James J. Corbett, known as Gentleman Jim to boxing fans, became World Heavyweight Champion by knocking out John L. Sullivan. Corbett later earned entry in the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In 1880, when the famed boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett was only 14 and a freshman at the high school division of St. Ignatius College,…

In Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West 1848–1919, the author, Rev. Gerald McKevitt, S.J., of Santa Clara University, writes, in part, of the tensions in the late 1800s at SI between teachers who believed in the European model of a classical education (such as Rev. Enrico Imoda, S.J., who served as SI…

The first years of the new century proved to be propitious ones for the school’s drama program. Students staged Macbeth in January 1900, and Julius Caesar a year later. In 1903, they performed Richard III and, in 1905, Henry V. The school also experimented with its classical program by introducing, in 1902, practical business courses such as bookkeeping and stenography at no…

This era of the school also marks the start of a great athletic rivalry between SI and Sacred Heart, the longest of any school west of the Rocky Mountains, which started with a rugby game played on St. Patrick’s Day in 1893. (The centenary of that rivalry was celebrated in the fall of 1992 at…

Students went on vacation January 21, 1880, but most returned the next day to help move furniture from the old school on Market Street to the new school on Van Ness Avenue. Bouchard preached his last sermon January 25 in the church that for years had existed on the second floor of the old school,…

Despite the efforts to discredit Montgomery, his many supporters managed to secure a variety of honors including the following (all documented in Quest for Flight): 1920: San Francisco renames the Marina Flying Field the Montgomery Field. 1924: SCU establishes the Montgomery Laboratories on the site of the present-day Mayer Theatre. 1934: SCU holds a celebration to…

Ask any child in school who invented the airplane, and you’ll hear a chorus of Wright answers. According to the authors of two upcoming books, that answer, and the question prompting it, are both deeply flawed. These authors credit the airplane’s invention to the combined efforts of dozens of early aviators and inventors who toiled…