The WWII Liberty ship at Fisherman's Wharf runs an active amateur radio club restoring its original equipment. Its most experienced operator, Denice Stoops — the first woman hired as a commercial Morse operator at KPH in Inverness — died May 1.

Denice Stoops — Morse handle DA — spent decades moving between two Bay Area stations that once formed the backbone of North Pacific maritime radio. She was the first woman hired as a commercial Morse operator at KPH, the station RCA called "the Wireless Giant of the Pacific," whose Art Deco receiving building still stands at 17400 Sir Francis Drake Boulevard in Inverness. She also worked the radio room of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, the Liberty ship moored at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, operating from the same consoles that kept watch on 500 kHz — the international maritime distress frequency — during World War II. She died May 1, according to a memorial account published last week by Darren Mckeeman in the newsletter Long Wharf.

Both institutions are still running without her. At KPH, the Maritime Radio Historical Society — which Richard Dillman and Tom Horsfall founded on July 12, 1999, the day Globe Wireless sent the station's final commercial transmission — keeps the receivers live in Inverness and hosts an annual broadcast event each July 12th. At the O'Brien, the SS Jeremiah O'Brien Amateur Radio Club (JOBARC, call sign K6JOB) meets the first Sunday of every month at noon aboard the ship. Chief Radio Operator Alan Kesselhein leads the club, whose volunteers restore vintage equipment and conduct special operations during Fleet Week, as well as radio merit badge programs for Boy Scouts.

The O'Brien is a Liberty ship — one of 2,710 built during World War II — and her radio room is preserved with its original array intact. During the war, the ship's operator kept continuous watch on 500 kHz and couldn't identify the ship's position in any transmission; submarines were listening. KPH, roughly 35 miles north, was the shore station the O'Brien's sparks would have called.

Station manager Ed Brennan hired Stoops at KPH in 1979, after she finished a hitch at the Coast Guard's master station NMC at Point Reyes. She arrived to find the station running antique vacuum tube receivers. "They had to be calibrated," she reportedly said — the patience, per Mckeeman's account, of someone who knew exactly what good equipment looked like. When MRHS began restoring KPH after 1999, Stoops guided the work with professional knowledge nobody else had. MRHS co-founder Dillman wrote her memorial himself. It ends: "I know we all wish Denice fair winds and following seas and know that she still stands watch on 600m."

Six hundred meters: 500 kilohertz, the old maritime distress wavelength. The frequency nobody monitors commercially anymore. The watch JOBARC is still keeping, every first Sunday, aboard a ship at Fisherman's Wharf.