Dale Says

I began writing a daily column for The San Francisco Chronicle on July 5, 1938. It was a magic time in a faraway city that has largely disappeared and may have existed only in foggy myth.

June 6, 1991

The other midnight, in a Chinatown bar, I met a real San Franciscan. He was a middle-aged longshoreman from the Mission, and he wore a zipper jacket and open shirt. While he quietly sipped a Scotch, he talked of Harry Bridges, Bill Saroyan and Shanty Malone. He was curious about Leontyne Price and Herbert Gold. He wondered if the Duke of Bedford’s paintings were any good, he missed Brubeck, and he discussed Willie Mays down to his last spike. He seemed to know everybody in town, by first names – and it was only after he’d left that we discovered he’s bought a round of drinks for the house. For want of a better phrase, he had that touch of class – the touch of a San Franciscan.

March 12, 1961

Scene: On Monday afternoon the portly figure of Mr. Alfred Hitchcock was to be seen emerging, with a definite “thwuck,” from a large black limousine on Powell. He waddled over to a bench in Union Square and spread himself out like a roly-poly pudding. Some nut with a paper bag sprinkled grain at his feet, attracting pigeons by the hundreds. Kicking at them good-naturedly, the director of “The Birds” admonished: “Get thee to Ernie’s – I’ll see you under glass at 7.”

April 3, 1963

I wouldn’t want you to think I became a columnist just like that. Before achieving this pinochle, I had made a name for myself – no matter what kind – as a sportswriter, police reporter and radio columnist. Actually, I didn’t make my name at all. Steve George, then sports director of the Sacramento Union, made it for me in 1932. After I had written a long and intolerable piece about high school football, he said: “Put your by-line on it. I wouldn’t want anybody to think I wrote it.” I scribbled “By Herbert Caen” at the top of the copy and handed it to him. “Good God,” he said irritably, crossing out the last three letters of the first name. “Who ever heard of a sportswriter named Herbert?”

July 5, 1963

And so you cried. You cried for the young man and his wife and his family. You cried because you hadn’t realized how much the young man meant to you. You cried for the famous faces of the people who had told them. You cried for the Nation, and the despoilers of it, for the haters and the witch-hunters, the violent, the misbegotten, the deluded. You cried because all the people around you were crying, in their impotence, their frustration, their blind grief.

November 24, 1963

Frankly, I never thought it would get here so soon, but today is my 50th birthday. If that makes YOU feel older, think what it does to me. As for my doctor, he’s a little disconsolate, too, since he once bet me 100 to 1 I’d never make it. Knowing him, I won’t get the money, but the important thing is that I won – and it all evens out, anyway. If he’d won, he’d have had a hell of a time collecting.

April 3, 1966

I park at the Pickwick and start walking. A good day: a stranger smiles at you for no particular reason, a car stops to let you by and you feel warm about the driver. A drunk finds a dollar bill on the sidewalk – terrific. You drop a quarter into a can held by a Black Panther who says “Free breakfasts for kids.” How can you be against free breakfasts for kids?

October 8, 1972

The tourists. They used to beat a path from the Ferry Building to the Cliff House. Now they roam around Vaillancourt Fountain, making funnies, and stay in Hyatts and Holiday Inns, eat at whatever place is handy and ask plaintively: “Where do the real San Franciscans go?” There is no satisfactory answer, for the San Franciscan is forever a tourist in his own hometown, mingling with the tourists from elsewhere and usually having just as good, or rotten, a time as they … Come let us play and pay together.

August 4, 1974

Beautiful Baghdad-by-the-Bay, aglow. On the streets, strangers actually smiling at one another, and isn’t that what Christmas is all about? It makes us feel a little kinder. A fiver for the kid who throws your Chronicle into the bushes – a good kid, a splendid little chap. A tenner for the garage man who dented your favorite fender last July, and a bottle for the postman, who always rings twice to announce the junk mail has arrived.

December 29, 1975