Russell Baker’s Birthday

A Real Good Ol' Boy

Today, Mr. Baker is 91 years old and will have lived 33, 238 days. I know these things because I have an internet connection. He and I grew up in neighboring states, but we were not particularly close; he lived in the far west of Virginia while I resided on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and he is somewhat older than I. I learned it was his birthday because I thought I would write something about him and figured I had better look him up.

Mr. Baker was a writer and journalist who wrote for many years for the New York Times and that is how I came to know him. You are likely more serious and know that he wrote also for the New York Review of Books and was the host of the PBS show, “Masterpiece Theatre”. When he was offered the armchair he thought it was a joke and was smart enough to realize that he did not want to replace the well-respected and long-tenured Alistair Cooke, but rather the guy who replaced the guy who succeeded Mr. Cooke. In any case, he took the job and I am sure you remember him and, like me, wish him well.

I am doing this simply because I wish to introduce you to something he wrote. It will come at the conclusion of this post after a bit of filler.

He began the “Observer” column for the New York Times in 1962 and the last one appeared on Christmas Day in 1998. It bore the title “A Few Words at the End” and in it he expresses his love for newspapers, a sentiment that seems to be rapidly waning among others. The titles of his columns were often good, as you will see, as were most of his sentences. For example, in the column “Up There in High Dudgeon”, we learn the answer to the frequently raised question of “Why we don’t like lawyers?” - Because “lawyers complicate what is simple and complexify what is merely complicated.”

Here are three samples for you. This one indicates how much things have changed with regards to one formerly august American institution.

“An Ozark Lawyer Studies Wall Street”, March 6, 1955.

   “ If your dream of a Southern Senator is a set of leather lungs wrapped in a frock coat and topped with a silvery mane, J. William Fulbright will come as a gentle awakening. The junior senator from Arkansas, who heads up Congress’ first stock market study in a generation, will yield nothing in polish, shrewdness, wit or intelligence to the men of Wall Street. Spiritually he is as remote from Senator Claghorn as Sir Anthony Eden is from Casey Stengel. Intellectually -- and that is how most people think of him first -- he enriches the Senate with the humanized perspective inherited from his Oxford education.”

This one shows how relevant his writing still can be although it is only now that we are witnessing the “ultimate result”. It was widely syndicated in 1987.

“Reagan the Ultimate Result of TV Game Show Presidency,” March 12, 1987.

     “Television news is being wiped out by game shows. It doesn't mean the audience of the United States is getting dumber. It just means Americans don't look to TV for the serious stuff any more, just for light entertainment.

     This is television as foreseen by Fred Allen - "chewing gum for the eyes" - and it explains why the United States is having this run of inadequate presidents. Presidential politics turned into television long ago, television turned into light entertainment and, inevitably, presidents turned into light entertainers.

We now see the ultimate fruit of the process in poor, bewildered Ronald Reagan , who is light entertainment from toe to pompadour. He is baffled by all the hostility since the discovery that he wasn't much good at governing.

It will probably become even harder to get well-qualified people elected president unless the business of nominating candidates is taken away from television. It is this monstrous process - starting with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary - that provides the entertainment format for turning an election into a game show.

With the connivance of the press, which ought to know better, television uses these two utterly inconsequential events to create an entire season of game shows.”

Now this last one illustrates again his talent for titles and how little things have changed as well as Baker’s prescience. It is his response when he was deluged with hate mail after he wrote positively about Senator Edward Kennedy and negatively about the N.R.A.

“Sass With Bile,” July 13, 1991:

“One knows that barrels of angry letters will be the punishment for derogatory remarks about the N.R.A. Intemperate mail from supporters of the gun lobby is so inevitable that I rarely beat this drum.” He then notes that: “Guns are out of control in this country, wanton murder is likely to be our lot for decades to come and, like it or not, there isn’t much anybody can do about it.” He concludes:
“I must go back to writing sweeter stuff about how long to boil a three-minute egg and what good-hearted people we Americans are.”

For such material he received a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1979. When his friendly rival (Art Buchwald, remember him?) reported this ‘bad news’ he added that he had heard that Erma Bombeck (remember her?), who was flying at the time, was so upset she ate the airline food. I guess some things have changed; at least the airlines offered food back then.


He also received another Pulitzer in 1983, this one for his autobiography, Growing Up. This is the opening paragraph from that work and the real purpose behind this post; the purpose being simply to present it to you. If you ever see a contest calling for “The Best Opening Paragraph” you can submit it on my (and Mr. Russell’s) behalf:

“At the age of eighty my mother had her last bad fall, and after that her mind wandered free through time. Some days she went to weddings and funerals that had taken place a half a century earlier. On others she presided over family dinners cooked on Sunday afternoons for children who were now gray with age. Through all of this she lay in bed but moved across time, traveling among the dead decades with a speed and ease beyond the gift of physical science.

“Where’s Russell?” she asked one day when I came to visit at the nursing home.

“I’m Russell,” I said.

She gazed at this improbably overgrown figure out of an inconceivable future and promptly dismissed it.

“Russell’s only this big,” she said, holding her hand palm down, two feet from the floor. That day she was a young country wife with chickens in the backyard and a view of hazy blue Virginia mountains behind the apple orchard, and I was a stranger old enough to be her father.”

Over 340 pages later he returns to that room and presents another  moving description, but additional poignant passages are found throughout the book. Here is one more sample:
“On a broiling afternoon when the men were away at work and all the women napped, I moved through majestic depths of silences, silences so immense I could hear the corn growing. Under these silences there was an orchestra of natural music playing music no city child would ever hear. A certain cackle from the henhouse meant we had gained an egg. The creak of a porch swing told of a momentary breeze blowing across my grandmother’s yard. Moving past Liz Virt’s barn as quietly as an Indian, I could hear the swish of a horse’s tail and knew the horseflies were out in strength. As I tiptoed along a mossy bank to surprise a frog, a faint splash told me the quarry had spotted me and slipped into the stream. Wandering among the sleeping houses, I learned that tin roofs crackle under the power of the sun, and when I tired and came back to my grandmother’s house, I padded into her dark cool living room, lay flat on the floor, and listened to the hypnotic beat of her pendulum clock on the wall ticking the meaningless hours away.”

I hope you have enjoyed his work and that he has a fine day.