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Saying Goodbye to the Two Who Blazed the Columnizing Trail

Sixteen years ago this week, a man I knew well motioned me into his cluttered office with a wave of his cigar. "Sit down, Beard," he said (I wore one then). "You need a shave. But what you really need is some education."

I needed more than some, as I have realized many times in the years since. And who better to play teacher than a man who had dodged the slings and arrows, and who had made Washington love him, for the previous 34 years?

When Bill Gold died at 84 a few days ago, it was hardly unexpected. He had been in failing health for some time.

The last time I saw him, he was trying to eat dinner in Krupin's Restaurant at a table near ours. He couldn't manage it. His wife, Bernice, had to help him lift the fork. The previous time I saw him, about a year earlier, he called me Joe and kept drifting away, physically as well as conversationally.

Which only made the memories of the old days even sharper, because Bill was one of the sharpest there ever was. His daily column, The District Line, appeared in this space from 1947 until mine began in 1981.

When it came time to change the guard, Bill could have been churlish and childish, jealous of his reputation, afraid that the new kid would mess up the block. Instead, he offered me all his help and wrote most of his final column about me, by way of introduction to the readers. Vintage Gold. I have never forgotten, or failed to be grateful.

Bill's death came at the beginning of my vacation. Herb Caen's came near the end. It walloped me nearly as hard.

Sixteen years ago next week, after Bill and I had arranged to pass the torch, I wrote to Caen at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he hammered out his famous daily column for most of his 58-year career. I told him that I was about to try daily columns myself, and did he have any advice?

His reply, tapped out on his beloved Royal manual typewriter, like every one of his 16,000 columns, was a classic:

"Dear Bob Levey:

"You'll love it if you don't hate it.

"Herb Caen."

Like Herb, I have loved it from Day One. But unlike Bill or Herb, I have not swum in quite the same kind of pond.

Bill and Herb came of age when columnists didn't yet think they should be secretary of state or at least mayor. Nor did "city columnists" have the luxury of rambling on about one subject. For most of their careers, Bill and Herb were masters of the "three-dot" column -- a collection of short, punchy items separated by three periods, but really linked by the periods, as if to waft the reader from one item to the next. A typical column would include 25 items, and 24 sets of dots.

"I think writing three-dot columns is the hardest work there is," Caen told a 1994 interviewer. "It's the stoop labor of journalism, assembly line writing. . . . You can't get kids to do it." Indeed, this kid flirted with the three-dot style for a while in the mid-1980s. He gave up shortly before he dropped from exhaustion.

Herb Caen's death at 80 wasn't unexpected, either. He had been ill with cancer for months. Near the end, he couldn't speak.

"But he just smiled and made a typing motion with his hands, like he was hoping against hope that there would be a last column to write," said his boss, Chronicle Editor William German.

Herb used to say that he wouldn't mind going to heaven -- but he cautioned that it wouldn't compare to San Francisco. Bill used to say that heaven was right here in The Washington Post's newsroom -- where he could enjoy the privilege of churning out one more column and the privilege of smoking one more cigar.

I think it's pretty close to heaven to follow in such illustrious footsteps. Those two men have made my path, and the paths of all who write daily columns, a little less rocky. They have shown us all that Truth can come in little packages as well as big. They have shown us that the best and most enduring columnists know how to poke fun regularly -- especially at themselves.

When I wrote my maiden column, I said I wouldn't try to imitate Bill Gold because I couldn't succeed. I would simply try to follow his lead, I said.

Rob Morse, a columnist for the San Francisco Examiner who has been pitted against Herb Caen for much of his career, said much the same when Herb died.

"When I came here, I was encouraged to imitate him, which was kind of ridiculous, because you can't," he said. "I tried to live up to him, and that's all anybody can do."

That's what I plan to keep doing, with a bow to two guys who showed me how.