Russell Baker (August 14, 1925 - Jan. 21, 2019)

   


    You youngsters will find it hard to believe that in the last century there used to be many newspapers and it was usually fun reading them. Columnists could be both funny and harshly critical and one of them, Russell Baker, wrote a "casual column without anything urgent to tell humanity." It has just been reported that Mr. Baker died at the age of 93. You should read him and you still can. The university close by has several of his books and the London Public Library has a few, including So This is Depravity, a title which should attract you.

Sources: 

  When Mr. Baker turned 91 a few years back, I did a post about him and since it contains some of his writing you should read it: Russell Baker's Birthday.

  For obituaries see: 

"Russell Baker, Droll Columnist and Memoirist Who Twice Won Pulitzer, Dies at 93," Jon Thurber, Washington Post, Jan. 22, 2019

   The obituarist offers this sample from a column in which there was failure to pass legislation that would have put a warning label on cars:

“Put yourself in the Congressman’s shoes,” Mr. Baker wrote. “One of these days he is going to be put out of office. Defeated, old, tired, 120,000 miles on his smile and two pistons cracked in his best joke. They’re going to put him out on the used-Congressman lot. Does he want to have a sticker on him stating that he gets only eight miles on a gallon of bourbon? That his rip-roaring anti-Communist speech hasn’t had an overhaul since 1969? That his generator is so decomposed it hasn’t sparked a fresh thought in fifteen years?”

" Russell Baker, Pulitzer-Winning Times Columnist and Humorist, Dies at 93," Robert D. McFadden, New York Times, Jan. 22, 2019.

“What Baker does,” Ronald Steel wrote in Geo magazine in 1983, “is punch holes in vast bubbles of pretension, humanize the abstract and connect the present with what one predecessor, Walter Lippmann, once described as the ‘longer past and the larger future.’”

His last column, “A Few Words at the End,” on Christmas, “a day on which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow,” spoke of his love affair with newspapers."

 Back in the last century there were also many more reporters and, believe it or not, they had good and enjoyable jobs. Baker notes:

“Thanks to newspapers,” he wrote, “I have made a four-hour visit to Afghanistan, have seen the Taj Mahal by moonlight, breakfasted at dawn on lamb and couscous while sitting by the marble pool of a Moorish palace in Morocco and once picked up a persistent family of fleas in the Balkans.”