San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tom Mix rides in style in S.F. visit
Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1994
April 6: A U.S. Navy bomber jet tipped out of control and slammed into San Francisco Bay yesterday, killing both fliers and sending a spectacular plume of water high into the air as horrified lunch-hour crowds watched from the shore. Witnesses said the A-6E Intruder attack jet had flown past the Bay Bridge at 11:55 a.m. and was at a low altitude when it suddenly dipped one wing into the water, skipped a couple of times over the waves then plunged. Some who saw the crash said the plane kicked up a huge spray at least six stories tall and sank at about a 45-degree angle. The crew of a small commercial boat, the Express Three, was retrieving the bodies of the pilot and his navigator-bombardier from the water when the Coast Guard rescue craft arrived. The bodies were taken to the Coast Guard’s Yerba Buena island base and the two were pronounced dead on arrival. The two men killed were identified as Lieutenant Randall E. McNally and Lieutenant Brian R. McMahon, both in the Naval Reserve. A-6E jets fly over the bay nearly every day of the week on training runs. The last time a Navy aircraft from the Alameda station crashed into the bay was 1988, when a minesweeper helicopter wreck killed eight people.
— Kevin Fagan and Benjamin Pimentel
1969
April 2: “The police act as judge, jury and executioner,” said the black woman in the pink knit dress. “That cop went in that store after that boy with hatred in his heart.” The speaker was Mrs. Ruth Williams, an angry and articulate mother of six whose son was an eyewitness to the slaying of a black teenager by a white policeman in Hunters Point-Bayview area. Mrs. Williams was one of some 75 people, most of them black and all of them disillusioned, who held a sort of black wake yesterday outside Paulette’s Record Shop at 5162 Third Street. Paulette’s is the little soul-music store where Alvert Joe Linthcome, 19, was shot and killed Sunday night by Patrolman Gerald Roberts. Linthcome, who was riding in a stolen car, was unarmed. Two and a half years ago in October 1966, Hunters Point blew up over an identical incident — the killing of a black teenage joyrider named Matthew Johnson by a white policeman. Yesterday’s mood, however, was not an explosive one; rather it was one of disappointment, of frustration, of impotent rage, of futility and cynicism. “Black people have no more protection than rabbits,” said Mrs. Osceola Washington, a mother of nine who has been a community force for 25 years. “That boy was killed in cold blood.”
— Maitland Zane
1944
April 4: Shown in Poll of 500 persons in San Francisco interviewed as to their attitude to Negroes: Eighty-one percent are willing to have their children attend school with Negroes. Seventy-five percent are willing to work in a place where Negroes work. Sixty-three percent are willing to participate in sports with Negroes. Fifty-eight percent are willing to work at the same job as Negroes. Forty percent are willing to work under a Negro foreman. Forty-seven percent are willing to live in the same block as Negroes. Thirty-four percent are willing to live in the same apartment house. The figures were given by Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University at a luncheon yesterday of the Community Chest agencies’ representatives at the Y.M.C.A. Building, 220 Golden Gate Avenue. Dr. Johnson said there are now about 75,000 Negroes in the Bay Region. He said that in 1940 there were about 4000 Negroes in San Francisco and that there are now about 20,000 in San Francisco.
1919
April 4: Though he isn’t supposed ever to need one, Tom Mix had a bodyguard yesterday in his ramblings about town. It turned out however that this hero from Oklahoma didn’t really need a police escort, and the emergency assistance of Lieutenant Sylvester and Inspector Walsh was required only when the crowd became so thick that (Mix) couldn’t make headway on Market Street. The police escort was purely complimentary. It was the expression of San Francisco’s desire to pay honest tribute to a man whose pictures have revealed to American youth American manhood in its finest physical manifestations. Mix was making a picture to be called “The Romance of Cow Hollow.” In it he rides up Market Street in broad daylight wearing the stunning garments of idealized cowboy costumery — marvelous of color and boots of such pattern that the foot looks no larger than a Cinderella slipper — but is, of course. Later Mix makes another journey over the same route, but this time at night, and though he rides a trusty steed, he wears a dress suit. As a courtesy to the star, the city lit up the Ferry Building Wednesday night so the picture that will be seen simultaneously by 3,000,000 picture patrons throughout the U.S. will reveal San Francisco’s fabulous street in its most brilliant aspect by day and by night.