Call It Frisco Part 3: Emperor Norton and Herb Caen Myths Debunked!

In this episode of The Secret History of Frisco, Knox Bronson returns—hopefully for the last time—to San Francisco’s most emotionally charged semantic battlefield: the word “Frisco.”

Building on the earlier episodes Call It Frisco and Call It Frisco #2 — Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict, Knox dismantles two of the most commonly cited weapons in the anti-Frisco arsenal: Emperor Norton’s supposed 1872 proclamation banning the word, and Herb Caen’s famously stern admonition, Don’t Call It Frisco.

New historical research from the Emperor Norton Trust reveals that Norton’s decree almost certainly never existed at all—an invention of a 1939 biography that somehow hardened into accepted truth. Meanwhile, Herb Caen himself ultimately reversed course, publicly inviting the city to reclaim “Frisco” as the sailors’, adventurers’, and Gold Rush city it once was.

Along the way, we explore sailor slang, Gold Rush linguistics, cultural snobbery, postwar migration, and the shifting moral geography of San Francisco itself. The episode closes by giving the final word to legendary madam and restaurateur Sally Stanford, who reminds us that the city’s original characters never called it anything but Frisco.

This is less a debate than a historical reckoning—and perhaps a small act of linguistic liberation.

Shownotes courtesy of ChatGPT. I find perverse enjoyment these weird summations.

Transcript

Welcome to the Secret History of Frisco Podcast. I’m your host, Knox Bronson.
We are going to revisit, once again and, hopefully, for the final time, the great question of  “FRISCO.” 
I’ve done two prior episodes on the topic, “Call It Frisco” and “Call It Frisco #2—Sally Stanford Weighs In On The Eternal Conflict.” I recommend listening to both episodes before listening to this one, although it is not necessary. There is still so much emotion attached to the word, “Frisco.” I have a couple of close friends who are so passionately against the use of the term, they will not even listen to my “Call It Frisco” episodes. 
So I must assume this is one more episode into which they will not be tuning.
[insert Shanghai Brown]
In the last “Call It Frisco” episode I mentioned that it would be my last statement on the subject. At the time, I meant it, but, since then, important facts have come to light. I do expect that this will be my last post on the issue.
In the first “Call It Frisco” episode, I told the story of Frisco’s infamous Emperor Norton, who graced the city with his presence from 1859 until his death in 1880. He had arrived in the city in 1849 as Joshua Abraham Norton but did not become Emperor Norton until after the great setbacks that plagued him in the 1850s.
According to legend and as I reported in that episode,
[typewriter fx]
The good Emperor Norton issued a proclamation, in 1872, about the use of the term “Frisco,” which was duly reported in all the local newspapers.
It read:
“Whoever after due and proper warning shall be heard to utter the abominable word “Frisco,” which has no linguistic or other warrant, shall be deemed guilty of a High Misdemeanor, and shall pay into the Imperial Treasury as penalty the sum of twenty-five dollars."
That would be about $650 today.
I can find no record that he managed to collect any fines.
[end typewriter fx]
Invariably, the anti-Frisco forces throw out Emperor Norton’s proclamation and San Francisco columnist Herb Caen’s book title of 1953, “Don’t Call It Frisco” to buttress their objections to the use of the term.
Recently, I stumbled across the writing of Robert Lumea at the Emperor Norton Trust website. Mr. Lumea has done extensive research about the Emperor’s proclamation and can find no reliable source by which to verify its actual existence. He cites twenty-three books and publications, spanning 154 years, including newspapers dating from 1870 to 1880. Fifteen make no mention of the proclamation. Eight mention the proclamation with no primary attribution. 
The actual first mention ever of Norton’s supposed decree came from David Warren Ryder's 1939 book, San Francisco's Emperor Norton. It seems that Ryder simply made up the story and it became, in popular culture, an historical truth. I believed it, even though it did not quite jibe with what I know of Emperor Norton’s very progressive and tolerant political views. It makes a good story, certainly, but I am happy to find that it since has been debunked by historians.
The Herb Caen aspect is problematic, because everyone knows he had his book with the title “Don’t Call It Frisco” and he stuck to that sentiment for many years. 
Let’s face it, he was a sprout from Sacramento, a kid of twenty-two from Cow Town central when he came to San Francisco and started writing for the Chronicle in 1938. I had the misfortune to have to live in Sacramento for a year-and-a-half in the mid-Sixties while in high school, due to my father getting a job up there. My friends and I called the town Scrotumento, for good reason. I mention this solely because it foreshadows Sally Stanford’s remarks about the changing culture of San Francisco after World War II and her view on the term Frisco, which I will reprise from our first Call It Frisco episode at the end of this one.
Don’t get me wrong, Herb Caen has been a lifelong idol to me. He was an incredible writer, creating a shared story a thousand words at a time for almost fifty years.  It was wonderful to see him receive a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize in 1996, a year before his death.
By 1977, Caen had had an epiphany and opened his article for The Rotarian magazine, titled "The City That Never Was A Town,” with the following admonitions.
[typewriter fx]
“It’s okay, you may call it ‘Frisco’ now. The gray-beards, the ones who objected so strenuously and endlessly to the ‘irreverent’ sailor-spawned nickname for San Francisco, are mostly gone now — and so, it must be added, is a large part of the city they loved and helped to build, the city that spawned world legends and legions of worshipers.
Old ‘Frisco’ was the seaman’s and adventurer’s delight, the gaudy, lusty, gusty town that grew up overnight in floods of gold and silver, much of it to be squandered in the infamous deadfalls of the Barbary Coast or among the opium-smokers of Chinatown’s dark corners. That was Frisco, it’s waterfront jammed and noisy and alive with ships from the seven seas, its harbor big enough to embrace all the natives of the world.
Small wonder that a newspaper columnist who once wrote a book titled ‘Don’t Call It Frisco’ was heard to implore one recent day, as he recalled these vanished glories, ‘PLEASE call us Frisco!’”
[end typewriter fx]
In 1978, he wrote in Chronicle column,
[typewriter fx]
WHO FIRST said ‘Don’t call It Frisco!’ and why? What’s wrong with ‘Frisco’ that you should be ostracized and cast into the East Bay for using it in mixed company? A few days ago, The New York Times put the headline ‘Dog Daze in Frisco’ over a light piece from San Francisco, and letters of protest have poured in from all parts of the country — from Philly to Chi, from Ellay to Dago. The gist: ‘How can the most distinguished newspaper in the country use this hateful nickname?’ Plus exhortations that I not let them ‘get away with it.’ (The Times trembles at my displeasure).
[end typewriter fx]
So from where did the term Frisco come? 
Mr. Lumea writes in his 2024 Article, “Charting A Path To Frisco”  on the Emperor Norton Trust website (find links to these resources in the show notes at our website):
[typewriter fx]
The folk etymologist Peter Tamony (1902–1985) was committed to the hypothesis that “Frisco” is not an abbreviation of “San Francisco” but, rather, has its own linguistic pedigree. In his brief but seminal essay “Sailors Called It ‘Frisco’” ( in Western Folklore magazine, vol. 26, no. 3, July 1967), Tamony flags possible connections to
(a) El Fresco, the name he says Mexicans (including Mexican miners) gave to the city they saw as a “refreshing, cool” respite from the heat of the Sierra foothills, and even to
(b) the Old English frip-socn, meaning “refuge of peace” or “place of sanctuary” — leading Tamony to suggest that “Frisco may be age-old in the vocabulary of northern and English-speaking seamen, available for application to havens such as the Bay of San Francisco.” 
[end typewriter fx]
I’m afraid I can find no credence in Tamony’s assessments. John Lumea agreed. He wrote:
[typewriter fx]
It wasn’t until after the mid 1840s that English-speaking settlers started arriving in significant numbers to the place called Yerba Buena and renamed “San Francisco” in January 1847. But “Frisco” was appearing in Sacramento newspaper accounts of San Francisco by early 1850. El Fresco would need to have been the standard Mexican usage in the late 1840s, and — during these same years — there would need to have been a lot of Mexican–English cross-pollination around El Fresco, in order to forge an Americanization of El Fresco to “Frisco” in such a short period of time.
As to Tamony’s favored theory from Old English: What he is referring to is “frisco” as a kind of generic term for “safe harbor.” There doesn’t appear to be any evidence that English-speaking 49ers brought such a word with them — or that they applied it to San Francisco.
[end typewriter fx]
So there we have it. Two fables that have been weaponized by the anti-Frisco fanatics for decades finally laid to rest.
I’ll admit, after a lifetime of indoctrination, I still find it hard to use the term Frisco, although it has gotten a lot easier since I began researching, writing, and producing this podcast. I enjoy teasing my anti-Frisco friends about it.
[intermezzo]
From where did “Frisco” come? Lumea goes on in great detail about its genesis and usage in great detail in his aforementioned article, “Charting A Path To Frisco.”
He concludes with these two paragraphs:
[typewriter fx]
Perhaps “Frisco” as a name for “San Francisco” came together as a marriage of the two meanings of the word “frisco” that had currency in the 16th and 17th centuries — as (a) a word dance, a word “caper,” a word play (b) inspired by fondness for San Francisco and its promise and leading to a new, jaunty, fond name. 
We know that many of the sailors, argonauts, writers, and journalists who arrived and worked in Gold Rush California were people full of piss, vinegar, and wry attitude who had their ears tuned to the music of words that struck them as fun — and funny.  
[end typewriter fx]
Fun and funny. 
That is Frisco in a nutshell. This profoundly weird city has always been fun, which is why it has been so beloved by people around the world over the course of its history. 
Maybe people don’t like the Frisco because it reminds them of what the city used to be before, as I wrote in my memoir, The Rise and Fall of the HoneyBun Empire, “the cool grey city of love was crushed as flat as a gluten-free pancake between money and political correctness.”
My journalist and dedicated mandolinist friend Lynn Ludlow, who died this past year at the age of 92, wrote often about California history. He summed up, on the Cosmopolitan Review website, the ongoing kerfuffle thusly:
[typewriter fx]
CALL it Frisco.  Whenever Korwin Piotrowski contemplates a trip from the diggings, he says he is going to Frisco. Nobody corrects him. From the Gold Country to the Golden Gate, San Francisco’s alternate name in the 1850s is uncontroversial among miners, prospectors, farmers, gamblers, and sailors – especially sailors.
The taboo comes later.
“Frisco” springs from an old Icelandic-to-Middle English term for safe harbor, according to the late Peter Tamony.  Because San Francisco Bay is just such a haven, sailors called it Frisco Bay. When the boring pueblo of Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco, the boomtown by the Bay soon became Frisco – and frisky. In a few short years the antique word morphed into a jolly synonym for the non-Victorian pleasures of the Barbary Coast.
As if banning a name might somehow restore virtue to Terrific Street (the salt-water term for bawdy Pacific Street), the F-word is soon denigrated as low-class slang. It vanishes from the parlors of the newly minted nabobs of Rincon Hill, the cotillions of their hoop-skirted daughters, and the salons of their bejeweled wives. (Before their husbands struck it rich, many a matronly language snob had been a boarding house widow or a laundress with ambition.)
They prevail. More than a century later, Frisco is an unmentionable epithet in its home town.
The prohibition would have surprised Korwin in the era of sail. A frisco was then a sheltered inlet. In a safe place where sailors scrape encrusted barnacles from the hull, a wooden ship could be repaired, repainted, and revamped. Old maps show a Frisco River on the Ivory Coast of west Africa and a long-forgotten port of Frisco in North Carolina. (The booming Texas city of Frisco was born as a whistlestop on the old St. Louis-San Francisco Railroad.)
The city’s lingo police, oblivious to the annals of slang, mistakenly condemn Frisco as a verbal sin or, in the jargon of etymology, a syncope. That scholarly term applies to ugly clippings, or contractions, such as Sacto, San Berdoo, Narlins, Looville, or (yuk) San Fran. It doesn’t apply to Frisco.
Anti-Frisco activists have been heard to assert that the persecuted little word is the diminutive of Francisco. If that were the case, Herb Caen would have told his readers, “Don’t call it Pancho.”
The war on Frisco didn’t start with Caen, but the newspaper columnist engraved the taboo on the citizenry’s mindset with the title of his book in 1953, Don’t Call It Frisco. He later changed his mind, but it was too late. No teacher, politician, or newscaster since then has ever been heard to say “Frisco,” at least not in public. If an unwitting tourist should blurt the word, she is more to be pitied than censored.
That was now; this is then: On one of Korwin’s letters, he writes his return address as “San Frisco.”
Let’s not go there.
[end typewriter fx]
Thank you, Lynn, for spelling it out, the whole thing.
[intermezzo]
I’m going to give one of the most legendary San Franciscans of all time, Sally Stanford, the final word on Frisco. 
Sally wrote, in her memoir, “The Lady of the House,”
[typewriter fx]
Fascinated by what they saw in our town on their way to Guadalcanal and Okinawa, thousands of young servicemen returned to Paducah, Peoria, and Pocatello, packed up their wives and goods, and headed back to the Golden Gate town to stay. They also packed up and brought their Midwest or down East small-town standards too, the jerks. As soon as they had established enough residence to enable them to vote, they voted like the provincials they were for purity and started the destruction of the spirit of the colorful city that had fascinated them.
These are the people who claim that some of us debase ourselves by calling the town "Frisco." The real San Franciscans from Charles Cora to Fog Horn Murphy have never called it anything but Frisco.
[end typewriter fx]
Be sure to listen to the prior “Call It Frisco” episodes for the fascinating stories of Charles Cora and Fog Horn Murphy.
I’m sure I’ll keep hearing about it, my decision to call it Frisco, The Secret History. I will continue to urge, most likely to no avail, the outraged protectors of propriety to listen to this episode, along with the first and second ones.
This should be my final episode on the Frisco question. I hope so. 
In closing, I will simply rephrase Sally’s erudite declamation: 
[trumpet blast]
Real San Franciscans have never called it anything but Frisco.
[intermezzo]
The Secret History of Frisco is ostensibly a listener supported podcast. Main episodes will always be free. Our website is www.friscothesecrethistory.com. Please join us on Patreon at www.Patreon.com/Frisco. Visit the website for show notes, references, and bibliographies. Please take advantage of our free membership option on Patreon. Paid tier members, starting at as little as $1 a month, will receive ad-free and bonus episodes and other perks of membership.
If you enjoy the podcast, please tell your friends about it, especially those who enjoy San Francisco or true crime history. Word of mouth is the absolute best means of promotion for any creative endeavor in this world of algorithms and the ceaseless barrage of ads, notifications, and appeals on every digital platform. If you are aware of some particular aspect of San Francisco history in the thirties and forties you would like me to research, or have a story to tell, please let me know.
Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, please get a little crazy and call it Frisco.