Columnist Herb Caen Dies -- Writer Distilled The Essence Of San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO - Herb Caen, America's most enduring metropolitan-newspaper columnist and the man who served as this city's social and cultural compass for more than half a century, died yesterday of lung cancer. He was 80.

Mr. Caen died at Pacific Medical Center with his wife, Ann, at his side. He had been found to have inoperable cancer last April and sporadically wrote his column in the San Francisco Chronicle despite his health.

In recognition of the special place Mr. Caen held in his "Baghdad by the Bay," Mayor Willie Brown ordered the city's flags flown at half-staff.

"He was an extraordinary human being," Brown said. "He was so interested in life and so well-informed and so inquisitive about everything and so ordinary in many respects. He was constantly in pursuit of the truth. He loved to tell the story."

President Clinton, in a statement issued by the White House, said no one knew San Francisco better than Mr. Caen. "If we listen carefully on those cool mornings when the fog has boiled through the Golden Gate, out beyond the clattering of cables underfoot and the low moan of the horn at Alcatraz, maybe we will still hear Herb Caen's wonderful, witty, irrepressible voice," Clinton said.

A clever writer with a wicked sense of humor, Mr. Caen had a gift for weaving gossip, one-liners, news scoops and miscellany into an insightful and entertaining daily diary of San Francisco life.

In a profession where burnout is a common workplace peril, he kept going and going - shunning computers and pecking away with two fingers on his "loyal Royal" typewriter to the end. His first column appeared July 5, 1938, and he continued writing 1,000 words a day, six days a week, through the 1980s. Later, he slowed a bit after he disclosed that doctors had found a tumor "the size of a pigeon egg" on his lung last April.

His writing streak - broken only by a stint in the Army during World War II - made Mr. Caen the longest-running columnist in U.S. history. His model, New York's Walter Winchell, quit after 40 years.

In his never-ending pursuit of material, Mr. Caen lived the life of a bon vivant, trolling the city's nightspots in his natty suits, gulping vodka - his beloved "Vitamin V" - with big shots and politicos. He quit smoking 25 years ago.

Despite keeping such company, he did not hesitate to impale the rich and mighty on his pen. And he often championed the little guy or a social cause that caught his eye.

"Even though he spent a lot of time writing about the beautiful people, the fact is that he remained a part of the city as a whole," said Ben Bagdikian, former dean of the graduate school of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

Mr. Caen was proud of that trait, but once said his contributions to the English language made him happiest of all. A deft wordsmith, he coined the term "beatnik," which made Webster's New World Dictionary.

Although he was dubbed "Mr. San Francisco," Herbert Eugene Caen was born in Sacramento, Calif., on April 3, 1916. His father, Lucien, was a whiskey salesman and proprietor of a billiard parlor. His mother, Augusta, was an opera singer who inspired young Herbert to take up piano, which he played faithfully until discovering baseball at the age of 15.

About the same time, Mr. Caen launched a column called "Corridor Gossip" - with the byline "Raisin' Caen" - for his high school paper. Mr. Caen's sister Estelle once remarked that he was perfect for the job - "a born busybody."

In 1936 Mr. Caen began writing a radio column for the Chronicle. But in 1938, he began writing about San Francisco under the title "It's News to Me."

"What made the column was when I started to get corny and descriptive about San Francisco . . . which I did because I ran out of items a couple of nights," he told the Washington Journalism Review in 1986. "I wrote these horrible, poetic, crappy things about the city, and people ate it up."

He often took on crusades, such as his effort in the late '40s and early '50s to save the cable cars - which became the city's biggest tourist attraction.

Mr. Caen maintained a devotion to his craft so slavish that it contributed to three divorces. Aside from the gossip - parceled out under headings like "Caenfetti" or "Caenecdotes" - column staples included silly "namephreaks" like "Buzz Minnow," a local fisherman, and "Give Pizza Chance." Particularly popular were his sneers at "lesser" cities. Chico, Calif., was the "Velveeta capital of the world," and "Lozangeles" was to be avoided at all costs.

Except for an eight-year stint at the San Francisco Examiner, Mr. Caen remained at the Chronicle. Last year, Mr. Caen won a special Pulitzer Prize for being the "voice and conscience of his city."

Mr. Caen himself once summed up his success this way: "I guess I've just become a habit." And that, he said, "is the luckiest thing that can happen to anybody."

In addition to his wife, Ann, he is survived by his son, Christopher.