Giants will stay in San Francisco
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1992
Nov. 11: The Giants will play baseball next season in San Francisco. Major League Baseball yesterday rejected Giants owner Bob Lurie’s $115 million deal with Florida investors, leaving Lurie free to negotiate with other buyers. Lurie said he will review the $100 million offer made by San Francisco investors and said that he expects to make a decision about whether to sell to the group within the next few days. “This is clearly a happy day in San Francisco,” Lurie told a roomful of reporters after seven hours of meetings by baseball owners. “I congratulate Peter Magowan, the entire San Francisco group and everyone throughout the Bay Area who worked so hard to keep the Giants in San Francisco.”
— Marc Sandalow and April Lynch
1967
Nov. 10: America’s airlines have created a malodorous, bearded monster who haunts their gleaming cabins. His name is hippie. For three years the air companies have been pursuing the patronage of today’s mobile young with special “youth fare” tickets which offer 50 percent discounts. But along with the well-scrubbed college boys and girls came the hippies, whose sense of freedom about personal hygiene is particularly controversial in the closed quarters of a jet. The problem was particularly acute for airlines with flights to and from San Francisco during the recently concluded Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury.
The trade journal, Aviation Daily, addressed itself to the problem and predicted “real trouble.” “The hippies, as they travel on discount tickets, are boarded last and often end up in middle seats in coach sections, shocking and offending regular patrons. Airlines should exercise their right to refuse passage to those not meeting cleanliness standards.” In head-on opposition is an attorney for the Civil Liberties Union in Washington D.C. who said: “They have no right whatsoever to make judgments of this sort. The same kind of reasoning kept Negroes in the back of the bus.” A survey of local airline offices showed that most companies have left the decision to the boarding agent — the man at the airport who can conduct a sight-and-smell inspection before takeoff. A spokesman for American Airlines said hippies are not turned away willy-nilly. “But hippies, and there are quite a few of them traveling by air now, who are dirty, smelly and offensively dressed are not permitted on board.”
— Keith Power
1942
Nov. 11: Simian Simon out at Fleishhacker Zoo peeled himself a carrot and munched it with a grimace, remarking to some fellow chimps: “I wish the Allies’d hurry up and make one of us out of Hitler. Carrots, carrots, carrots — they don’t even look like bananas.” But the monkeys at the zoo weren’t the only ones with a beef. The lions had a beef — rather, they were growling because they hadn’t. The canaries have to sing on dry cracked wheat breadcrumbs. The big cats no longer get milk and eggs on Sunday morning; it’s buttermilk instead. “For the most part,” said Zoo Director Carey Baldwin, “the lions and other meat eaters still get some horse meat, but we also feed them more chicken heads. The cubs like chicken heads. We had a time with the big cats at first, because they didn’t go much for buttermilk. With bananas scarce and high, the monkeys get none at all. Instead we increased their ration of carrots, lettuce and apples — maybe we should get them banana apples.” In all, despite necessary changes in menus, Baldwin said the animals were still faring fairly well and have adjusted themselves to war rations. One thing the keepers seek in a substitute is the supply of vitamins, for vitamins make the birds and the beasts happy. The apes have their orange juice every morning.
1917
Nov. 11: Shouting in protest and refusing to dress himself, Warren K. Billings, the first of the defendants to be convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, was dragged from his cell in the County Jail and taken to Folsom prison to begin his term. Billings resisted but was compelled to dress. A carefully planned demonstration among the prisoners in protest against the removal of Billings was frustrated by Sheriff Thomas Finn. Learning that a riot was planned, Sheriff Finn ordered that the prisoners be kept in their cells until Billings had been removed from the jail. When the officers went to Billings’ cell he defied them to take him and refused to dress. The cell door was opened and Billings in his nightclothes was dragged into the corridor by jail attaches. Fighting every step of the way and cheered by the prisoners, Billings was subdued. Billings, who is 23 years old, was taken to prison by Deputy Sheriff W. T. O’Connor. Since his conviction, Billings has fought unsuccessfully for a new trial. Billings was convicted as the man who planted at Steuart and Market streets, during the Preparedness Day Parade, July 22, 1916, the suitcase bomb that caused the death of ten persons and wounded scores.