Baseball fans boo Allen Ginsberg at Candlestick, 1994

Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago.

1994

June 3: Allen Ginsberg stepped out on the field at Candlestick Park on Wednesday night as “Poet at Bat,” the first in a series sponsored by the City of Poets celebration. To a somewhat less than rapt crowd waiting to see the Giants do battle with the Atlanta Braves, Ginsberg read “Hum Bom!” an anti-war chant from his new book, “Cosmopolitan Greetings.” He had chosen “Hum Bom!” he told Personals “because it is a sound poem that would echo properly through the stadium and penetrate everybody’s skulls.” Although some members of the team introduced to the poet before the game actually seemed to know who he was — Bob Brenly, for example — Ginsberg’s rousing rendition of his work was greeted with boos from impatient fans with unpenetrated skulls. The poet said he had never been to a ballpark “except to see the Rolling Stones,” explaining the hole in his education with no apparent embarrassment: “I’m a four-eyed sissy.” Ginsberg threw out a perfect, bounceless first ball, but left the park as the game began, for a reading at a Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore. There, the stands were packed, no one booed and Allen Ginsberg was Joe DiMaggio. How does it feel for an iconoclast to have become an icon? “Whether I’m an icon is somebody else’s problem. I’m a coward and a jerk ... like everybody else.” Ginsberg said.

— Leah Garchik

1969

June 2: The youngest brother of Sirhan B. Sirhan visited the convicted killer of Senator Robert Kennedy at San Quentin prison yesterday and said afterward that Sirhan has asked for Melvin Belli’s legal assistance. The San Francisco attorney promptly announced he would file a brief with the State Supreme...