This expressman was a regular San Franciscan. And there is such a thing,
you know, as a regular San Franciscan. He is a native son and more. His
speech betrays him. He calls a “car” a “cahh,” and when he’s surprised
he says: “Yeah”! He has a permanent laugh in his eyes, and the only
thing he gets mad about is prohibition. But the particular thing that I
started to say of him is that money is to him a thing to spend. Money is
an incident to life, that’s all.
He said it would be a “dollar, six-bits,” and I was sorry, but I only
had a ten-dollar bill. When I said that, he just reached out and took
it from me, and said he’d get it changed, and disappeared. Now, the
significant thing, and the one that made him a regular San Franciscan,
was that he never dreamed that I would doubt his honesty in returning
with the change. And I didn’t. It was this last that surprised me. If it
had been in New York--I gasp--if it had been in New York, no expressman
would have dared do such a thing because no one would have trusted him,
and if they had been so hick as to trust him, the expressman would have
had no respect for himself if he himself were so hick as to return with
the change.
I never shall forget the shock of seeing a pile of newspapers in front
of a drug store, the day I landed in San Francisco, where men took their
morning paper and threw down a nickel, and even made change for a dime.
Right out on the pavement--a lot of nickels lying loose and no one
paying any attention. Why, in New York--well, it couldn’t be done in New
York, that’s all.
It’s not because San Francisco is not metropolitan. For San Francisco
is essentially a city just as Los Angeles will always be a terribly big
country village. It’s not at all a matter of population. In Connecticut,
we always said that Bridgeport was a city, and New Haven which was
larger, was not. It’s a bing, and a zip, and a tra-la-la-lah, that makes
one city a city and another not. I can explain it no other way.
But with all its cityfiedness, there is a strange lack of suspicion, a
free and easy attitude toward mere physical money, that one finds in
no other large city except San Francisco. In the stores the clerks will
say: “Shall I put it in a sack?” and you answer just as they hoped you
would: “Oh, no, I’ll slip it right in my bag.” In New York as soon as
one did that she’d be nabbed on the way out for a shoplifter.
Perhaps the constant use of silver money has had something to do with
the matter. Paper money can be tucked away. Silver is more spendable,
everyone knows that. Break a five-dollar bill into “iron men,” and
it’s gone, gone. And yet it can’t be the use of silver money alone that
accounts for it. Reno has silver money, and yet there is little of the
old, free Western spirit left in Reno.
No, it’s something to do with San Francisco where suspicion doesn’t yet
grip the hearts of men and where money is made to spend.
San Francisco, the last stand of the old, free West.