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A TRIBUTE TO THE
LEADER OF THE BAND
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I grew up around columns. As many readers know, my father,
Arthur Hoppe, wrote a column for The Chronicle for almost 50 years. He was a
political and social satirist, and along with Herb Caen, Charles McCabe,
Stanton Delaplane and others, led a golden age of journalism in San
Francisco.
The greatest joy I've had in writing for The Chronicle is
bringing back memories of my dad from so many readers. All of us go through
life hoping to make some kind of impact on others, and it became very clear
to me that my father had an enormous impact on so many people.
While I was growing up, he wrote six columns a week, appearing
every day except Saturday. He would write his Sunday column on Tuesdays,
meaning he would write two columns on that day. Amazingly prolific.
He would offer my three sisters and me the chance to make five
dollars if we could come up with a column idea. I went all the way through
high school, college, my 20's and my 30's without coming up with a single
idea. I suggested a couple, but they didn't make the cut.
Yet he would come up with six a week, every week. No one does
that anymore. Asked how he did it, he would shrug and say, "I read the
paper every morning until I can find an item I don't understand, and then
I'd sit down and explain it to everyone."
In his heyday, he was syndicated across the country, appearing
in almost 100 papers. But he was on the West Coast, far away from the
political hotbed of Washington D.C. and New York, so he took a backseat to
more famous political satirists like Art Buchwald (Washington Post) and
Russell Baker (New York Times).
He had offers to move back East and work for a more politically
connected newspaper, but he declined them all. He had a loyalty to The
Chronicle, where he started as a copy boy after graduating from Harvard on
the G.I. Bill, and he didn't want to uproot his young family. I am forever
grateful.
He was hilarious, my father, and one of the nicest gentlemen
you'd ever want to meet. I'd like to think he passed on some of his writing
skills to me, but he certainly didn't pass on his incredible imagination.
He created characters that live on forever. Joe Sixpak, Private
Drab, The Landlord, his neighbor Crannich, his wife Glynda, son Mordred,
daughter Malphasia, the Harvard educated gorilla, and dozens more. Then he'd
make up stories involving his characters, always with a life lesson of some
sort. Six days a week, every week.
Imagine the imagination that would take. I can't.
When I graduated from college, I wanted to be a journalist. I
went to work as a copy boy at The Chronicle, just like my dad. But I quickly
realized that I'd always be compared to him, and that's not always a good
thing when you're going against greatness. So I changed course and went into
business, where I've been ever since.
I have no regrets. My dad was the columnist, not me. I
dabbled with the notion before, writing a freelance business column for a
couple of years for the Marin Independent Journal in the early 90's. It was
a humorous look at the absurdities of running your own business. It was fun,
but I ran out of ideas. Not enough imagination.
My dad never ran out of ideas. As he aged, he cut back to five
days a week, then three. He always said the less often he appeared, the
better he had to be. He couldn't afford as many clunkers when he was only
writing three days a week.
In November of 1999, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He
dutifully wrote about it, even writing one memorable column about the
benefits of having cancer---eating whatever he wanted, refusing invitations
to events he didn't want to attend, not having to return phone calls, and
other advantages. Readers loved it, because they loved him.
The cancer spread quickly, and in late January of 2000 he
called me one day and announced that he had written his last column. Tears
were shed. He was going into the hospital and was pretty certain he wouldn't
come out. He died on February 1, 2000 at the age of 74, only one week after
his last column appeared. His imagination was raging right up to the end.
But nothing lasts forever.
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