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As supervisors discuss a plan to tax residents along Innes Avenue in Hunters Point $600 per lot for street improvements, 75-year-old Mrs. Seimar stands up and says she is too poor to pay such a tariff. Earlier, city taxes forced her to sell her five cows. "I used to give the small boys who passed my place many years ago a glass of milk. Now I can't even do that." Supervisor Richard Welch interrupts her: "I know you. I'm little Dick Welch you used to give two glasses of milk to sometimes when I was on my way to swipe shrimp from the Chinamen shrimp catchers at Hunter's Point." The improvement plan is postponed. — Jan. 18
Postmaster Joe Beard serves final notice on city trustees that the mansions of Burlingame will henceforth carry numbered street addresses. Previously, the owners of these estates gave them names like "Wimbledon Hall at High Gates" or "The Hunt." But the postmaster "and his postmen are no longer willing to burden their minds and their memories with" such pretentious names. — March 5
In a "race with the sun," aviator Lt. Russell Maughan flies from New York to the city in his third attempt at a dawn-to-dusk traverse of the continent. While it is dark at Crissy Field, where 40,000 spectators await his arrival, he sees the last rays of sunset on the horizon as he makes his landing approach. — June 24
On the first day of transcontinental airmail service, "thousands of San Franciscans gathered about their firesides last evening to hear the latest news read from letters that had been mailed in New York 34 hours and 45 minutes before." — July 3
At the Lick Observatory on Mt. Hamilton, astronomers try to figure out if the oddly straight rivers on Mars are natural, or instead man-made canals. Professor Trompler notes that if you looked at Earth's Nile River from millions of miles away, it would look straight, too. — August 17
Babe Ruth, the King of Swat, plays a charity exhibition game in San Francisco that amounts to a home run derby for the superstar. "What did Babe Ruth do? Swatted the third ball that was pitched to him over the fence, popped a foul over the grandstand, lost the next one somewhere in the vicinity of Twin Peaks and eventually retired from the diamond to save the Examiner's Christmas Fund from being wrecked by the loss of baseballs." — Oct. 26