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Safe? Sane? Hardly. San Francisco experienced what was probably the unsafest, unsanest New Year's Eve in memory — a night which saw a Market Street revelry riot quelled by a flying wedge of police and the canine corps and the arrest of nearly 100 drunks who smashed shop windows, roughed up innocent pedestrians and spat on police cars. — Jan. 2
The Rev. Martin Luther King called for a nationwide economic boycott "against all concerns who refuse to hire or train Negroes." The noted integration leader told an Emancipation Centennial rally in Oakland Auditorium, "All the Negro needs is a job to accept his true place in society." — Jan. 2
Alcatraz Penitentiary, for 29 years the grim symbol of a special kind of Federal justice reserved for the incorrigible, becomes history. The final contingent of 27 inmates, handcuffed and hobbled in leg irons, is taken off the island for a 10-minute boat ride to the mainland and special plane flights to other, more modern institutions. — March 22
The logic behind a University of California policy that bans Communist speakers from the campus yet allows right-wingers to hold forth without restraint was questioned by Chancellor Edward W. Strong. "To ban the spoken words of one and not the other in colloquium debate or lecture appears to be an offense to logic and reasoning," Strong told 300 professors. — April 27
Dr. Max Rafferty, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, said Monday he thought most educators would "sincerely regret" the Supreme Court's ruling against the use of the Lord's Prayer and Bible reading in public schools. — June 17
More than 200,000 at civil rights march on Washington hear Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech. A crowd of "600 persons, at least 60 percent of them white and the rest mostly Negro" attend support rally in front of San Francisco City Hall. — Aug. 29
"A worse foundation would be difficult to envision" for the Pacific Gas and Electric Company's nuclear reactor than the site at Bodega Head, a seismology and engineering geology consultant said. — Aug. 30
All-digit dialing begins: Although YUkon, MIssion, BAyview and all the other prefixes are safe for now, telephone company officials say the process of conversion to all-number dialing will begin in October. The Fall 1964 phone directory will eliminate letter prefixes. — Aug. 30
With removal of Key System tracks, Bay Bridge decks convert to one-way traffic. — Oct. 12
San Francisco elects a Democrat mayor for the first time in 67 years. Representative John F. Shelley scores a landslide victory over Harold S. Dobbs, a Republican. — Nov. 6
In tears and futile fury. That is the way the city took the news of President Kennedy's assassination. But first it had to get over a case of deep shock. A basketball rally at St. Mary's College High School in Berkeley abruptly became a Rosary and Mass. Three young girls ran down the hall of Everett Junior High School blinded by their own tears. A Negro girl on the San Francisco State College campus wailed, "Oh, no." — Nov. 23