Not Your Century
On hiatus as of March 2020 because of the coronavirus crisis. Get unlimited access to the Chronicle. | A daily celebration of the news — and the news media — of years gone by. King Kaufman takes you on a quick tour of the Bay Area and the world as it used to be, which often colors the world of your century.
Episodes
March 16, 2020 • 6 mins
The 23-year-old religious and spiritual leader of Tibet gets an invitation from the occupying Chinese to come to a dance performance. Without bodyguards. Sensing a trap, he flees on foot over the Himalayas to India, where he remains in exile.
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March 13, 2020 • 7 mins
He's a giant of silent comedies, in more ways than one. Hollywood's first million-dollar star is a baby-faced man-mountain with the grace of a dancer. But a sensational rape and manslaughter case has derailed his life and career.
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March 11, 2020 • 7 mins
A century before the COVID-19 coronavirus, the United States, like all combatants in the Great War, wants to keep the exploding flu crisis quiet to protect morale and prevent the enemy from seeing weakness. Sound familiar? | (Correction: An earlier version of this episode contained an error. Some 675,000 AIDS deaths occurred in the United States.)
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March 9, 2020 • 18 mins
As an 18-year-old, Tracy Sims was the leader of civil rights protests that forced San Francisco hotels to end hiring discrimination. Now Tamam Tracy Moncur, the retired schoolteacher remembers a time when "the whole country was on fire for civil rights." | See also: 1964: Civil Rights at the Palace Hotel
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March 6, 2020 • 8 mins
"That's the way it is," says the Most Trusted Man in America — for the last time, as he retires from anchoring the CBS Evening News. It's like a presidential changeover. | Get unlimited Chronicle access.
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March 4, 2020 • 5 mins
In a college gym in small-town Missouri, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill tries to shake Americans out of their postwar bliss by saying their old ally "Uncle Joe" Stalin has dropped an "Iron Curtain" across Europe.
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March 2, 2020 • 6 mins
When a commotion outside his apartment woke George Holliday up at 1 a.m., the plumber grabbed his new camcorder and went out to his balcony. He saw a police beating, and within a few days, everyone would see it.
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February 28, 2020 • 6 mins
The Mitchell Brothers, Jim and "Party Artie," revolutionized the adult entertainment business, first with their O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, then with movies like "Behind the Green Door." They were close. Then Jim killed Artie. Why?
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February 26, 2020 • 6 mins
In the wake of the Fusion and Netflix series "Who Killed Malcolm X?" the New York D.A. has reopened the case of Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler, who served 20 years for the murder despite multiple alibi witnesses.
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February 24, 2020 • 7 mins
AP Photographer Joe Rosenthal had one chance to get what would become one of the most iconic pictures in history. He didn't miss. After the war, he spent 35 years at the San Francisco Chronicle. | See a trove of Rosenthal's Chronicle photos
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February 21, 2020 • 5 mins
The lifelong anti-Communist shocks the world by initiating the first high-level contact with the People's Republic in more than 20 years. Even after he's driven from office, it would remain a signature achievement.
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February 19, 2020 • 11 mins
Total SF host Peter Hartlaub joins King Kaufman to talk about the most infamous headline in San Francisco history and the man behind it, Scott Newhall, the mad genius of the Chronicle's mid-century rise. | Related: 1962: Crusading Against Animal Nudity
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February 17, 2020 • 6 mins
Chief engineer Joseph Strauss' massive safety net had saved 12 construction workers who'd fallen during construction. They called themselves the Halfway to Hell Club. Then a broken bolt turned the net into a killer. | See how Hollywood hates the Golden Gate Bridge.
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February 14, 2020 • 6 mins
In the most famous hit in American mob history, seven members of Bugs Moran's North Side Gang are gunned down, cementing control of Chicago for Al Capone's South Side Gang. | Related: 1934: Alcatraz Opens for Business.
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February 12, 2020 • 6 mins
Despite a GOP majority in the Senate, President Bill Clinton is easily acquitted on both articles of impeachment stemming from his lies about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
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February 10, 2020 • 5 mins
Sparks fly at a San Francisco panel on changing sexual mores as anthropologist Margaret Mead suggests a new kind of marriage and promotes access to birth control for 16-year-old girls.
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February 7, 2020 • 6 mins
The big Bay Area business news of the day is Wells Fargo buying Crocker Bank. Nobody knew the computer graphics division of Lucasfilms would become a $7 billion company. Related: The Golden Spike.
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February 5, 2020 • 6 mins
Seven years before Gov. George Wallace's Stand in the Schoolhouse Door, Autherine Lucy integrates the University of Alabama. But she's expelled after two days — "for her own protection."
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February 3, 2020 • 6 mins
They were the gang that couldn't bomb straight. Their plan to blow up court records was dumb, they didn't know anything about dynamite, and they talked too much. | Get unlimited Chronicle access.
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January 31, 2020 • 6 mins
As the Union nears victory in the Civil War, a constitutional amendment that would ban slavery wins a close vote. All that's needed now is ratification by three-quarters of the states. But do states at war with the U.S. count?
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