By Sam Wein
• Formed in 1946, the San Francisco Forty Niners are the Bay Area’s oldest sports franchise.
• From the 1500s to the 1700s, tobacco was prescribed by doctors to treat a variety of ailments including headaches, toothaches, arthritis and bad breath.
• Benjamin H. Brooks, was the man who first conceived the idea of having “a street railroad propelled by an underground endless rope,” now known as the cable car.
• It was Douglass Cross who wrote the lyrics, and George Cory the music to “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
• A “clue” originally meant a ball of thread. This is why one is said to ‘unravel’ the clues to a mystery.
• General William Sherman of Civil War fame, once operated a bank on the corner of Jackson and Montgomery streets.
• Schroeder’s Café on Front Street, which opened in 1893, refused to serve women at all until 1935, and refused to serve women before 1:30 p.m. until 1970.
• The oldest extant building in San Francisco is Mission Dolores, completed in 1791.
• Green goddess salad dressing was created by a chef at the Palace Hotel.
• Over 90 years ago, celebrating the city’s recovery after the 1906 earthquake, the first Bay to Breakers race was run with only two participants.
• The three principal styles of Victorian houses are Italianate, San Francisco Stick and Queen Anne.
• In 1956, Y.A. Tittle, the Forty Niners star quarterback, made $21,000, making him the highest paid professional in football.
• Lactobacillius sanfrancisco is the microorganism that is the secret of the city’s sourdough bread.
• A cable car moves at only one speed, 9.5 miles per hour.
• Charles H. Gough was a city milkman in the 1850s working his route with milk cans tied to the saddle of his horse. In 1885 he and his wife, Octavia, were members of a citizens committee that named the streets of the Western Addition. Contrary to popular opinion, Octavia was not the name of his horse.
• The oldest sourdough bakery in the city is the Boudin Bakery, established in 1849.
• The first cable car ran down Clay Street between Jones and Kearny on Aug. 2, 1873.
• The Golden Gate Bridge is designed to sway safely 27 feet from side to side.
• At 8.25 miles, the Bay Bridge is the longest steel high-level bridge in the world.
• In 1878 during a San Francisco banquet for Li Hung-Chang, the first Chinese viceroy to visit the city, he asked the waiter at his lavish dinner to bring him a simple dish of vegetables and meat. The waiter and the cook concocted what we now know as chop suey.
• Union Square was named shortly before the Civil War when it was the site of pro-Union rallies.
• From 1885 to 1905 San Francisco was the center of the Pacific Coast whaling industry, primarily of gray whales that were often caught in San Francisco Bay.
• During her visit to San Francisco in 1983, Queen Elizabeth II ate in a restaurant for the first time in her life. That restaurant was Trader Vic’s.
• The San Francisco Star was the city’s first newspaper, founded in 1847 by Sam Brannan, but it ceased in 1849 when all the printers took off for the Gold Rush.
Wein, a published author, is a Los Altos resident.
