Herb Caen, Emperor Norton & "Frisco"
The 6 September 1995 entry from legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (1916-1997) included the following note:
“Such balderdash dept.: A front-page story in the Daily Afterblatt yesterday assured readers that two fugitives were arrested by two rookie cops in Berkeley because they said they were from Frisco, ‘the one word sure to identify them as tourists or rubes.’ The toughest guys on the old S.F. waterfront, neither rubes nor tourists, called it Frisco, and no effete journalist would have tried to correct them, either.”
This amounted to a late-in-life recanting of the Frisco Doctrine from the person who widely is recognized as San Francisco's modern theologian of anti-"Frisco" orthodoxy.
Herb Caen in the 1940s. Source: San Francisco Chronicle.
Almost invariably, in fact, those who champion the Doctrine today cite two authorities, Caen and Emperor Norton — not necessarily in that order — to buttress their position.
For decades, the famous injunction levying a fine of $25 against anyone "heard to utter the abominable word 'Frisco'" has been attributed to Emperor Norton. And — although we've seen no evidence that he ever wrote or said anything of the kind — it seems to be taken for granted that Caen must have caught the ant-"Frisco" bug from the Emperor.
So it's worth noting that, in Caen's little essay, "Don't Call It Frisco," which introduces his 1953 book of the same name — i.e., in the one place where one would expect to see Caen making his bows to Emperor Norton on this subject — the Emperor never comes up.
The Emperor doesn't even make the index to the book.
Caen concludes his essay by writing, simply:
“Don’t call it Frisco. Don’t ask me why. Just don’t.”
More than than 40 years later, Caen revived "Don't Call It Frisco" as the title of a 3 March 1995 column that includes the passage most frequently cited today to sum up Caen's position:
“It’s San Francisco. Old San Francisco. It looks its best — very old — in the rain, when gray ghosts flit across the wet sidewalks, leaving no shadow. Not Frisco but San Francisco. Caress each Spanish syllable, salute our Italian saint. Don’t say Frisco and don’t say San-Fran-Cis-Co. That’s the way Easterners, like Larry King, pronounce it. It’s more like SanfrnSISco, all one word minus a syllable.”
But, again, no mention of the Emperor.
Herb Caen had his reasons for not liking "Frisco."
But perhaps they had very little to do with Emperor Norton.
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There’s reason to doubt whether Herb Caen had a problem with “Frisco” at all.
Nearly 20 years before the 1995 “retractions,” he already was walking back the “don’t call it Frisco” mantra.
Here’s how Caen opened "The City That Never Was a Town,” a February 1977 article for The Rotarian magazine:
“It’s okay, you may call it ‘Frisco’ now. The gray-beards, the ones who objected so strenuously and endlessly to the ‘irreverent’ sailor-spawned nickname for San Francisco, are mostly gone now — and so, it must be added, is a large part of the city they loved and helped to build, the city that spawned world legends and legions of worshipers.
Old ‘Frisco’ was the seaman’s and adventurer’s delight, the gaudy, lusty, gusty town that grew up overnight in floods of gold and silver, much of it to be squandered in the infamous deadfalls of the Barbary Coast or among the opium-smokers of Chinatown’s dark corners. That was Frisco, it’s waterfront jammed and noisy and alive with ships from the seven seas, its harbor big enough to embrace all the natives of the world.
Small wonder that a newspaper columnist who once wrote a book titled ‘Don’t Call It Frisco’ was heard to implore one recent day, as he recalled these vanished glories, ‘PLEASE call us Frisco!’”
Here’s Caen a year later, in his Chronicle column of 19 March 1978:
“WHO FIRST said ‘Don’t call It Frisco!’ and why? What’s wrong with ‘Frisco’ that you should be ostracized and cast into the East Bay for using it in mixed company? A few days ago, The New York Times put the headline ‘Dog Daze in Frisco’ over a light piece from San Francisco, and letters of protest have poured in from all parts of the country — from Philly to Chi, from Ellay to Dago. The gist: ‘How can the most distinguished newspaper in the country use this hateful nickname?’ Plus exhortations that I not let them ‘get away with it.’ (The Times trembles at my displeasure).
I FIND MYSELF strangely unmoved, even though I once put out a book titled ‘Don’t Call It Frisco.’ A catchy title, that’s all. I was never sure about the reasoning behind the objection, even while voicing it. Other old-timers don’t know either. They stumble around with words like ‘undignified’ and ‘bawdy’ and ‘coarse,’ as if there’s something wrong with a city being any of those, which every city is. Maybe It has to do with San Francisco being ‘the city of St Francis,’ and there is no St. Frisco. My recollection is that it’s a waterfront-born nickname that the sailors used lovingly, back when this was the best (i.e., wildest) port of call in the Pacific. Furthermore, is anyone yet alive who remembers that day in ‘75 when S.F.’s first professional baseball team took the field, and I do mean The Friscoes? When you hear Clancy Hayes sing all those fine ‘Frisco’ songs with the old Bob Scobey band, can you really be outraged?
BEFORE GOING on to less pressing matters (cheers, hoots, catcalls), this knee-jerk and, I think, not at all serious aversion to ‘Frisco’ Is redolent of lavender and old lice, such as a San Franciscan’s alleged ‘hatred’ of Los Angeles and ‘contempt’ for Oakland. These might have.had a trace of validity once — when S.F. and L.A. literally were competing for pride and population, and when this city was riding high on a fairly justifiable wave of cockiness — but these feelings no longer exist. In fact, the situations no longer exist. Los Angeles has long since moved on to another dimension, which you may like or dislike. And there is no longer anything amusingly hicktownish about Oakland. Ask our port director.”
As in the 1950s and 1990s examples above, Emperor Norton is nowhere to be found in these 1970s ruminations on the subject of “Frisco.”
The more one looks at it, the more it begins to appear that “don’t call it Frisco” was a clever schtick created and used by the Sackamenna Kid to lovingly tweak his adopted San Francisco for taking itself too seriously.
If so, then those San Franciscans today who revere Herb Caen as the Count of Anti-”Frisco” may be doing so because — like generations of self-serious San Franciscans before them, they never got the joke.
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MORE “FRISCO”
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