Herb Caen - Career

Career

Caen was born April 3, 1916 in Sacramento, California though he liked to point out that his parents—pool hall operator Lucien Caen and Augusta (Gross) Caen—had spent the summer nine months previous in San Francisco. After high school (where he wrote a column, "Corridor Gossip") he covered sports for The Sacramento Union.

In 1936 Caen began writing a radio column for the San Francisco Chronicle. When that column was discontinued in 1938, Caen proposed a daily column on the city itself; "It's News to Me" first appeared July 5. Except for Caen's four years in the Air Force during World War II and a 1950–1958 stint at the San Francisco Examiner, his column—eventually entitled simply "Herb Caen"—appeared every day except Saturday until 1990, when it dropped to five times per week.

"What makes him unique," a colleague wrote in 1996,

is that on good days his column offers everything you expect from an entire newspaper -- in just 25 or so items, 1,000 or so words.... Readers who turned to Herb on Feb. 14, 1966, learned that Willie Mays' home was on the market for $110,000. The Bank of America now owned the block where it wanted to build its headquarters. "Dr. Zhivago" director David Lean was in town. Meanwhile, "Mike Connolly is ready to concede that the situation in Vietnam is complex: 'Even my cab driver can't come up with a solution.' "

Sports, business, movies and current affairs.

Caen had considerable influence on popular culture, particularly its language. He coined the term beatnik in 1958 and popularized hippie during San Francisco's 1967 Summer of Love. (He is interviewed in the 1968 documentary Revolution.) He popularized obscure—often playful—terms such as Frisbeetarianism, and ribbed nearby Berkeley as Berserkeley ("where time stands still", he said) for its often-radical politics. One of his many recurring if irregular features was "Namephreaks" — people with names (aptronyms) peculiarly appropriate or inappropriate to their vocations or avocations, such as post office cancellation machine operator Nancy Canceller.

Among the many San Francisco personalities making periodic appearances was Edsel Ford Fung, whose local reputation as "the world's rudest waiter" was largely thanks to Caen, who lamented him here in 1984:

SOME WOE around Sam Wo, the skinny three-story resaurant on Washington near Grant. Waiter (and one-time part owner) Edsel Ford Fung, who became famous for berating and insulting the customers, all with tongue in cheek, died Tuesday at age 55, and the skinny old eating place is in mourning. The wondrously named and actually quite charming Edsel was the son of Fung Lok, a former owner of Sam Wo, who named his sons Edsel, Edmund and Edwin – after the first names of the Caucasian doctors who delivered them. Edsel, always a fellow with a flair, added the Ford and hinted broadly that he was related to the auto family; an amused Henry Ford II made a special trip to Sam Wo to check out the rumor . . . By the way, there is no Sam Wo at Sam Wo. The name means something analogous to "Three Happiness," but there is only sadness there this week.

Now and then an item (usually a joke or pun) was credited to a mysterious "Strange DeJim", whose first contribution ("Since I didn't believe in reincarnation in any of my other lives, why should I have to believe in it in this one?") appeared in 1972. Sometimes suspected to be a Caen alter ego, de Jim (whose letters bore no return address, and who met Caen only once—by chance) was revealed after Caen's death to be a Castro District writer who, despite several coy interviews with the press, remains publicly anonymous.

Confidence in Caen was sufficiently high that when in 1985 he reported — mistakenly, as it turned out — that journalist Hunter S. Thompson had become night manager of the "adult" Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre several readers went there hoping to meet Thompson.

In Sunday columns current items were set aside in favor of "Mr. San Francisco's" reflections on his unconditional love for his adopted city, musing on (for example):

he crowded garages and the empty old buildings above them, the half-filled nightclubs and the overfilled apartment houses, the saloons and the skies and the families huddled in the basements, the Third Street panhandlers begging for handouts in front of pawn shops filled with treasured trinkets, the great bridges and the rattle-trap street cars, the traffic that keeps moving although it has no place to go, thousands of newcomers glorying in the sights and sounds of a city they suddenly decided to love instead of leave."

A collection of essays, Baghdad-by-the-Bay (a term he'd coined to reflect San Francisco's exotic multiculturalism) was published in 1949, and Don't Call It Frisco -- after a local judge's 1918 rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles") -- appeared in 1953. The Cable Car and the Dragon, a children's picture book, was published in 1972.