If you had occasion to dine at Sam’s Grill a couple of weeks ago, perhaps you noticed at the bottom of the menu, just to the right of the warning that parties of eight or more are subject to a 20% autogratuity, a cheery proclamation: “Congratulations Carl Nolte on 65 years with the SF Chronicle.” Loyal readers of the Chron will know what was unsaid — that on June 13, after 65 years to the very day he started at the paper, Carl retired.
“Hold on, hold on,” Carl would interject right about now. “I don’t like the word ‘retirement.’” Too final, too “next stop, Colma.” What would he prefer I write? “Say that I’m going in a different direction,” he told me over martinis at the Big Four last week.
Like many of you, I read Carl’s column regularly, and we had people in common, as folks with San Francisco roots often do. He’d overlapped with my father at USF in the ‘50s and had taken over as the school paper’s sports editor from my dad’s best pal, John Murray, during the electrifying Bill Russell years, when the basketball team was nigh unbeatable. But we’d never met in person, and the occasion of his retirement — excuse me, mid-career pivot — seemed as good a reason as any…