Herb Caen - Honors

Honors

In April 1996 Caen received a special Pulitzer Prize (which he called his Pullet Surprise) for "extraordinary and continuing contribution as a voice and conscience of his city". The following month doctors treating him for pneumonia discovered he had inoperable lung cancer.

June 14, 1996 was officially celebrated in San Francisco as Herb Caen Day. After a motorcade and parade ending at the Ferry Building, Caen was honored by "a pantheon of the city's movers, shakers, celebrities and historical figures" including television news legend Walter Cronkite. Noting that most of the city's present and former mayors were at liberty to attend, Caen quipped, "Obviously, the Grand Jury hasn't been doing its job."

Among other honors a promenade along the city's historic bayfront Embarcadero was christened "Herb Caen Way...". (Caen termed his work "three-dot journalism" for the ellipses separating his column's short items.) This was particularly appropriate given the recent demolition of an eyesore against which Caen had long campaigned: the elevated Embarcadero Freeway, built astride the Embarcadero forty years earlier and derided by Caen as "The Dambarcadero." A tribute to Caen was inserted in the Congressional Record.

Caen continued to write, though less frequently. He died February 1, 1997, survived by his fourth wife and a son from a previous marriage. His funeral at Grace Cathedral (broadcast live by the area's four network television affiliates) was followed by a candlelight procession to Aquatic Park, where Caen's will had provided for a fireworks display—climaxing with a pyrotechnic image of the manual typewriter he had long called his "Loyal Royal" (see image above).

"No other newspaper columnist ever has been so long synonymous with a specific place ... Part of his appeal seemed to lie in the endless bonhomie he projected," said his New York Times obituary, comparing him to Walter Winchell "but with the malice shorn off."

The Chronicle projected a one-fifth decline in subscriptions—surveys had shown that Caen was better-read than the front page. Fifteen years later reprints of Caen's columns remain a regular feature of the Chronicle.