Giants take swing at San Jose move
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.
1992
Jan. 16: The Giants baseball team and San Jose leaders, in a move that caught San Francisco officials by surprise, announced plans yesterday to move the team from chilly Candlestick Park to a $185 million stadium in the South Bay. Standing before a “San Jose Giants” banner, an excited Mayor Susan Hammer and team owner Bob Lurie revealed an agreement calling for city taxpayers to pick up $155 million of the cost of the ballpark, which would open in 1996 on the city’s northern fringe. The Giants would pay $30 million. In San Francisco, where voters have twice turned down proposals for a new baseball stadium, newly elected Mayor Frank Jordan pledged to woo the team back if the San Jose plan fails. But Lurie insisted yesterday that the preliminary agreement with San Jose rules out further talks with San Francisco leaders. “This makes me feel really good,” he said “We’ve struggled through this project for what seems like a 100 years. I can’t wait to see the shovel get into the ground.” Mayor Jordan, who campaigned on a pledge to renovate Candlestick Park rather than building a new stadium, said he would meet with Lurie within a week. But he acknowledged that he had no strategy to talk Lurie out of his deal with San Jose.
— David Dietz and Marc Sandalow
1967
Jan. 19: A “massive racial confrontation” between armed white and Negro convicts at San Quentin was finally broken up yesterday after 3½ tense, touch-and-go hours. Warden Lawrence Wilson said his guards threw up a “wall of fire” with an assortment of weapons to keep 1400 whites separated from 1000 Negroes. The warden said the two groups got within 50 feet of each other in the Main Yard but “we fired a lot of rounds of ammunition describing limits for people.” Eight convicts were hit by bullets or ricochet slugs and taken to the prison hospital. Another five prisoners received “head wounds” from other weapons. The convicts on each side, the warden said, were armed with pieces of pipe, prison-made dirks and knives, wooden clubs, rocks and even mess hall trays to be used as shields. Guards manning the catwalks surrounding the Main Yard fired shotguns, submachine guns, rifles and tear gas to keep the two booing, cursing groups apart. The noise of the convicts and then the rapid-fire shooting could be heard a quarter of a mile away. Black smoke was observed belching from the interior of the main part of the prison as some wooden classrooms in the West Block were set on fire by convicts.
1942
Jan. 18: SACRAMENTO — Bitterly debated by impatient legislators, a joint resolution urging the investigation of State civil service employees of Japanese birth was passed by the Assembly today. The vote was 42-21. The Senate must concur in minor Assembly amendments, after having unanimously approved a similar resolution yesterday. The State Personnel Board was requested to “take every proper means” to determine the loyalty of all civil service employees or applicants who have Japanese racial heritage. Particular object of the resolution was to uncover cases of dual citizenship among civil service employees — cases in which Japanese may be citizens of both the United States and Japan.
1917
Jan. 18: Experience is unnecessary in a new means of livelihood evolved by the California Employment Bureau and San Francisco hospitals. Every three weeks a notice appears in the bureau’s office at 933 Mission Street: “Wanted — Four husky young men as subjects in a blood transfusion case. Applicants must be white and able to pass blood tests; $10 to the right men.” Whenever the notice is posted, according to C.B. Sexton, superintendent of the bureau, scores of men offer their blood. Some of them show the evidence of some blood taint; others are obviously unfit, some so weak they evidently have no blood to sell. The fit men are sent to the hospital that needs their services. There they are subjected to blood tests. Three men in every four who pass the preliminary examination are found unfit according to T.R. Nicholson, who handles the cases for St. Luke’s Hospital. “But we have no trouble getting enough men,” Nicholson said. The employment bureau finds scores willing to sell their bit of blood.”
At the hospital the subjects are treated to all the comforts of a regular patient. They are given all the time they need to convalesce, while interns and nurses hover about their cots. That period of ease generally lasts three or four days. Occasionally the bureau announces a halcyon day on which men whose teeth are in a certain specified condition of disrepair can have their dental work done free of charge and be paid $2 a day while the operations are under way. That means prospective dentists are about to be examined and must have subjects on whom to demonstrate their ability. The embryo dentists provide the gold, the work and the $2.