Stanton Delaplane (1907-1988) - 22 April 1988

This has been one of those weeks in which it’s hard to tell whether the hissing sounds coming from the pots on the stove indicate that things are simmering or coming to the boil.

By the time you hear these words you may know but I am far away and talking too soon to take a risk, so I’m not going to talk about the Persian Gulf or Afghanistan or the latest acts of terrorism or even about the New York state presidential primary, which before it happened was said to be critical or decisive to the Democrats' choice of a leader.

Well maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. Let’s wait a week and see if there’s a sensible consensus on who did what to whom. At the moment there is a far more agreeable topic that beckons. Every city has – or used to have, before the onslaught of the internal combustion engine on mass transport – every city used to have its own peculiar sounds.

To this day the Chicago police have a very strange sort of whistle like a choir boy in panic which they blow at certain dense intersections when the traffic light goes from red to green, but in one city there are two sounds which by the dawn’s early light tell you that you are nowhere but San Francisco.

One is the melancholy fog horn that sounds far off where the Golden Gate Bridge divides the icy currents of the bay from the treacherous waters of the Pacific and the other is the rhythmical clicketty-clack of the cable cars that are drawn up the mountainous streets and controlled on the downhill ride by continuously moving cables sunk in slots beneath the streets.

At every intersection uphill and down the motorman pulls on a cord before he releases the brake. He plays always the same one note rhythm, dum-ti-ta-tum tum, tum tum. Now for generations this rhythm has been applied to not only the song of the cable cars but to a knock on any door as “shave and a hair cut two bits” – two bits is the slang term for a quarter of a dollar, 25 cents.

The first morning that I was back here in San Francisco the ding-dong of the cable cars carried a quite new overtone, a sound at once sad and funny, for a reason I’m about to tell you. At breakfast the first day I opened the morning paper and folded it to the place where I expected to read the daily column of a favourite journalist, a man named Stanton Delaplane.

His column was called Postcard and it got the name from the pieces he filed from all over the world. For six months of every year he was away from this city in familiar tourist haunts, Paris, Rome, New Delhi, but just as often in unpronounceable hideaway places in which you’d expect no tourist ever to appear. The nasty shock last Tuesday morning was that he had suddenly gone to that bourn from which no traveller returns.

A week ago a newspaper friend saw him in his favourite saloon, cradling a straight-up martini and watching the cigarette smoke wreath around his bespectacled grin. His face was long and gaunt but chuckly, the face of a favourite uncle got up unsuccessfully as Dracula. Last Monday he died.

My first feeling was one of annoyance. Stanton Delaplane was so much a regular ingredient of breakfast that I had the impulse to call the waiter back to check the order. The second feeling was one of simple shock. Stanton Delaplane wrote like a young and happy and wholly successful pupil of Hemingway. He rarely wrote sentences of more than six or seven words and he could go weeks without calling on an adjective.

His peculiar magic, which I often probed into and never discovered, was to keep these bare sentences rollicking along in the most effortless way, running as clean as spring water over the bed of a brook. He could not help being an entertaining writer and that is a gift that very few writers indeed can legitimately claim from the double-domed philosophers to the light-weight journalists.

The second shock, therefore was his age. His prose was so easy and high-stepping that I’d always assumed he was in his '40s, still recording as in a casual diary the perversities of his adored children and the odd sights and sounds of foreign places newly discovered. He was 80 when last week he wrote his last column, but why should the ding-dong of the cable cars last Tuesday morning sound like a tocsin?

Because I first spotted his talent, but not his name, one hilarious morning during the founding conference of the United Nations here in the spring of 1945. Covering that nine-week construction job was as strenuous as anything I’ve ever done in the newspaper years.

Now the local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, rallied a team of – I don’t know ten, a dozen, more perhaps – good reporters and almost choked the paper with reams and reams of able but inevitably tedious reporting of the care and feeding of the infant UN bodies in their various incubators. Nothing else seemed to be happening anywhere in the world, though there was you may recall a continuing disturbance going on in Europe and the Pacific known as the Second World War.

One morning, however, a story appeared on the front page that had nothing to do with the United Nations but a story so gaudy, so lunatic and incredible that ll sorts of visiting magnificos, prime ministers, generals, sheiks, presidents, secretaries of state, rajahs almost forgot for a day or two why they were there.

It was a story about a conductor, a motorman on a cable car. Stanton Delaplane, I now know, was the one who dug it out. The motorman’s name was Van Wies, Francis Van Wies, a mild, competent worker familiar for years to the people who regularly took his run. No doubt they, if they ever thought about him at all, a tidy meek little husband whose kicks came from the expert tugs with which he sounded the “Shave and a haircut two bits”.

Well Delaplane discovered that Mr Van Wies had had for, I think, at least eighteen months, not one wife but three – one in San Francisco, one across the bay in Berkeley, one down the peninsula somewhere, all content, each considering herself his one and only helpmeet and light of love.

Naturally what fascinated all the high-toned statesmen and the low browed journalists was how the mild Mr Van Wies managed it. Curiosity gave way to open admiration when it was disclosed that he had somehow invented three lives and, to the satisfaction of each of his wives, lived them out. He had, as you can imagine, a pretty agile schedule.

To one wife he was a night worker – so he was, he was busy with wife number two. To another he had, he said, an 8am to noon job which allowed him to spend some of the afternoons with number three. What he was to number three, except a punctual afternoon lover, I don’t know.

Anyway for close on two years he juggled his calendar with apparent satisfaction to one and all. At some point, wife number two, say, saw him tugging his cord on his cable car. It was the end of a beautiful triple play. He was arrested and charged with bigamy. Delaplane dubbed him, to the delight of the delegations, "The ding-dong daddy of the D-car line".

Well there were, during that joyful honeymoon – of the United Nations, that is – other stories that stay with us. There was an earthquake, nothing lethal but brisk enough to jolt some of us from our beds and provide the distinguished delegates with the boast that they had been present at a, if not the, San Francisco earthquake. And there were stories that never made the front pages, or indeed any pages at all.

I remember an Arab prince who took a fancy to one of the Chinese lift girls at the Fairmont Hotel. He thought she would make an exquisite addition to his harem. Having dealt for so long with the British, an Arab tended to check first in those days with the British. The prince approached Mr Anthony Eden. He suggested $10,000 as a reasonable price. Mr Eden thought it was a subject for the American delegation.

So the prince went off to the chief American delegate, Secretary of State Stettinius. He repeated his offer. Mr Stettinius went into shock. “Impossible!” “Well then, how about twenty thousand?” “No no no,” said Mr Stettinius, “You don’t understand. She’s a free person. She’s an American and therefore eligible for the Presidency of the United States.”

The prince shrugged and went away. Two or three nights later he was the host at a reception to which the visiting press, not all 600, were invited and I remember coming into the suite and seeing a lamb the size of a cow turning on a spit in the living room – amazing, these Arabian customs. The prince behaved with impeccable courtesy but he was still dazzled, still puzzled, by the strange customs of the west.

But down the years I’d run into old UN hands now, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, high-muck-a-mucks of several nations and they would say, “Whatever happened to the ding dong daddy?”.

Well, when he landed in jail and was charged with bigamy – trigamy I guess – two more wives showed up and several days later Stanton Delaplane was able to write the marvellous lead sentence, “The count at midnight on Francis Van Wies – hold on for the curve – was eleven”.

Well, he got out after two years and married again and again and again, but serially this time. He died in 1963 at the age of 73. By his bedside was his 81-year-old ever-loving wife, number eighteen.

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