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Yeah, yeah, a place for enjoying life. And I've done it to the full thousands and thousands of columns and millions of words, all about one city, which is a tribute to the city. More than anything else. Hurricane has been the city for more

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than 50 years. He's sort of the life of the city, and he's a guy you really like to see coming into a room. It's part of who you are when you wake up in the morning, nobody can write it better than her. San Francisco Without Herbs

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Column would be Petaluma 11 Yeah, like letters from a friend, Herb Cain has written to us almost every morning for the past 58 years with news, gossip and good humor from his beloved city by the Bay. Hello, I'm Suzanne Shaw here at the Palace of Fine

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Arts. If Destiny was determined to bring Herb Cain and San Francisco together, then this is a good place to begin our story. The summer of 1915, San Francisco was hosting the Panama Pacific International Exhibition. Herb Cain claims his parents spent several weeks at the fair, and

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in that San Francisco summer they conceived a child, Herbert Eugene Kane, was born the following April in Sacramento. A great place to grow up, he said, if you were a tree. In later years, he wrote about his Jewish immigrant parents in his column. My German born

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mother goosey was obsessively clean and strict. She was also an excellent operatic soprano. She would open a window and bellow in a full bodied mezzo that rattled windows for blocks all around her birth and all the mean kids. I was playing baseball with wood chorus in

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falsetto Harbert. My father, Lucien, was a dashing chap with a moustache, double breasted vests and a taste for wine restaurants and the good life. My kind of guy herbs. Father was a whisky salesman. Grocer ran a pool hall. He loved to visit San Francisco on business,

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often taking his young son along to see the skyline rise out of the bay and the smell of the sea air. And here the C goes and cable cars and street cars. For a valley boy raised in a kind of a sleepy, Southern like city, it

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was a thrill that, but still still gets to me to this day at Sacramento High school, Cain was known for his quick wit and friendly company, especially among young ladies. He also loved to write and in a fateful step joined the school newspaper, where he had

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a column called Corridor Gossip. Peculiar Plight of a well known student who arrived at 8 30 went to the counselor's office, procured a tardy slip and just then found out that the clock was five minutes fast. He spent so much time in the counselor's office that

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he really was late. Poor soul. Just a few days out of high school in 1932 Cain walked into the editor's office at the local newspaper. I asked for a job and he said, Can you type? And I said, Yeah, and he said, Sit down, You're hired.

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I couldn't type even I still use three fingers. Over the next four years, Kane learned the craft of newspaper from sports to police Beat for fun. He wrote about radio shows and sent his stories to The San Francisco Chronicle. One day, the Chronicle's editor, Paul C.

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Smith, called to offer Kane a job. But Kane thought it was a joke, says his friend Jerry Bunsen, in her figured It was one of his buddies, he says. You know how much you're gonna give me to pay for the trip? Uh, and he hung up.

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And a friend of he said, Who was that? He was a Paul C. Smith. The guy says, What are you kidding about? That probably was Paul C. Smith, and Herb called him right back and said, Hey, how do you like my sense of humor up? Pretty

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funny, Really great. I'll be there in 10 minutes. Mhm, Yeah. And so in 1936 Herb Cain came to San Francisco as a radio columnist for The Chronicle. He was 20 years old. Two years later, he had an idea for a new column about what? Asked his

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editor about the city, he said, Every day I said Yes. He said, We'll give it a try. But remember one thing. I'm easily bored. I have a short attention span. So, for heaven's sakes, be entertaining. It's news to me. Got off to a shaky start on

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July 5th, 1938 was really tough going for a while there, Jerry Bunsen became herbs assistant, a job he kept for 36 years. The first couple of weeks. When he wrote the column, we felt kind of discouraged. A lot of people didn't know he was writing a

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column. But Cain soon hit his three dots, tried finding the people, parties and punch lines that connected with his readers. World War Two took Cane to London with the Army Air Corps, first doing photo reconnaissance, then writing military press releases from France. The war brought thousands

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of people to San Francisco, who decided to stay. When Herb Cain returned in 1946 he had trouble getting started again. How could he write for such a diverse new audience? Kane decided to target one special reader, a woman named Effie. Zilch. Zilch was just a mythical

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housewife in the Sunset District, and we were writing for her. So she was just every housewife and every secretary in town that wanted to read the column with her coffee. And every time we had an item that we were at least doubtful about, we would ask

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each other. Would Effie zilch be interested in this item? And if we decided no, she really wouldn't care about it. While she was having her second cup of coffee, then we wouldn't use it. Readers TRUSTED CANES COLUMN One mention could bust or boost a restaurant. A

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play. A politician for politicians one Mentioned in Herb Canes column was better than an editorial praising your performance. Hurricanes, power, clout and influence exceeds everybody else in the city and county of San Francisco Hurricanes OFFICE Carol Vernier, Hurricane's assistant for 16 years. What is my job?

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Just mainly going through all these letters and answering phones and checking on items and answer for Excuse me a second Hurricanes office Summer 1996 Carol Bernier and Jennifer Ash sit like border guards outside Kane's office. Herb is at home writing the column between treatments for cancer.

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Still, the three dot circus goes on when I'm on deadline. It's always, you know, pretty rush, rush rush to get this done. Get this done and stuff like, but we hardly ever fight. He gets upset with me sometimes because I blow it on items and yeah,

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he's right and I'm wrong. So but that is easy to work for the before the cancer her would be here by 10 a.m. Checking items ready to write by noon. I can't use a computer I'm not that smart, but I'm sort of a laughing stock at

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The Chronicle. Young reporters come in and peer in at me to see what a typewriter looks like. They can't get over it. This isn't original hard copy of Herbs Comb. He'll bring out one page at a time, and then Jennifer generally puts it into the computer

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system. It takes about, oh, an hour to an hour and a half from time to finish off the column. But Hurricanes Workday is just beginning. I think Herb is a newspaper man 24 hours a day. The column is literally the man. He's opinionated, he's sometimes caustic.

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He's never malicious. Never mean spirited. He's thoughtful, sensitive. He cries and he cares. And it all comes through in the column, and that's really the man, just absolutely tireless. He's got more energy than anyone I've ever seen in my life. Used to go out 67 places

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a night, sometimes 10 or 12, just dropping by here, dropping by there. That was the fun thing about, you know, being around him and growing up with him is you always had this sense that the antenna we're always out, he was always sniffing for an item,

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and he had this uncanny knack for seemingly just being able to know which bar to go into, where to go late at night to find that celebrity. To find that item. Cane gathered most of his own items but also had regular contributors. This man became famous,

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hiding behind a pillowcase and the pen name. Strange Do Jim who? Strange one. I always wondered if he really existed or it was just a figment of hurricanes. Imagination. Now, for the first time on television, Strange, the gym unmasked to his odd sense of humor. First

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popped into Herbs column in 1972. 1 day it just occurred to me that I had not believed in reincarnation in any of my other lives. I didn't see why I should believe in it in this one. So I sent it into her and he printed it.

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Her printed hundreds of strange to Jim's one liners. I never had any imaginary friends when I was a child, I just thought I had, and he began getting invitations to parties and public events. Suddenly I realized I wanted to be a mystery character. I didn't want

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people to know what I looked like. So I put a pillowcase over my head, and one time her showed up and he knew it was me because of the pillow case. So he just waved from across the the room. Neither of us has ever wanted to

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meet the other one. He didn't want her to know who he was, and he didn't want to know who he was, either, because it was a perfect relationship. What would Herbs column been without my comments? Um, well, he might have won the Pulitzer 10 years earlier.

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Mm 11 58 years, some 16,000 columns more than anyone else in newspaper history, a couple of families have written where they said, We've gone through three generations worth of Herb Cain because my grandfather, my mother, myself and so forth I get letters from nine year old

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saying, I read you every morning. I don't know what you're talking about, but I read it anyway. Effie Zilch is still out there, too, though she may be divorced and living in Marin like longtime fan Barbara Marino, he's been a constant when everything else in life

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is changing. If you're losing your job if your marriage is ending. If you're moving, Herb is still there. It's the one relationship that's lasted. Mm. If you had to do a thumbnail sketch of what Hurricane is really like, how would you describe yourself? Well, he's a

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phony, For one thing, overdressed, overpaid, malaprop artist has been getting away with murder for years, and suddenly they're going to catch up with. They did catch up to him. On April 9th, 1996 he won the Pulitzer Prize, the highest honor in journalism. So how does the

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writer of funny license plates and cute company names get a Pulitzer? Kate's best reporter we've ever had on the Chronic came his best writer, pure writer, and he wrote about serious things affecting the beauty of this city. Herb has led more fights for the environment in

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San Francisco than any other single human being. This is the site of the proposed Panhandle Freeway. Jeanne Cord, um, is standing in the fast lane of what was supposed to be a freeway right through Golden Gate Park. But the shocking thing is that it would have

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taken all of this out and turned it into a piece of concrete. In the early 19 sixties, the state wanted to build two freeways through San Francisco, connecting to the Golden Gate Bridge. The central Freeway would have cut west wider than a football field, knocking down

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blocks of Victorians between oak and fell streets, paving over the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park, cutting just behind McLaren Lodge to run inside the park along Fulton Street, finally turning north up Park Presidio all the way to the Golden Gate Bridge on the other side of

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town, the Embarcadero Freeway would have continued along the waterfront, swooping around the base of Telegraph Hill, passing right behind Ghirardelli Square, eventually rolling out over the bay alongside the marina green and through the ST Francis Yacht Club. Oh, I think it would have been the greatest

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disaster in San Francisco since the earthquake and fire of 19 oh six, when gene code, um, decided to fight the freeways. She was considered a nut in 1966. There was no such thing as an environmental protection agency. Instead, she was facing the governor, the mayor, the

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Board of Supervisors and the Chamber of Commerce. But on her side was a growing force of San Franciscans, including Herb Cain. Oh, any mention in Hurricane was extremely important. We fought for that privilege of getting something into hurricane. The man just has incredible clout. Mhm. There

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are those who can't understand all the fuss about freeways. Young people born in the freeway age can't see anything wrong with the device that takes you where you're going as fast as possible, no matter how much beauty was sacrificed in the process. In the hierarchy of

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anarchy, the car is God and a place to park is heaven. Mhm. San Francisco supervisor Sue Berman was another leader in the battle over freeways, and it's not easy to protect a city. You just fight and fight and fight, and her cane fights with us. And

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so it was. In 1966 San Francisco became the first city in the country to stop the freeways. Instead of standing here looking out on the bay, looking at a sailing ship out there, we would have had an eight lane freeway full of cement and concrete, automobiles

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and exhaust right here on San Francisco's front door. It wasn't just freeways any development that threatened canes view of how San Francisco should look got bashed by Keynes Royal Wrecking Ball. He wrote about saving the cable cars, protecting the bay, preserving the waterfront. We can't tear

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down buildings fast enough to make room for new ones that are every bit as distinctive as Pittsburgh's or Atlanta's. To the bureaucrat technocrat mind, a building is a building, and the bigger the better. To hell with what it does to the environment. The view, the tradition.

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Have you ever tried the lounge in front of Bank of America? The Old City grew beautiful by accident. The new one is growing ugly by design. He's got a good heart, but he's got he's got a hard pin. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church says Cain

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also had strong ideas about how the city should act. Williams remembers when baseball great Willie Mays first came to San Francisco in 1957 looking for a place to live. May's tried to buy this house at the edge of ST Francis Wood, but the deal fell through

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when neighbors pressured the owner not to sell, said one neighbour. Colored people just don't belong in this part of town. Here's a man who has the money and the fame to move in almost any community, it would seem, but of course they refused him. Herb Cain

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wrote about it. Herb Kane revealed it. Hurricane opened it up. Herb Cain gave us a wake up call. And when we did find out about it, Shame, shame, shame on this city. Caught in the headlines, the neighbors back down. May's bought the house with no further

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trouble. Cain was pro labor, joining in two newspaper strikes. He was for gay rights against the death penalty and one of the first columnist in America to oppose the Vietnam War. Mhm what the Pulitzer Prize people summed up Keynes influenced by calling him a voice and

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a conscience of San Francisco. At the awards ceremony, he told a Pulitzer judge that perhaps he wasn't worthy of the honor. He was very stern, and he looked at me and said, Mr Cain, we know what you do remember. There are no cheap Pulitzers that made

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me feel better. Mm, Uh huh. They were newspaper men. McQuaid, corn, Caylor Fanning. In the 19 thirties, Herb Cain was one of them, racing the daily deadlines, working till 3 a.m. then heading for Powell street to drink and read the early edition, the ink still wet

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on the page Sunrise would find them standing on the curb, legging pennies at the cable car slot. I no longer remember how the game started or what the point was, since the winner was the one who lost his penny down the slot. It simply appealed to

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the child in us, the child that lives in every newspaper man of whatever age. We were all like that living and breathing the newspaper business. He worked too hard, drank too much, married and divorced too often blue, our health and our home lives and in most

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cases, died too young. It never occurred to us to put in for overtime. We were having too good a time all the time. Your column is more important than your wife or Children or mother or anything like that. The column was his life, his his whole

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being. His way of communicating with people remember him writing about why he went through three divorces, he said, simply because the column came first. But then came cancer. Herb Cain was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer last April. He didn't even have a week to sort of

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celebrate the Pulitzer before he found out that he had the cancer and as it almost seemed like it was a case of where he was almost writing too high and some hand came along and said, Got to knock you down. That was a blow because I

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stopped smoking 25 years ago. My son Christopher was very young then, and there was a great anti smoking campaign aimed at Children. He put signs up all over the house. No cigarette. He made up a word. No cigarettes, no cigarettes, no sniggering, no sniggering, and then

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proceeded to put those notes everywhere. In the house, in his shoes, in his closet, under his pillow in his cereal box was even in the shower, and he hit all the ashtrays and he tore my cigarettes in half. And finally I said, All right, you win,

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Christopher. I smoked my last cigarette and he said, Thank you, Daddy. And it was a terrible scene. He was on his knees like Al Jolson. Daddy, Daddy, you're not gonna smoke anymore. Well, I quit. And yet along comes lung cancer. Cain kept riding from home, hoping

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to produce three columns a week. But for the first time in his life, he was missing deadlines. Sometimes the energy levels up. Sometimes it's down, but I don't want to be out of the paper. My whole life is being dedicated to being there, so I'm going

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to continue to be there as long as I can. Yeah, Over the years, Herb Cain has watched his newspaper buddies lose the deadline race one by one, and sometimes Cain would find himself alone, standing on the curb with thoughts of old newspaper men and a handful

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of pennies. Sometimes I feel like a survivor of the last Man Club. Throw another penny at the slot and remember the good times. Yeah, June 14th, 1996. Herb Cain A chance for thousands to say Thank you. Herb was there with his spring bride and Muller. In

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the end, he really does what he does for the readers. That's his judge and jury. In his mind, Doing for his readers to actually stand up and applaud meant more to him than anything. One day, if I'd do gooder heaven, I'm going to do what every

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San Francisco does that goes to heaven. He looks around and says It ain't bad, but it ain't San Francisco. Yeah, Along the waterfront he helped preserve, Herb Cain was honored with a sidewalk bearing his name. There is no marble statue or towering monument, just this three

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mile stretch of flat pavement. Anything else might block the view. It's more of an honor than I can handle. I mean, Hurricane way sounds a little stiff to me, but we're going to put up a few signs, and I guess I'll be remembered along there by

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somebody. Maybe an old Siegel, maybe one leg at Sego mm.