Himself

I never met him, never even saw him, though my formative years in the Bay Area were inextricably entwined with Charles McCabe. McCabe didn’t occupy the celestial firmament claimed by fellow San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, whose gossipy columns tracked the city’s movers and shakers as they pursued their gilded activities and interests; Caen’s columns never spoke to me like those of the gritty McCabe, lover of San Francisco born in NYC’s Hells Kitchen. When the Chron arrived early each morning with a mighty thump against the front door, my parents and I (politely but sneakily) maneuvered to be first to read McCabe’s latest column on what makes us, and by extension the world, tick. He wrote of our commonalities, both personal and communal, and we loved him for it. Since he was a newspaper rock star back then we were also hungry for details of his daily life. He arrived at the Chron’s 5th and Mission offices at the “ungodly hour” of 8 a.m., where he banged out his column by 9 before retiring to Gino and Carlo’s North Beach bar in Little Italy to begin his informal research for the next column between bottles of Rainier Ale (nicknamed “The Green Death” for its green bottle). Gino and Carlo, like its urban contemporaries, may look like an upscale sports bar today, but to me it will always look like the Petri dish of McCabe’s columns.

McCabe’s musings concerned the ups, downs, and sideways realities of simply living, and he turned his journalist’s eye to seldom-acknowledged topics like parents don’t really love their children equally, or that marriages suffer from too much togetherness. We saw ourselves in him, surely the greatest accomplishment of any columnist, and through that rare fusion felt that we knew him. In this way insightful and talented writers worm their ways into even the most well-defended hearts.

When my parents died 20 years ago and all the exhausting details of their passing mercifully ended, I was left with a wall of moldering cardboard boxes that I just couldn’t throw out. Though no one really wanted the detritus of my parents’ colorful and well-lived lives, as an historian by education I just couldn’t toss them. It was a recent foray into one of those boxes that brought me back to McCabe, long dead since 1983. Folded between old report cards and letters was a fragile copy of a McCabe column, carefully cut from page 41 of the paper’s June 30, 1976, edition. Titled “Poor Jimmy,” it was about Jimmy Carter, written just five months before his election as president. 

Vintage McCabe, his column wasn’t about the future president’s qualifications or stated policies, pro or con. It was instead about how wall-to-wall TV news coverage, then in its infancy, would tarnish Carter through overexposure and inevitably turn the public against him. Maybe my father was the one who clipped and saved that McCabe column written almost 50 years ago; he hated television and never watched it. But it could also have been my mother, who would have seen it as a save-worthy meditation on the perils of superficial, image-based broadcast journalism. Or perhaps they saved it together for later reference on some future rainy day when they would revisit it to see if McCabe’s predictions about “poor Jimmy” had come true.

Today’s dogmatic feminist sensibilities would undoubtedly tsk-tsk at McCabe’s views on women. The title of his 1973 book, “Tall Girls Are Grateful,” is a clue; San Francisco may have been home to famous topless dancer Carol Doda but McCabe wrote that women should be “small and proportional,” which presumably would have precluded silicon-enlarged breasts. 

Ditto for his views on ever-elusive marital harmony. In a column titled “You Can’t Win, Pal” in my well-thumbed collection of McCabe’s columns, McCabe wrote that his [several] wives handled the money. “That way I always have a grudge;” he wrote, “and grudges, I need hardly tell any of you ace husbands, are the cement of marriage.” 

He was, after all, a man of his era, and wrote that his influential Catholic mother taught him that “there were two kinds of women in the world─saints and whores.” He further theorized that the inherent contradiction of pursuing saints for earthly pleasure landed him too often in the arms of the other kind of woman. The late sixties hadn’t sunk in, yet.

One of my favorite columns in the same collection, entitled “Old Nick and the Law,” hypothesized that the police foolishly waste their time and our money by fruitlessly trying to enforce laws that run counter to “human nature” and can never therefore be eliminated: drug use, prostitution, drunkenness and homosexuality [gender equality hadn’t happened, yet]. He quoted an unnamed source as saying “Society was created because of man’s needs; government, because of his wickedness.”

Next month it will be 39 years since more than 400 colleagues and admirers gathered together for a final farewell to McCabe at North Beach’s National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi church. The Mass of Resurrection was delivered by McCabe’s friend, the San Francisco native Reverend John K. Ring, himself dead since 2017, who praised the columnist’s “restless heart and mind,” along with a remark that would survive in the memories of his many fans in the decades since his sudden death from a concussion in his San Francisco apartment. “Charles couldn’t stand anything phony,” Ring declared, as reported in his beloved Chron, “whether it be presidents, governors, oil-tongued clergymen or razor blades.” 

Maybe one or both of my parents saved the McCabe column about Jimmy Carter because, as political junkies of the much-ballyhooed Greatest Generation, they had caught a whiff of the future intersection of politics and television, where appearance would ultimately trump substance, making mockeries of us all. Maybe they saw Carter as a kind of innocent incapable of standing up to the broadcast steamroller poised to run him over. As FDR Democrats, they were perhaps also wistful of a past time where, despite dire circumstances, they felt hopeful about their country. Too young to have experienced the deprivations of the Great Depression as adults, too old to willingly embrace what was coming, they found in McCabe a kindred spirit.