By Larry D. Hatfield, San Francisco Examiner, 14 Aug 1970
Click Beatrice McCall Whitnah for the photo appearing with this article.
A strange, if not altogether unlikely, alliance has been forged between San Francisco's 22 year old "siren fiend" and Berkeley's 88 year old sign stealer.
The so-called "fiend," Michael Courtney, arrested Wednesday, says his siren-setting escapades of the past week were financed by Mrs. Beatrice Whitnah.
Mrs. Whitnah, a booster of anti-war causes and a confessed booster of air raid shelter signs, says it isn't true but it doesn't matter. She thinks Courtney is on the right track.
"If I had seen his picture and knew he was 22, I would have been tempted to lie and said I did (finance him) but I really have never seen him," the octogenarian cause-fighter said after "two big detectives and two policemen shook me out of bed."
Even though she doesn't know Courtney, she said she "would love to get a young lawyer to defend him. He has enough insight to see through this thing."
"This thing," according to both, is the danger of nuclear holocaust and the futility and wast of current air raid warnings and shelters.
Courtney, a native of New Orleans, said in a jail interview last night Mrs. Whitnah paid him $25 each time he set off an air raid siren. If a siren did not go off, he got paid $5 an hour for his "working time," he claimed.
Payments, "a dozen, maybe 13" of them, were made by mail. "the money was from her," said Courtney, who still claims he had no accomplices in setting off sirens around The City.
Police say more arrests are expected.
Haight Siren
Courtney, a former student at the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science, said he met Mrs. Whitnah last year "through friends" interested in her anti-war activities.
"I visited her at her home about three or four times about eight months ago," he said.
"I wonder who he is, I don't think I ever saw him," Mrs. Whitnah mused. She added she would, indeed, pay to have sirens set off, if she could afford it.
She set one off herself, with the aid of "two young men (neither of them Courtney)", on Haight Street last Nov. 15, she said.
"And I sent a full confession to (Mayor) Alioto, the (then) Police Chief (Tom Cahill) and the Fire Chief (Bill Murray), but they ignored me.
"I would like to get arrested. I'm dying to get into (Sheriff Matthew) Carberry's jail so I can expose him and the conditions there," she said.
She also would like to "find some young lawyer" to sue the Berkeley police because they have confiscated 31 of the 140 air raid shelter signs she paid people to steal last year.
Peace Symbol
"They've got stolen property and they should give it back," Mrs. Whitnah said. It was pointed out that she, too, had stolen property with the shelter signs she still has arranged in the form of a peace symbol at her home.
"I know, but I'm not respectful like the police."
"It makes me so impatient when a woman on crutches and her mind possibly failing can make such a stir," she said of her own activities, adding wistfullly, "if I only had 20 other old women . . ."
If she did, she said, she would expand her crusade against "senseless" civil defense spending. She thinks the money could be put to better use.
For Breakfasts
"I want to get them to stop spending money on sirens and shelters and turn it over to the (Black) Panthers to feed their children," she said. "We're killing the Panthers . . . Do you blame them for rising up, finally?"
Courtney told The Examiner the he "didn't enjoy" setting off the alarms which rocked residents in various parts of The City awake in the pre-dawn hours for five consecutive days before his arrest.
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