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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, May 19, 2002

COMMENTARY
Bay Area offers us a different perspective

By John Griffin

    "They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

— Andy Warhol

I was at Goro Arakawa's 80th birthday party in Waipahu recently when it struck me why many of us Hawai'i people still often go to San Francisco and the Bay Area.

In a word, the reason is perspective.

Yes, I know. It's a stretch from sitting there in a sea of palaka-clad folks at the Okinawan Cultural Center to salute the Leeward O'ahu merchant prince and community guru to thinking back to a few days earlier and sipping stingers at the

Top of the Mark in memory of visits there long ago.

But that's the point. Andy Warhol was right. And, in Hawai'i, more than many other places, we live in different island eras, and also, when we travel abroad, in different cultural time zones that may be tied to our past. Thus time binds us and expands us in many ways.

Of course, we don't usually go consciously to the Bay Area to chase nostalgia. After all, we find there some of the world's innovative food, much beauty, the joys of the wine and cheese country, the old and new of Berkeley, the Giants playing in smashing Pac Bell Park, family and friends, and the kind of shopping that can infect even resistant males.

Still, I think many people, especially those who have lived there or long visited, go back over years and find themselves pondering the past and the changes in the city and their lives. San Francisco lends itself to that, and in Hawai'i's case the ties go back across two centuries.

Sure, The City, as they call it in the Bay Area (and almost never "Frisco"), has changed. That's for the better in places like the waterfront and South of Market, for the worse in terms of homelessness (upward of 14,000), panhandling, street litter downtown, and impact of the dot-com debacle. Then, as in Hawai'i, came the 9/11 impact on tourism and the struggle back.

But San Francisco, with its rich history of dramatic ups and downs, scoundrels, immigrants and empire-builders, and its social turmoil, still stands as a city of beauty and excitement, a kind of American Paris, something unique.

It was what's called a maritime city, one where much of it was built and initially populated with what came via the ocean (like Sydney, Australia, and Vancouver, British Columbia) instead of over land. That has helped make its special culture. So has its limited size, smaller than Honolulu with only 776,000 people on land bounded on three sides by bay and ocean. It's still a kind of island in a region of 7 million.

My perspective this time was helped by arriving amid San Francisco's weeklong observance in honor of Herb Caen, the San Francisco Chronicle columnist who died five years ago. The Chronicle ran some of his old columns as part of the festivities.

Herb was master of the three-dot chitchat format and poetic essays celebrating the city over six decades. But more important (and unusual for a journalist), he became an institution who defined — some would say invented — the evolving City By The Bay in far more depth than Tony Bennett's stirring song.

It also helped that our visiting group included two writers who, aside from being fans of the dreaded L.A. Dodgers, have from time to time left parts of their hearts and wallets in San Francisco.

Tom Chapman, who in recent years sold his Asia in-flight magazine empire to Time Warner and moved to Hawai'i, lived in The City and Bay Area in the excitement of the early 1960s. He found himself visiting old haunts, as well as every bookstore he could find. At the end, he commented on the play of memories and change:

"Now when I return, I wonder if in fact the city still appears before my eyes in the descriptions and nuances of other writers, filled with characters and charm. It always seemed an easy place of which to remember the good times and ignore the bad. ...

"So why do I think, so fondly and with absolute clarity, of a place in which I was usually impoverished? ... It must be the drama I concocted for myself. ... One thing seems sure. San Francisco never seems as I once knew it. But what place does?"

Author and Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who knew the city as a correspondent for The Washington Post and other papers, came at it from my working angle. He suggested I could write columns on how San Francisco is now even more accessible for tourists, how Oakland under liberal Mayor Jerry Brown, California's "Governor Moonbeam" in an earlier incarnation, has become an affordable haven for businesses, and on the fallout from the dot-bomb meltdown.

Next trip, we'll get to that. ...

In between offering his acknowledged expertise on politics, sports and California wines, Santa Barbara resident Cannon came up with a quote from British historian C.V. Wedgwood that seemed to fit our search among memories and realities:

"History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time."

So I was pondering things like that as almost 400 of us were there on the edge of old Waipahu and its modern neighbors honoring Goro — and by extension, the evolving history of the old plantation culture.

It was a moment from the past, saluting the future, just as our San Francisco visit was a few days of enjoying the present looking to the past.

It would probably be inaccurate to say I would rather live in Waipahu than anywhere in the Bay Area. But I did find myself thinking how much I like living in Hawai'i, or more specifically Kaimuki (which, with neighboring Palolo some might call "Waipahu East"), and being invited out to "the country" to salute friend Goro.

That, plus going to the Bay Area just before that to think about my wilder youth and a present that includes Asian-Latino-Irish grandchildren who live there as part of a changing California.

It's called living history forward.

John Griffin is a frequent contributor to and former editor of The Advertiser's editorial pages.