Stanton Delaplane

Stanton Hill ("Stan") Delaplane (12 October 1907 – 18 April 1988) was an American travel writer, credited with introducing Irish coffee to the United States. Called "last of the old irreplaceables" by fellow-columnist Herb Caen, he worked for the San Francisco Chronicle for 53 years, winning a Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1942.

Early life Delaplane was born in Chicago, Illinois, and attended high school there and in Santa Barbara and Monterey, California.

Career Delaplane's career as a journalist began as a writer for Apéritif Magazine from 1933 to 1936, when he joined the San Francisco Chronicle as a reporter He also won National Headliner Awards in 1946 and 1959. the two spent hours perfecting the Irish method for floating the cream on top of the coffee, reportedly to the point where Delaplane almost passed out on the cable car tracks outside.

Postcards Beginning in 1953 Delaplane published a syndicated humorous travel column called "Postcards". About his writing style, British commentator Alistair Cooke wrote, "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."

Ding dong daddy

Delaplane's second Headliner award was for a semi-fictionalized account of Francis Van Wie, a Muni conductor arrested for bigamy for keeping 18 wives. The story inspired the American swing revival band the Cherry Popping Daddies to write a new song about Van Wie, "Ding-Dong Daddy of the D Car Line",

Delaplane's final column ran the day he died, and was a reminiscence of old days in North Beach.

Published works