how herb caen paid his union dues

The actual outcome of the eleven-day strike last November by nine newspaper unions against the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner is muddled. Will Hearst resigned a month later as Examiner publisher, an act that's hard to construe as a victory lap. Teamsters and management are at odds about how much job protection actually was negotiated for union truck drivers. Dozens of other disagreements have surfaced, and a second strike is a possibility, though not yet a likelihood. Against this seething background, one clear moment has assumed the stuff of minor newspaper legend. That was when seventyeight-year-old Chronicle columnist Herb Caen led a select group of Chronicle and Examiner writers before the local TV cameras to vow that they wouldn't return to work until everyone returned to work.

It was pure labor theater, but even semi-hardened Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll says that, to his own astonishment, tears of gratitude sprang to his eyes when Caen stepped forward. Even though it was unthinkable that a longtime union stalwart like Caen would do otherwise, at that moment in the strike, plenty of union members were thinking the unthinkable.

The press conference itself was an improvisation. Newspaper management had sent a letter to the 2,600 strikers threatening immediate termination if they didn't return to work. Though the union leaders had anticipated the threat, phone trees and face-to-face pep talks weren't providing reassurance fast enough.

The idea for the press conference apparently belongs to Doug Cuthbertson, executive officer of the Northern California Newspaper Guild. "I knew [the pledge] would have enormous impact on the people out there on the picket line in the rain," he says. "It was even bigger than I thought." In particular, Cuthbertson says, the TV moment reminded secretaries and clerks that they were not alone, that they were pan of something larger. "If the day people got the "permanent replacement" letters was the nadir, the press conference was right at the apex," says Bill Wallace, Chronicle reporter and president of the Northern California Newspaper Guild. "It was a triumphant moment."

That Herb Caen would mean the most to those outside the newsroom was a foregone conclusion. In spite of his style and wit, his column does not travel well outside a 100-mile radius of San Francisco, consisting as it does of dozens of individual local items in the Neolithic three-dot style about socialites and politicians, opera openings and gossip, bad puns and nostalgia. But he remains a Bay Area icon. Fifty years worth of recognition factor adds up, as Chronicle investigative reporter Susan Sward discovered when a produce clerk at her Safeway supermarket told her he knew the newspaper unions were on strike, and said, "You guys got Herb Caen to come out for you." Perhaps, as Cuthbertson suggests, the unexpected emotion the press conference stirred inside the two papers was simply a momentary overflow of their anxiety.

Perhaps, as Chronicle editor Bill German says, it resulted from the fact that "they didn't know Herb very well."

Or, as Carroll says, it may have come from the somewhat unnerving realization that Caen might be the only one of the columnists and writers who really mattered to management. That insight has its own comforting corollary, of course: the paper has got to have Herb Caen; if he's with the union, the union wins. "I called him first," Cuthbertson says. "I would have been a naked mercenary without him."

A standard argument in the Chronicle newsroom has always been this: how many of the paper's half-million readers will cancel their subscriptions the day after Herb Caen is buried? (The assumption is he'll write till he drops dead, and his fans will want to read about the funeral.) The betting, says union official Wallace, runs from 15,000 to 150,000.

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