San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Goodbye to oldest parish church
Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1994
June 27: Staring down from the ornate church walls, San Francisco’s patron saint looked particularly glum yesterday as 200 worshipers said goodbye to the oldest parish church in the City of St. Francis. With a remarkable lack of fanfare from the city’s three Roman Catholic bishops, the final Sunday Mass was held at 11:00 a.m. yesterday at St. Francis of Assisi Church, the twin-towered historic landmark on the corner of Columbus Avenue and Vallejo. Founded in 1849 by Catholics who disliked the dusty seven-mile walk to Mission Dolores, Saint Francis of Assisi Church is where the first Catholic priests in Northern California were ordained by Archbishop Joseph Alemany, the city’s first Catholic prelate. The Gothic structure, completed in 1860 and restored after it was gutted by fire in the 1906 earthquake, is one of nine churches to be shut down under the archdiocese’s bitterly contested parish consolidation plan. Archbishop John Quinn said he is not surprised that the order to close churches has created uproar in the parishes. “When a doctor tells a patient he has to have a leg amputated,” Quinn said, “he doesn’t expect a party.”
— Don Lattin
1969
June 25: The Catholic priest who stopped distribution of a children’s coloring book showing Negroes shooting white policemen said yesterday that the incident was being over-dramatized. “As far as I know it was handed out at one particular time and in very small numbers,” said the Rev. Eugene J. Boyle of Sacred Heart Church. The church at Fillmore and Fell streets hosts a Black Panther-catered breakfast program for ghetto youngsters. The coloring book was passed out one day in March, Father Boyle said. The book, which portrays policemen as pigs and shows black men shooting and stabbing them, attracted national attention when San Francisco Police Inspector Lashkoff showed a copy to the McClellan subcommittee while testifying on Black Panther activities. Panther leader Bobby Seale was quoted as saying he had ordered the book withdrawn from circulation when he became aware of its contents. Sam Jordan, proprietor of Sam Jordan’s Catering, another site at which the Panthers conduct their breakfast program, said he has never heard of the coloring book being distributed at his establishment. He did say, however, that he had had reports of the children being taught songs unflattering to police officers.
1944
June 24: London, June 23 — Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told a shocked House of Commons today that the government now possesses evidence proving that the Germans wantonly murdered 50 British and Allied prisoners who tunneled out of a Nazi prison camp. He then vowed that the “foul criminals” responsible would be tracked down to the last man and brought to exemplary justice. The Foreign Secretary, intensely bitter as he addressed Parliament, said the long-delayed German official explanation did NOT deny the mass executions at Stalag Luft III, near Breslau, and spurned it as “in fact, a confession of an odious crime against the laws and conventions of war.” Emphasizing that the prisoners had been shot in cold blood, Eden asserted that the evidence, received partly from prisoners subsequently repatriated to England, showed that the men were not shot while resisting arrest as the Germans had claimed. He said that on the contrary they were captured, taken in manacles to a Gestapo prison, and subsequently removed in small groups and executed.
1919
June 26: Because Al Jolson, worldfamous blackface comedian, “could not stand success” and allowed his tastes to run to “wine, racehorses and other women,” he is facing suit for divorce in the Alameda County Superior Court yesterday by Mrs. Henrietta Jolson, 340 East Fourteenth Street, Oakland, according to the explanation of her suit by Mrs. Jolson. Mrs. Jolson said Mr. Jolson called her on the long distance telephone call from New York. “Come back to me and I’ll give you all the clothes and money and motors you want. File suit against me and you’ll have nothing,” was the gist. Mrs. Jolson says the immediate cause of the divorce action was his sending her back last March from New York. “I left our house on Sunny Slope Avenue, shipped our furniture and automobile at his request,” Mrs. Jolson says, “when I arrived I found he had suffered a change of heart. He used the money I got for my automobile to buy another car, which he used to entertain a musical comedy queen whom I have named in my complaint as Jane Doe. Certainly he didn’t advertise the fact that he had a wife. I found many people in New York very surprised there was a Mrs. Jolson.” Last summer when he was in Oakland he promised to take her to Catalina. On the eve of departure he told her he had changed his mind. He said he was going deer hunting with his friends. I have since learned that it was most probably dear hunting, in another sense that he did.”
Johnny Miller is a freelance writer.