Mrs. Lawton and HERB CAEN

This is another clipping from Mrs. Lawton's scrapbook. It was floating loosely between two pages, not pasted down. It's a clipping from a Herb Caen San Francisco Chronicle newspaper column, not an unusual item to find if you lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I believe there are one or two squirreled away in my mother's jewelry box.

Click on image to see it larger.

Herb Caen was a famous columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. I'd say what he wrote was gossip, but that wasn't really what it was. He compiled brief bits and pieces of interesting and funny moments linked together by an ellipses, which he called "three-dot journalism."

Herbert Eugene Caen (April 3, 1916 – February 1, 1997) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist working in San Francisco. Born in Sacramento, California, Caen worked for the San Francisco Chronicle from the late 1930s until his death, with an interruption from 1950 to 1958 during which he wrote for the San Francisco Examiner. His collection of essays titled Baghdad-by-the-Bay was published in 1949 and in 1953 he published the book "Don't Call It Frisco". Caen died of lung cancer and his funeral was one of the best-attended in San Francisco history. (SOURCE: Wikipedia)

Each morning I'd hear either my mother or father howling with laughter over something in the column. It was a sad day in the Bay Area when Caen was gone. He is missed.