Ballet stars busted at pot party
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
July 15: San Francisco will log as many AIDS cases in the next five years as were reported during the previous decade, according to public health projections. Barring a medical breakthrough, the study projects that San Francisco’s death toll from AIDS will reach 21,000 by the end of 1997. The number of people living with AIDS on any given day is expected to climb to 4,018, compared to 3,400 today. Most of those who will come down with AIDS in the next five years are people who were infected before 1983, when the cause of the then mysterious epidemic became clear and the city’s gay population began adopting safer sexual practices.
— Sabin Russell
1967
July 12: Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were arrested early yesterday on rooftops in the HaightAshbury district when police raided a wild party — but after a day of deliberation the authorities dropped charges against the world’s two leading ballet dancers. Dame Margot and Nureyev were found hiding on adjacent roofs three stories over Belvedere Street and spent four hours in custody while they were booked for disorderly conduct and being in a place where marijuana were kept. Dame Margot was arrested after police using flashlights found her wrapped in a magnificent, white mink coat and crouched near the roof parapet. Nureyev, the fey Russian genius who defected to the West six years ago, was found lying flat on a graveled roof protected by a picket fence.
It apparently was a whim which brought together the FonteynNureyev coterie and a mixed group of hippies and nightclub entertainers at the third-floor flat at 42 Belvedere Street. The two premier dancers held court in Trader Vic’s after appearing in “Paradise Lost.” Then, after a midnight supper and liquid refreshment, their party decided to tour San Francisco hippieland. According to one version, they were attracted by the noise to the boisterous party roaring along at 42 Belvedere and invited in by someone leaning out the window. When police raided the flat they found 12 marijuana cigarettes, two suspicious-looking white capsules and a “pipe commonly used to smoke marijuana.” Dame Margot and Nureyev were taken along with the other suspects to Park Police Station — that hated bastille of hippieland — and there questioned. Dame Margot graciously declined to give her age but police listed it as 49. Nureyev’s age went down as 29, and his name was spelled “Noureev.” Two hours later at 5.00 a.m., when the nature of the arrests was beginning to dawn on officialdom and hasty phone calls awakened local cultural leaders, Dame Margot was taken by squad car to the Hall of Justice, where she was booked and kept under custody in the matron’s office. Nureyev arrived later in a paddy wagon. About 7.30 a.m., with full press and television corps assembled, Royal Ballet manager V.H. Clark completed the procedure of bailing out his premier dancers. As he left the Hall of Justice Nureyev told reporters “You’re all children.”
— Keith Power
1942
July 13: The Navy Department yesterday issued its seventh casualty list of officers and men dead, wounded or missing between June 18 and June 30. Included in the list were 11 navy nurses last heard of in the Manila Bay area prior to the conquest of that section by the Japanese early in the war. Only one nurse is known to have escaped from the Manila area when she went to the Bataan peninsula with an army medical group, later was assigned to Corregidor and eventually was removed from there by submarine to Australia. The Navy’s seventh casualty list covered casualties of Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard personnel, totaling 268, including 49 dead, seven wounded and 211 missing.
1917
July 15: Twin Peaks tunnel, one of the greatest of the public improvements ever completed in San Francisco, was dedicated yesterday. There was a double ceremony. The first was held at the west portal and the second at the east. For the first time the public was admitted to the two-mile bore, and as pilgrims traveling to the setting sun, hundreds walked from the eastern entry to the west. Several thousand persons participated, and it was a time for rejoicing, for one reason that the opening of the bore has opened up a district in San Francisco which within a few years will draw back to this city a multitude of people whose interests lie here, but who have taken residence across the bay or down the peninsula. The ceremony of driving a silver spike, the first spike in the Twin Peaks railway, occupied but a few minutes, Engineer M.M. O’Shaughnessy started the spike with a few raps to put it in place and the Mayor Rolph, with right good will, wielded the sledgehammer and finished the task. This however was not the end of the celebration. In the new Laguna Honda station at Forest Hill there was dancing and plenty of music and refreshments for visitors and residents.