San Francisco Chronicle - Herb Caen

Herb Caen

Most likely the Chronicle's best-known and most widely-quoted writer was the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb Caen (1916–1997), a Sacramento native who joined the newspaper in 1938 to write a local-radio news column. Caen eventually covered city comings and goings of all kinds—politics, business, and society both high and low, with some San Francisco history added for good measure. He moved to the rival Examiner in 1950 but returned to what he often called "The Chron" in 1958, where he remained until retirement.

His column was subtitled "Baghdad-by-the-Bay" for many years and later shortened to an eponymous title for the rest of its existence. For many years "Herb Caen" was the only feature on its page (it traditionally shared a section front with a Macy's advertisement). For most of his column's history, Caen somewhat in jest railed against the slang "Frisco", considering it a demeaning term for the city, and in 1953 wrote a book called "Don't Call It Frisco" after a 1918 Examiner news item of the same name. Caen's view of San Francisco was egalitarian and eclectic; he made the daily round of restaurants, clubs, bars, and shops in both the tony and the less elegant quarters of the city. Among his friends were socialites, artists, business leaders, politicians, visiting celebrities, and the unknown eking out an unglamorous existence on the downtown streets—characters equally prominent on the city's stage in Caen's view.

Caen gave his readers an intimate cross-sectioned look at San Francisco that few local writers anywhere could offer. Caen also took a positive, if sometimes bemused, view of those in the forefront of the convulsive cultural (and counter-cultural) changes to the city from the 1950s to the 1970s. Frequent observations of the city's "beatniks" (a term he may have coined) and "hippies" appeared in his writing, and he extended the hand of acceptance to those who added to San Francisco's warmth and color. With tongue-in-cheek he called his writing "three-dot journalism"; his columns comprised brief items neatly tied together by ellipses.

His Sunday feature was often a sentimental retrospective of San Francisco, sometimes comparing the present state of the city with the 1930s and 1940s—which he celebrated as a halcyon time. Though he lamented the incursion of freeways, high-rise towers, and chain stores as a devaluing of his beloved "city on golden hills," he usually concluded that his adopted home town's beauty and character was sufficient to withstand any and all changes. From the late 1940s to late 1990s a dozen books of Caen's writing and reflections were published.

In late 1996, after some protracted absences led readers to inquire after his whereabouts, Caen disclosed that he was being treated for lung cancer; after several public ceremonies and fetes (and after a section of the city's waterfront Embarcadero was renamed for him) he retired, passing away on February 1, 1997.