Today is the birthday of San Francisco journalist Herb Caen. His
column in the San Francisco Chronicle began in 1938, the year I was
born. Caen was 22 then. The Golden Gate Bridge opened a few months
later. What a wonderful time to live in San Francisco. Herb wrote 1,000
words a day, six days a week, for almost 60 years — the longest-running
column in American history. He coined the term “beatnik” in 1958, and he
made the word “hippie” popular in the 1960s. He said: “I’m going to do
what every San Franciscan does who goes to Heaven. I’ll look around and
say, ‘It’s not bad, but it ain’t San Francisco.’”
I arrived there in the early sixties, and fell in love with the
city, a wonderland for this naive, young man from Southern Illinois. A
day was not complete without reading Caen’s column, a mixture on love
and humor lavished on that incredible city, ‘Bagdad by the bay,’ he
called it. Those spectacular views and places: North Beach, the Haight,
Embarcadero, Panhandle, the Castro, City Lights, and the Vesuvio.
Golden Gate Park. Riding
a cable car to work. God, how I loved that city, only place I ever felt
I was where I belonged. Everyday ecstasy.
Two decades later fate and finance tore me away. I lived across the bay
in Oakland for a while, and then Seattle. Now this final stop, in
Sweden. Like a long lost lover unforgotten, San Francisco comes to me
behind closed doors of consciousness. In dreams I wander in a labyrinth
of fascinating streets and hills of times gone by. Few months have
passed without her late night reappearance.
