49er Lott signs with the Raiders
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1991
March 26: Ronnie Lott, a ten-year 49er, after struggling with what he called “the most difficult decision I ever made in my life,” announced yesterday that he had signed a twoyear contract with the Los Angeles Raiders. He left the 49ers even though the Raiders have not guaranteed him a starting job and the 49ers had made him an offer that included an administrative job with the team after one more season as a player. But the 49ers’ key stipulation was that they wanted Lott — who has missed 14 games in the last three years with injuries — to play football only for one more season. It is believed that Lott signed for the Raiders for $100,000 signing bonus and a $1 million salary in 1991 — essentially the same total he would have received from the 49ers — and $1.2 million in 1992. His agent, Leonard Armato, said the money isn’t guaranteed, but added: “There is a commitment by the Raider organization that they want him around for more than just one year.”
1966
March 23: Three Vallejo boys — ages 14,15 and 17 — were booked yesterday for stealing, of all things, a Southern Pacific diesel locomotive. The youths, frequent visitors to the railroad station in Napa, first stole a master key, police said. Last Friday, they drove a locomotive out of the yard, 15 miles to Vallejo, where they collided with an auto driven by Dennis J. Flynn, 17, of that city. Flynn suffered a broken arm and other injuries. The boys subsequently abandoned the engine at the Napa junction. They were arrested by Vallejo police on Monday night.
1941
March 21: Thirty-four hundred officers and men of the 30th In- fantry, Third Division, United States Army, trudged six miles under a blazing sun on a shakedown march from Crissy Field to Beach Chalet, soccer field, Golden Gate Park. Nearly half of them were selectees, in the army but three weeks. At 8 a.m. the motor column of 270 trucks, carrying kitchen equipment, supplies and weapons, moved away from Crissy Field. Thirty minutes later officers led the foot troops away. Sweating under their 35-pound packs and their rifles, they marched in 32-man platoons to the field in the early morning. By noon the field was covered with row upon row of pup tents erected for the overnight bivouac. The troops, clad in their olive drab field uniforms and wearing their sanded helmets, marched in columns of three with platoons spaced every 50 yards. Along Lincoln Boulevard, they marched across the Lobos creek bridge to El Camino Del Mar, in front of the Palace of the Legion of Honor to Clement Street, to Great Highway and along Great Highway to the north windmill of Golden Gate Park. The Weapons Platoon of Company I, Third Battalion came swinging across the Lobos creek bridge. They were singing “Loch Lomond,” and Colonel Richard Gayle, reviewing them as they passed, complimented them. “Aah, it’s a breeze, Colonel,” piped up one of the rookies. The Colonel smiled.
1916
March 26: Ishi, the man primitive, the unlearned creature of nature; Ishi the last of the Yahi, the stone age tribe which once flourished and fought the “whites” among the crags and cliffs east of the Sacramento, is dead, a sacrifice to science, which tore him from his green forests and running streams to dispel the darkness clouding the primitive life and viewpoint. Ishi, whose living presence at the Affiliated Colleges Museum served to revive a memory of what once was; who brought back the days when the Western plains were the scenes of strife and massacre; and further back, the time when the discoverers of America, landing on its eastern shores, found there a race of matchless physical perfection, breathed his last at noon yesterday upon a small cot in the University of California Hospital. He died nameless for “Ishi” in the vanished language of his vanished tribe means simply “man,” and of tuberculosis. Thin, hungry and clad only in a cast-off undershirt, Ishi was discovered in August 1911, at a slaughterhouse four miles from Oroville. A few weeks later he was taken in charge by the department of anthropology of the University of California and became a “scientific specimen” at the museum and later an assistant janitor. With two twigs Ishi produced fire out of thin air; with nimble fingers he produced monstrous nets; fashioned with flakes of elk antler the finest arrowheads. According to Professor T. T. Waterman, Ishi was one of a small party of survivors who fled to the hills east of Sacramento in 1865 after suffering almost complete extermination at the hands of an armed band of whites. Tomorrow Ishi will be cremated in the manner of his forefathers. He will not carry to his grave, as was the custom of his tribe, the crude creations of his nimble fingers. These will remain as monuments to his memory in the museum to which Ishi in his lifetime drew great, curious throngs.