Mr. San Francisco:
Today, April 3, is Herb Caen’s birthday. Herb Caen wrote the column “It’s News to Me” for the San Francisco Chronicle, from the late 1930s (shortly after the building of the Golden Gate Bridge) until 3 weeks before his death in 1997. He moved it to the competition, the San Francisco Examiner, from 1950-1958 and took time off to serve in WWII. Otherwise, he filed 1,000 a day, six days a week for 58 years. The lobby of the Chronicle keeps Caen’s typewriter on display to this day.
Caen’s column were a blend of local gossip and poetic pap about the city he loved. I say “pap” because Caen admitted he starting writing them as inch filler when he ran out of items. Nontheless, in those musings, he popularized the terms “hippie” and “beatnik” and coined the city’s nickname “Baghdad by the Bay.”
My old insurance man Dean once told me than when his father immigrated to San Francisco from Japan, he learned English by checking the newspaper out of the library and reading Herb Caen.
Sometimes I don’t think much of myself as a journalist or as a San Franciscan. At my worst, I practice both sporatically. On good days I think of Herb Caen, his consistency, his drive and his unending love for a city he wasn’t born into but that embraced him, most because he embraced them first.
Shortly before Caen’s eath, The city of San Francisco renamed a stretch of the Embarcader “Herb Caen Way.” During the dedication Caen said this…
“I think when I go to heaven, I’ll do as all San Franciscan’s do when they die. I’ll say ‘Heaven? It ain’t bad. But it’s no San Francisco.”
So true. I hope I meet Mr. Caen someday so I can say thank you. And tell him how our city is doing (via The Writer’s Almanac).