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San Francisco ends 1926 with the fewest felony prisoners — 18 — in the City Prison since records have been kept. Lt. James Boland, locking the prisoners up and wishing them a Happy New Year, credits a drop in crime to "work done by agencies supported by the Community Chest, which are getting into close touch with delinquency problems and those phases of life where crime develops." — Jan. 1
Motion picture producer Samuel Goldwyn, feted by 500 of the city's leading citizens, promises to film an epic to tell the story of San Francisco. "It shall be dedicated to this city of romance. What a story it will make!" — Feb. 19
A 'love cult" which seeks a superman and superwoman is broken up by Alameda County authorities with the arrest of three Oakland women. One is the cult's founder, Supreme Teacher of the Sacred School Gertrude Wright, 30, who goes by the cult name Zareda. Police charge Wright's Sacred Order of the White Brotherhood encompassed "temples of erotic worship, ritualistic poetry that is unprintable, bizarre rites practiced in fantastic costumes and under queer symbols." — March 11
Opening at the Majestic Theater: The motion picture "Kosher Kitty Kelly," in which "Viola Dana is the Irish girl with acquired Jewish antecedents." — April 16
A mouse cripples industrial West Berkeley for a day when it commits suicide and short circuits a PG&E transformer. The headline:
Suicide of Mouse Is
Big Blow Out; Berkeley
Plants Quit in Homage
— April 20
With 37 planes in attendance — "ranging the scale from trembling little Jennies to a thundering 10-passenger Douglass" — San Francisco Municipal Airport is dedicated near San Bruno. — May 8
City Engineer M.M. O'Shaughnessy leads a delegation to Washington to challenge the War Department's ruling that no trans-Bay bridge may be built north of Hunter's Point. The city's Board of Engineers is recommending a Rincon Hill-Alameda Mole span. — June 16
At the stroke of midnight, 825 new state rules go into effect, including laws that make the statewide speed limit 40 mph, the age of adulthood for girls 21 (from 18) and cosmetology an industry to be regulated by two new state boards. — July 29
Dorothy Ellingson, serving up to ten years for killing her mother when she refused to let her go to a party, announces she has found God: "The Moth Girl, repentant, beating her singed wings against the bars of San Quentin. The red-headed flaming jazz girl, a chastened supplicant at the shrine of religion." Ellingson was only 16 when she committed "The only matricide in the history of California." — Aug. 10
Shy young aviation hero Charles "Lindy" Lindbergh disappoints the mayor and a crowd of thousands when "rather than undergo what to him would have been probably the ordeal of another thunderous ceremony, Lindy popped down to the airport an hour ahead of time ......... and with just an unaffected good-bye or two to the airport officials and others who were there early, folded his gangling length into the tiny cockpit of his pet plane, and roared away to the other things he had to do!" — Sept. 18
Astronomer W.W. Campbell, who also happens to be the president of the University of California, says the Earth is "just an insignificant point in the universe of countless spheres. ......... Therefore it is unthinkable to assume that our world is the only planet that supports life." — Oct. 4
Angered by a proposal to nearly double phone rates, an "independent group of telephone users" files a petition with the State Railroad Commission asking that body to acknowledge that Pacific Telephone and Telegraph is simply an arm of the monopolistic American Telephone and Telegraph, and to declare the phone system a public utility. — Dec. 18