Fung, whose local reputation as "the world's rudest waiter" was due in no small part to Caen, who lamented his death in 1984: Although Caen relied on "an army of reliable tipsters," all items were fact-checked. Now and then an item (usually a joke or pun) was credited to a mysterious "Strange de Jim," whose first contribution ("Since I didn't believe in reincarnation in any of my other lives, why should I have to believe in it in this one?") appeared in 1972. Sometimes suspected to be a Caen alter ego, de Jim (whose letters bore no return address, and who met Caen only onceby chance) was revealed after Caen's death to be a Castro District writer who, despite several coy interviews with the press, remains publicly anonymous. Caen took special pleasure in "seeing what he could sneak by his editorshis 'naughties, such as this item about a shopper looking for a Barbie doll: Does Barbie come with Ken?' he asked the perky saleswoman. 'Actually no,' she answered slyly. 'Barbie comes with G.I. Joeshe fakes it with Ken. On Sundays, current items were set aside in favor of "Mr. San Francisco's" reflections on his unconditional love for his adopted city, musing on (for example): An occasional column was given over to serious matters, such as a May 1, 1960, piece on the upcoming execution of Caryl Chessman, which included Caen's recollection of witnessing a hanging as a young reporter: On December 12, 1960, Caen wrote: Powers received almost a hundred cards, most from the San Francisco Bay Area. A collection of essays, Baghdad-by-the-Bay (a term he'd coined to reflect San Francisco's exotic multiculturalism) was published in 1949, and Don't Call It Friscoafter a local judge's 1918 rebuke to an out-of-town petitioner ("No one refers to San Francisco by that title except people from Los Angeles")appeared in 1953. The Cable Car and the Dragon, a children's picture book, was published in 1972. In 1993, he told an interviewer that he declined to retire because "my name wouldn't be in the paper and I wouldn't know if I was dead or alive," adding that his obituary would be his last column: "It will trail off at the end, where I fall face down on the old Royal with my nose on the 'I' key." Honors In April 1996 Caen received a special Pulitzer Prize (which he called his Pullet Surprise) for "extraordinary