera Minetti. They eloped to Reno in 1925 and were married for more than 55 years before she died in 1991. They never had children. While his true passion was playing the stocks, he also ran a San Francisco Bay Area theater for years.
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