San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Half century of service proves devotion to S.F. clear as a bell
I was early for a dental appointment at 450 Sutter St. the other morning and took a stroll around Union Square. The streets were empty, as they have been since the pandemic started nearly a year ago. I missed the crowds and the sounds of the city — but I did notice the slap and rattle of the steel cable that normally pulls the cable cars along Powell Street. Muni must have been exercising the cable machinery, the way you run the engine of a laidup automobile once in a while to make sure it still works.
There were no cable cars on the street, just the sound of the moving cable. It was a bit eerie, the soundtrack of a city that seems to be in hibernation.
The sound reminded me of Carl Payne, when both of us were a little younger and I rode the Hyde Street cable car from Russian Hill downtown to work every day. He was a cable car operator. I was regular passenger. I was covering public transportation then, so I got to know him. After a while, he and I went our separate ways. He retired from the cable cars and became a police officer and then a park ranger; I went on to cover other things.
Payne worked for the city for 50 years. I think he’s one of those people who make San Francisco special. So I was sorry to hear from a friend that Payne is not doing well. He has an aggressive form of cancer and has been in and out of the hospital. “I’m going to fight this stuff,” he told me. “I am not going to give up.”
That’s typical of him. He’s had a love affair with San Francisco for nearly a lifetime, and love has its rough spots sometimes. This is one of them.
When I first knew him, the cable cars were in the news. Years of deferred maintenance had taken their toll, and the system was falling apart. Dianne Feinstein, then the mayor, got the federal government to put up 80% of the $60 million it cost to rebuild the entire system. The rest would have to come from the private sector. She appointed a highpowered committee to raise the money. So Payne became the public face of the cable cars. He had the ingredients: He was a veteran gripman who knew the system. He was personable, quick with a quip and good with the media. “I have the gift of gab,” he said once. “I like people.”
Tourists loved him. He was “a sort of ringmaster of his own thrilling road show,” People magazine once said of him. He could make the brass onenote cable car bell sound like a musical instrument. He won the annual bellringing contest a record 10 times. Once, at a civic luncheon, I heard him accompany Tony Bennett in a singandclang rendition of “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”
He also played the cable car bell at the San Francisco 49ers’ first Super Bowl and went on a world tour as an ambassador for the city. “I love this place and want others to love it too,” he said.
But cable cars were not his first love. He was born in Pittsburgh, joined the Marines and served as a military policeman. “It’s in my blood,” he said.
He was discharged in San Francisco in 1962. “I thought I’d stay a little while and look around. I thought I’d stay for a few days,” he told me. “Maybe a little longer. But once the city gets its hooks into you, that’s it.”
He took civil service tests and was ready to go to work for the post office when the Municipal Railway called. He drove buses for a while, the 30Stockton mostly, then transferred to the cable cars. “I liked to work with people, liked outdoor work. I loved it,” he said.
But he always had police work in mind. He noticed that pickpockets worked the crowded cable cars, and he kept an eye out. He carried handcuffs, would grab a suspect and call the police. He once said he caught 300 pickpockets. Other cable car people called him “Deputy Dawg.”
He took the civil service test for police officer, passed and was on the list. But he got a call from headquarters. “They said, ‘You just turned 36. You’re not eligible.’ ” Then they hung up. Click.
The age limit was 35 then. So it was a technicality. But Payne, who is Black, thought it was more than that. “Back then, it was who you knew and who you were related to.”
Times changed; there was a lawsuit, a courtenforced consent decree, and the rules changed. Payne applied again, left Muni service after 29 years, and was sworn in as a police officer. He was 50 years old when he entered the police academy, San Francisco’s oldest rookie.
He served for nearly 25 years as a street cop. He saw the job as “Mostly helping people,” he said. “If something happened, I would try to listen to people, to hear what they had to say ... even the crazies. I’d hear them out.”
Were there a lot of crazies?
“Yes.” He said softly. His beat in the end was Union Square, right on the cable car line.
It’s tough being a street cop when you are over 70, so he switched to being a ranger in Golden Gate Park.
He is 80 now. “God has been good to me,” he said. “I’m not giving up. Never give up. I learned that my first day in the Marine Corps.”