Ex-champ Ali OK on his own in S.F.
Here’s a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1988
May 2: Mohammed Ali caused a mild panic for the police before dawn yesterday when he floated like a butterfly out the glass doors of the Clift Hotel. Without explanation, Ali left his king-sized suite, shuffled across the lobby at 4.30 a.m. and casually stepped out into the cool San Francisco air. The ex-champ and his road manager, Avudi Mahdi, had checked into the Clift two hours earlier. Ali was in town for a $1000-a-plate fundraising dinner for Massachusetts Democratic congressman Joe Kennedy. Fearing that Ali might not be able to fend for himself, the Clift’s desk clerk immediately woke up Mahdi, who was staying in an adjoining room. Then the clerk phoned the police, who issued a radio bulletin that the champ was missing. Soon after, a Clift employee spotted Ali walking peacefully along Geary Boulevard near the corner of Van Ness. The champ was just taking his routine morning stroll, said Mahdi adding that the fuss was all a “big misunderstanding.”
“I wasn’t worried about him,” said Mahdi. “I didn’t even get out of bed when the hotel staff called me. I told them Ali can take care of himself.”
Ali’s health has been the topic of speculation in recent years. In 1984 he checked into hospital complaining of symptoms similar to Parkinson’s disease. Now, at 46, his speech is slurred, he has chronic fatigue and moves very slowly.
— Jim Doyle
1963
April 28: Wilt (The Stilt) Chamberlain, the world’s highest scoring basketball player, last week was barred from buying the ocean-view house he wants here. His way was barred by Marvin L. Sheldon, a wealthy real estate developer, who said last night he wants no Negroes in any of the homes he has built in Golden Gate Heights. Sheldon said he had nothing against the star of the San Francisco Warriors. But he asserted, he rejected Chamberlain’s $39,950 offer mainly because: “I feel interracial mixing of areas devalues property. Negroes tend not to have enough money. I don’t want anything jammed down my throat.”
The frank-spoken builder then expanded on his philosophy of racial relations.
“Frankly, as a group, I can’t say I like them very much,” he said. “But individually I like them.” Sheldon went on: “My daughter has a colored piano teacher. I think this is fine. If she can learn from a colored piano teacher, fine. My daughter has colored friends in Lowell High School.” And finally, the wealthy developer boasted, “I have a wonderful Hindu friend from India.”
— Donovan Bess
1938
April 28: The saga of Charles Petersen, last of the five Norwegian men who sailed with Captain Roald Amundsen to make the first successful journey through the Northwest passage, ended yesterday. The old sailor, still wracked by memories of those three hideous years spent aboard the Gjoa in ice-locked Arctic water, succumbed to heart disease at Laguna Honda Home. He was 65. In poor health for a number of years, Petersen often recalled the hardships and terrors of the three years in the polar seas. Of no solace to him was the knowledge that the Gjoa, with its 9x6 cabin, rested calmly in Golden Gate Park.
1913
May 3: Nearly two hundred persons, all clad in fashionable evening dress, were plunged into a building excavation at Geary and Mason Streets last night, just after they had left the Columbia Theater, where they had witnessed a performance of “Fine Feathers.” A temporary sidewalk that had been erected only yesterday gave way under the weight of the throng of merry theater goers and within seconds the whole structure, nearly fifty feet in length and ten feet wide, had sunk into the excavation, carrying the mass of screaming, struggling human beings. Many of those who escaped falling were on the very brink of the fall and had to press back against the oncoming throng to prevent being pushed into the hole. Several women suffered broken ankles and others were screaming and crying as at least half of the two hundred were entangled in the fallen and twisted wreckage. Two minutes after the sidewalk collapse, the clanging and whistles of the onrushing fire apparatus added so to the confusion that the scene took on every semblance of riot and death.
When the firemen arrived they dashed into the excavation with ladders and axes and applied heroic methods to the work of rescue. Many of the women who went down with the sidewalk were so tightly caught in the jam of timbers that it was necessary to tear most of their clothing in order to extricate them. While the injured were awaiting ambulances they were administered to by their relatives, friends or by kindly strangers. In the general confusion, husbands and wives and young men and women became separated and for nearly half an hour after the collapse, anxious faces were scurrying to and fro in the hopes of finding lost ones.