San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Rockers rebuffed over RFK wake
Items culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago:
1993
June 10: A San Francisco man who lost his entire family at Jonestown says it is time for a monument to the 912 victims of the 1978 Guyana massacre. Fred L. Lewis, 64, who lives in the Bayview District, lost his wife, Doris, their seven children, a sister and 18 other relatives. The monument would replace a modest headstone at a mass burial site in Oakland’s Evergreen Cemetery, and Lewis has begun a drive to raise $14,000 for one big enough for all 912 names to be engraved on it. Every name would be on it but that of Rev. Jim Jones, the maniacal Peoples Temple leader who ordered the gruesome suicide-murder Nov. 18, 1978.
Lewis said one of the first contributors to the fund was Gale H. Robinson of Burbank. He is the father of Greg Robinson, the 27year-old San Francisco Examiner photographer who was one of the five people slain in an airstrip ambush near Jonestown. Representative Leo Ryan, D-San Mateo, was also killed in the ambush. Lewis, a retired butcher, said Evergreen Cemetery has agreed to provide the monument at cost, and he hopes to see it dedicated on Nov. 18, the 15th anniversary of the slaughter. “It’s going to be beautiful,” Lewis said.
— Maitland Zane
1968
June 10: San Francisco’s two leading rock-groups, the Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead, tried to play an impromptu “wake” at Golden Gate Park yesterday in honor of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, but the police wouldn’t let them. More than 3000 young people gathered in the park’s Speedway meadow for the occasion and sat back in the sunshine to wait for the sounds, which never came. The rock groups did not have a permit to play in the park and the position of the law remained immobile through nearly three hours of discussion — no permit, no music. The argument was one of those confrontations, which couldn’t quite make it across the generation gap. On the one side, Sergeant Galik, the sergeant in charge of the park’s mounted unit, backed up by plainclothes officers and several carloads of Tactical Squad officers, also known as riot police. On the other side were Bill Thompson, the Airplane’s manager; and Rock Scully, the Dead’s manager; plus some of the musicians and some of the unhappier members of the waiting audience. “There’s a matter of basic law,” said the sergeant. “You don’t have a permit.” “This isn’t a concert,” said Thompson. “This is a wake.” Furthermore, said Scully, the day had been declared a national day of mourning. The sergeant appeared torn at this point, his sympathies to some extent with the young managers, his law to uphold, and his patience wearing thin. A radio call from supervising Captain Eugene Caldwell came through and it affirmed his position.
— Dick Hallgren
1943
June 12: Angel Island — German prisoners of war profess an unshaken belief that Germany will emerge victorious, officials at the Angel Island internment camp say, but prisoners from the conquered countries share no such conviction. The Angel Island camp in San Francisco Bay through which Japanese, Italians and Germans have passed is labeled a collecting station because it does not retain prisoners after the wounded have recovered and a sufficient number have come through to make up special train inland. As a group of newspapermen entered their separate rooms some prisoners stood stiffly at attention, then at an order marched from their quarters. Others, including Austrians, Poles and Czechoslovakians, smiled at their visitors. Most of the prisoners were in their early twenties, dressed in dungarees and army issue shirts. Some played cards while others were sunning themselves on the hillside, inside the one-acre barbed-wire enclosure. A few were playing volleyball or pitching horseshoes. The men receive $1 allowance for candy, cigarettes and toilet articles every 10 days. They clean their own quarters but there is no work program. They write letters, limited to two a week, and receive mail from the Red Cross. They are given a diet similar to men in the U.S. Army and thrive on it. Several did not appear unhappy in their confinement but looked longingly at the skyline of the cities across San Francisco Bay.
1918
June 6: The Royal Theater, corner of Polk and California streets, promises a double bill of exceptional merit today and tomorrow when William S. Hart will be seen in “The Tiger Man” and “Fatty” Arbuckle will appear as an ample star of “Moonshine.” Hart plays a bandit whose early career suggests an unregenerate and hardened criminal but whose later career is molded and fashioned by a good woman whose influence reshapes the destiny of the “bad man.” Arbuckle in “Moonshine” will prove an effective “gloom dispeller.” How he tries to capture a gang of illicit distilleries in the mountains of Kentucky is told with a mingling of comedy, farce and melodrama through all of which “Fatty” travels at top speed. Al St. John and “Buster” Keaton assume important roles in support.