Eating household pets now illegal
Here’s a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1989
Sept. 19: Governor Deukmejian signed into law yesterday a bill making it illegal to eat household pets, but he said the penalties in the law are too harsh.
“If the killing of pets for food is a cultural practice that a few new arrivals to our country have as a custom, their assimilation to accepted practices can be accomplished with more sensitivity,” Deukmejian said.
The bill — by assemblywoman Jackie Speier, D-South San Francisco — has been criticized by some as a slap at Southeast Asians, who have traditionally eaten dog meat. Under the new law, to kill and eat a pet is a misdemeanor. The governor also signed a bill requiring service stations near major highways to keep restrooms open during business hours.
“The right to free rest rooms might not be a constitutional right, but it’s darn important,” said the bill’s author, Assemblyman Terry Friedman, D-Los Angeles.
1964
Sept. 14: The weekly Union Square marijuana march was itself picketed yesterday by teenage church workers and a husband and wife evangelist team.
Some 40 picketers in the loosely organized Bay Area crusade to have marijuana smoking legalized showed up around 1 p.m. They, in turn, were picketed by 30 well scrubbed and neatly dressed members of Teen Challenge, of 959 S. Van Ness Ave. In addition, the Rev. Edwin Tiemann exhorted one and all from a portable lectern with a microphone and a loudspeaker.
Sept. 15: A welcome mat leading into hospital delivery rooms was being dusted off yesterday for California’s expectant fathers. The State Health Department’s Hospital Advisory Board approved a change in health regulations that would enable fathers to be present during the birth of their children.
This will mean that fathers-tobe, banished from time immemorial to hospital waiting rooms and corridors during their wives’ travail, may witness the birth of their children. John Peterson, administrator of Alta Bates Community Hospital in Berkeley, said his institution has permitted husbands to be present in delivery rooms for the past 4½ months. He said that, of 654 births, fathers have witnessed 84 deliveries without any problems such as illness, fainting or interference with obstetric procedures.
1939
Sept. 14: Bob Hope belongs to the sophisticated or double-breasted suit school of comedians. No baggy trousers, no clownish makeup for Bob. Debonair and dapper, he lets the wisecracks fall where they may, without any frenzied attempts to make people laugh. And because he is a born funnyman, with a sly glint of humor in that oblique glance of his, the people laugh and laugh.
They were laughing and laughing at the Golden Gate Theatre, where Mr. Hope started a week’s engagement . . . along with several members of his toothpaste radio show. The jokes, if you stopped to analyze them, may not have been really so wonderful, but it was the subtle Hope way of putting them over that made you like them. That casual, I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude that is more effective than the get-this-it’ll-make-you-scream attitude. Mr. Hope was bantering ad-libs with Jerry Colonna, the man with the handlebar mustachios and the roving eyes. He was fondling Dolores Reade while she chanted ballads into the microphone. (Miss Reade happens to be Mrs. Hope, which made the act more above board.) And as a finale to an excellent show, he sang “I’ve Got an Invitation to a Dance” and “Thanks for the Memory,” not too seriously.
1914
Sept. 17: State Fairgrounds, Sacramento: Thirty-five thousand persons tuned to the spectacle of destruction hung in tense excitement here today to see the crash of two locomotives in collision. The big spectacular event, the stellar attraction of California’s 1914 State Fair, was a huge success. Steaming at 30 miles an hour, the two locomotives crashed with a hollow thudding echo that was lost in the reverberations of a hysterical joyful response from the spectators.
During the 40 seconds that elapsed between the start and the crash, the huge crowd remained tense with silence. When the 40 feet narrowed between the whistling, speeding engines, a long “Oh-h!” began that, chameleonlike, changed with the crash to an unstinted approval of noise. Each engine had about 320 yards in which to travel before the collision. “Too bad they didn’t have a longer run at it,” was the general expression of the crowd. “There would have been more fireworks.”
The engineers opened their throttles and then jumped when speed had been attained. A near riot ensued in the center of the track enclosure immediately following, when the crowd, frenzied with excitement, broke through the mounted military police and made for the scene of the wreck.