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The Hearst Temperance Contest is offering a $25,000 reward for a "practicable plan, as a substitute for prohibition," which will actually prevent alcohol abuse, be more enforceable, create less crime and violate fewer "fundamental rights and personal liberties of American citizens." — March 19
After a mini-crash in the stock market, which quickly bounced back, a cartoon shows a blond "flapper" in a tight dress and mink stole on Wall Street telling a man to "Buy Canary Bird Copper, It's Going Up!" When the man leaves his broker's office with a box of shares, it blows up in his face. Subtext: "By the way, that recent explosion (in the market) was only a little one, just something to show you what high finance CAN do, when it wants the little fish to stop speculating." — April 3
A citizen of San Francisco for 78 years, Lillian Hitchcock Coit, "belle of San Francisco in the sixties," dies in a sanitarium at 86. Fire department patron Coit, who "belonged to Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 5 and was always among the first to answer an alarm," was childless and left an estate expected to exceed $1 million. "Mrs. Coit's long life was not wholly free from misfortune," says her obituary. In 1903, for example, Maj. J.W. McLung was shot and killed by Alexander B. Garnett in Coit's room at the Palace Hotel. At trial, it emerged that McLung was actually trying to kill Coit. — July 23
Joseph B. Strauss, prominent Chicago engineer, is named supervisor of the Golden Gate Bridge project for a fee of roughly $880,000 — based on a 4 percent cut of the $22 million budgeted for the span. — Aug. 16
San Francisco engineer and artist Lonnard Aker proposes — and depicts in a painting — using tall buildings in city centers as mooring stations for giant Zeppelin airships. "In San Francisco a new ferry building, approximately 800 feet tall, would be the logical place for such a mooring, Aker declared." —Sept. 12
With a parade of 3,000 cars and floats, the Bayshore Highway is opened, battering "down the Chinese wall which has kept San Francisco from her neighbors to the south." Bert B. Meek, state director of public works, declares that the highway cost $10 million and should be protected from defacement by billboards and roadside stands. — Oct. 21
Bertrand Russell, "one of the foremost living philosophers, as one of the few men who understand the Einstein theory of time and space," holds forth for reporters at the Hotel Oakland, stating, among other things, that "stability in marriage can only be brought about by logical distinction between matrimony and sex relations." — Oct. 25
Topping The Examiner editorial page are short lists of what the paper feels are the most important civic goals — locally and nationally. For San Francisco, "Metropolis of the Pacific," the paper wants "schools, more schools, better schools ......... and a liberal education for every child in San Francisco, native or foreign born." Also: "more of every kind of transportation," bridges or tubes spanning the Bay and the completion of the Hetch Hetchy water system. Nationally, the chain calls for a 13-month year, construction of a Nicaraguan Canal, and acquisition of the French and English West Indies as repayment of war debts. — Dec. 14