Wayback Machine
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
Dec. 9: They held a news conference yesterday afternoon attended by the Giants’ new management, a bunch of agents and Barry Bonds. Yes, it finally went down. Bonds signed a six-year, $43.75 million contract with the Giants. “It’s a lot of money, but there’s only one Barry Bonds,” said Peter Magowan, managing general partner of the ownership group. The new Giants regime entered baseball with a full-on roar. The contract is the biggest in baseball history and it could get bigger if performance incentives are reached. The ceiling is reportedly $50 million. Bonds stood at the podium yesterday, surrounded by his agents, his father Bobby, and the Giants’ hierarchy. He began speaking in an even tone then became emotional as he discussed playing for the same team as his father. “It’s like a boyhood dream that came true for me,” Barry said. “All I ever wanted to do is share something with my father. This is the greatest moment of my life.” Bonds and his father have apparently worked out a deal with Willie Mays that will allow Barry to unretire and then wear No. 24. Mays is Bonds’ godfather. “I get to keep his dreams and what he accomplished alive… If you retire all the numbers there won’t be any numbers left.”
— Tim Keown 1967
Dec. 3: A runaway cable car jammed with screaming passengers careened down the steep Hyde Street hill into a station wagon last night, triggering a fiery explosion that injured some 39, three critically. Flames enveloped the plummeting cable car after the crash at the intersection of Bay and Hyde Streets. Spewing out its passengers into the rainy street, it raced on for another two blocks out of control. “There was a sheet of flame throughout the cable car,” said passenger Harvey Epstein of New York, who was standing behind the gripman. “I got spilled out just after it happened. The guy who fell out over me was on fire.” Flames from the sedan’s ruptured gas tank raced after the cable car. Neighborhood residents who ran outside after the crash rocked their homes about 6.30 p.m. saw rivers of flames sweeping down Hyde Street. Three children — flames spurting from their clothing — were dragged to safety. Half a dozen persons were pried from the mangled wreckage of the charred auto, including the driver who was badly burned. Epstein and some fellow passengers said they heard the gripman Arthur Coats yell he had “lost the rope” (the cable) as the car skidded down the slippery hill for Chestnut.
— Jack Viets 1942 Dec. 3: RENO —Mrs. Joe DiMaggio arrived here last night and registered secretly at the Riverside Hotel to establish residence preliminary to divorcing the New York Yankees baseball star. This morning Mrs. DiMaggio, the former Dorothy Arnold of the films, conferred with her attorney Joseph Haller, who admitted she was here for divorce purposes. Last summer she spent a month in Nevada, but returned to her husband and it was reported they had patched up their differences. Mrs. DiMaggio brought her son, Joe III, and a companion with her. The Yankees home run hitter and Miss Arnold were married in San Francisco in November 1939. In San Francisco DiMaggio refused to discuss his wife’s action. “It’s my business where she is and what she’s doing,” he declared. Dec 4: The supply of horsemeat for animals at Fleishhacker Zoo may not be so plentiful after all. William Hubner, city purchasing agent, yesterday advised the city’s park commission to prepare for rationing meat for the zoo inmates. Hubner explained Western California Products Company had executed a contract to deliver 200,000 pounds of horsemeat at $5.87 per hundredweight. But Hubner said, the company inserted a clause that no deliveries would be made in the event that the supply of horses is unavailable. Hubner said he had been compelled to accept the condition since the company was the only one to submit a bid. Wild horses, he added, are slaughtered in Nevada and Utah to provide the meat supply. 1917 Dec. 5: “The biggest hawk we ever got here, alive or dead!” was how Sergeant McGee yesterday described the sharp-shinned hawk shot in Golden Gate Park last week by Tom Jameson. “He was really more like an eagle,” explained the sergeant, “and he was flying about thirty yards up in the air with a full-grown rabbit in his talons when Jameson spotted him. It was over the eucalyptus trees in Threemile Valley that Tom saw him, and believe me, it was some shot for a rifle that brought him down. The lad got him in one crack.”
“By the way we’ll miss Tom,” added the sergeant, regretfully, “but his handiness with a gun will be handy where he is going. He leaves for the front via Camp Lewis, on the 15th. In my mind’s eye I can see the sergeant-instructor teaching Tom which end of the rifle the shell goes in.”