Herb Caen, Emperor Norton & "Frisco"
The 6 September 1995 entry from legendary San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (1916-1997) included the following note:
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.
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 anti-"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:
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:
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:
Here’s Caen a year later, in his Chronicle column of 19 March 1978:
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”
For more of our “Frisco” research, click here.
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