Herb Caen
The Press Bus and Herb Caen*
I went to the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in San Francisco and was on the press bus sitting next to Herb Caen. I didn’t know who he was yet. I was a kid with a notebook and press credentials that felt bigger than my hands.
I remember telling my mother he was “just an old drunk.” That’s what he looked like to me — gray suit, glass in hand, laughing with everybody on the bus like he owned the city. I was sharp with my words back then. I didn’t know I was sitting next to a legend.
Then I learned about Herb Caen and his famous column in the San Francisco Examiner. Three-dot journalism. Names, news, and gossip with a poet’s eye. He wrote San Francisco every day for 60 years. Mayors read him. Bartenders read him. My mother read him. He could make or break a restaurant in a sentence and make you fall in love with the fog. The man I thought was “just an old drunk” was the reason people picked up the paper.
That hit me because the same newspaper that ran his column later gave me a front page story with my picture on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner evening edition. Me. The girl from the press bus. The one who thought Herb Caen was nobody. There I was, above the fold, ink on newsprint, my name in the same kind of type they used for him.
I remember standing at the newsstand that night. Picking it up. My hands were shaking. The photo was me, but it felt like proof. Proof that the little girl who mailed letters to pen pals, who laid out newsletters with rubber cement, who chased interviews at the UN, who studied journalism at Diablo Valley College and wrote for The Inquirer — that she was real. That this counted.
I used to do journalism and most of my younger life was filled with writing. It wasn’t for clicks. It wasn’t for likes. It was for print. For deadlines. For editors who bled red ink on your copy and made you better. For the rule that you get it right before you get it first. For the sound of a newsroom at midnight and the smell of fresh copies hitting the street.
Sitting next to Herb Caen on that press bus taught me something I didn’t expect. Legends are people. And sometimes, if you keep your head down and do the work, you end up in the same paper they did. Not because you planned it. Because you earned it, one story at a time.
I came to that UN anniversary as a kid with a notebook. I left knowing the difference between watching history and writing it. And I’ve been writing ever since.
