Fittingly, the NYT advance obit that has been sitting in the morgue awaiting a trip up the elevator is written by Robert D. McFadden, a newspaper man who was a contemporary of Baker's. McFadden is a youngish 81, and still works the advance obit desk at the NYT. They both won Pulitzers for their newspaper work. Baker winning a second one for Biography. The print obit is a NYT 21-gun salute at Arlington: full page, photos, five columns.
Mr. McFadden describes Mr. Baker as "lanky and laconic" and compared him to the Jimmy Stewart reporter character in 'Call Northside 777' in which the dogged work of the reporter and newsroom photoengravers help free an innocent man from prison.
Looking through the many Twitter postings at #russellbaker and looking at some of the photos and watching and re-watching some video I can't help but see him as resembling the Ralph Waite father character in 'The Waltons.' Avuncular, soft-spoken, and both from Virginia. To me, they look alike.
My own exposure to Mr. Baker's writing occurred when I was in high school in the 60s. I was a daily reader of the NYT, and found enjoyment in his 'Observer' columns, as well as Buchwald's in the Herald Tribune.
Then, as now, I read newspapers voraciously. Only now there are only two newspapers left for me to read, the NYT and the WSJ. I do read the Daily Racing Form, but not daily, only on those days I'm in a betting mood and need to carry reference material (past performances) with me.
If in 1967 when I dropped out of college for the second time the high school guidance counselor sent me to a newspaper to get a job, I might have fallen in to that profession. Instead, I showed up at a health insurance company and spent 43 years doing work connected with that industry.
Pete Hamill has written about the lengthy letter he wrote to James Wecshler, the New York Post columnist and editor, when he was a young man. The letter led to his employment at entry level into the world of New York journalism.
Mr. Baker's March 1967 letter to me telling me that college was the best way to prepare for the future didn't result in any third time re-enrollment, but the acknowledgment left a lasting impression. The letter, from his NYT Washington Bureau address on K Street, hangs on my wall in my home office in an oak frame I made myself.
Over the years I very sporadically would write to Mr. Baker. Once it was about my plans to create a book of quotes and newspaper outtakes that I found witty and worth preserving. He wrote back to tell me that this was a "commonplace book" and pretty much would find no market. He sent me some pages of his own abandoned commonplace book. There here somewhere if I look hard enough.
Several of the outtakes were from his columns. I've updated his observation that he's learned all he needs to know about the O.J. trial just by walking past a television to include that I know what all the talking heads are saying just my going past any TV in the house that my wife is watching.
And his observation on fruitcake being the only food that can be considered a "family heirloom?" I've blended that into some blog postings just like Mr. McFadden mentions Baker's take on fruitcake in his obit. It is a priceless opinion of fruitcake.
Surely one of the worst jobs ever is to be asked to give a commencement address. Years ago at my daughter's grad school graduation there was a speaker from the national laboratory at Brookhaven Labs on Long Island. I have no idea what his name was, but he was boring as hell. People started walking about, as I did, as he droned on, inserting something about how he didn't like President George W. Bush.
At one point, as I was taking a tour of the landscape, I could still hear him on the pa system and he said something that he identified as a Russell Baker quote. Hey, maybe he's not a complete nerd. I started to listen again.
Looking at some of the #russellbaker Twitter posts there are several people who recount writing to Mr. Baker—and like myself—getting a reply. Either he really didn't get much mail, or he stayed up late at night, but it seems he could be counted on for an response.
There is the 2001 response, also framed and in front of me as I write this, that gave me his opinion on the disappearance of hyphenated words from text.
"After awhile it no longer seems worthwhile to keep fighting. I surrendered to hyphen idiocy years ago before leaving the Times.
I confess that I still rage against the jamming together of words to form corporate entities as in PBS's NewHour, for instance. There are more born every day. It's a byproduct of internetaddresstalk.gabble, I guess. When one one these appears I think you can be excused for shooting on sight without asking questions."
Mr. McFadden offers his own example of the Baker wit that would burst onto the page:
He once wrote a Jonathan Swift-like satire on the advantages of public hanging, arguing that a society pleased with capital punishment might do well to cut off thieves’ hands and notch the noses of incurable double parkers.
Baker was of course kidding. But his bad opinion about capital punishment was solidified when he had to attend a hanging when he was a police reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
My last framed letter from Baker was his March 2011 response to the hard copy I mailed him of my January 12, 2001 blog posting (he admits to just getting around to January's mail) that I sent him where I recalled the fellow he once worked with who turned in his report on the weather that was never published. John Carr was sacked after he wrote: "Every day we have some weather, and yesterday was no exception."
Mr. Baker's short note updated me on Mr. Carr, who he was glad to be reminded of. Carr went onto be hired by GM as an executive in the public relations division, an employment that Mr. Baker affirmed to him "how badly run was GM. Three minutes with Carr and you knew that he would be the world's worst p.r. man. He hated public relations, especially public relations men.
Anyhow, among the perks was the right to use the company airplane to travel the nation. When Buick finally discovered their mistake and fired him, they explained it was because he didn't use the company plane often enough. To be precise, He'd never used it. Couldn't think of any place important enough to justify ordering up his own airplane, he told me."
Without anyone holding anything over his head, Mr. Baker seems to have found time to provide answers to letters. The story goes that the Pendergast gang back in Kansas City, Mo. told Harry Truman after he was elected Senator and got to Washington he should keep his head down and make sure he answers his mail. I dedicated my 2012 collection of 'Onofframp' blog postings to Russell Baker and Dave Anderson because they were men who answered their mail.
There are many images his words have brought to light. The prior tenants at his Nantucket rental that somehow wedged a foreign beer bottle into a crevice in the attic. The perennially unpaved Hudson Street in NYC that no doubt was nearby his apartment when he took his life into his hands and lived in NYC. There is a quote of his that appears on a charging station LinkNYC kiosk near Foster Avenue in Brooklyn.
And with the City Council even now considering allowing e-bikes and e-scooters with a 15 mph maximum, the dangers can only increase exponentially, even if these conveyances are meant for the street. Ever see someone riding their bike on the sidewalk?
Living in New York gave him a chance to write a column titled 'Potato Mashes Man' after a hefty spud was apparently hurled in his direction from the roof of the 48-story building near where he lived in Manhattan. The potato missed, and thus he got to write about it, rather than giving the N.Y. Post another coveted headline: 'POTATO MASHES MAN.'
People in New York meet death in various fashions. Strangers get cut down by stray shots meant for others, or even no one in particular, other than a missed target. The potato gave Mr. Baker a fresh awakening as to the infinite number of ways you can go in this town:
“After a certain age most people probably speculate occasionally on the manner of their ultimate departure, but the possibility of becoming a potato victim was one that had never occurred to me, and I did not like it,” Baker mused in his next column. “On a slow-news day, it might merit a paragraph or two on the Associated Press wire: ‘Potato Mashes Man.’ ”
There is the reference to the Buick that he must have brought with him to NYC that he refers to as his "rustmobile." And that airplane travel is hurtling through space in a "tin can," in decided contrast to the ocean-going days of crossing the Atlantic in 5 days and wearing a tux to dinner.
Missing from the obit however is that Mr. Baker was on the the cover of Time magazine in June 1979, 'The Good Humor Man.' A typical Time magazine play on words.
I've made several references to Mr. Baker in past postings, and even fairly recent ones when I would take Maureen Dowd to task for turning in one column a week and going a month or so on several occasions without writing a thing. I would contrast her output with Mr. Baker's who maintained a three times a week schedule nearly right up to retirement on Christmas Day, 1998.
I can't watch Edward G. Robinson clutching his stomach after he's plugged in the movie 'Little Caesar,' wondering, "is this the end of Rico," without remembering the start of the President Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal when Mr. Baker wondered if this was going to be the end of President Clinton—"is this the end of Rico"—and trying to imagine a man who helps himself to the office help.
The Twitter posts at #russellbaker are piling up. I'm adding my own. There is Adrienne Lafrance, a reporter who grew up in Baltimore who did an interview with Mr. Baker for The Atlantic a few years ago at his Leesburg, VA home.
Asked who might he a humorist, Mr. Baker mentions Maureen Dowd, only to say, "she has a sharp tongue, and she had a gift for phrase making cruel stuff. But I wouldn't say she's a humor columnist." Ditto that. She's never made me laugh.
Going through some papers the other day I came across a response I hadn't framed, so I therefore forgot about it. Rather than continue to compile outtakes from newspaper stories I took to writing a blog at the suggestion of Marilyn Johnson, author of 'The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries" who tired of me constantly emailing her and suggested I start a blog. I did, and have now been at it over 10 years with over 1,250 posting to my dubious credit.
The shared interest was obituaries, and has since given way to that, and more. Back in 2009 I apparently sent Mr. Baker a few hard copies of my first blog postings, telling him no doubt I abandoned the commonplace book idea and supplanted it with one that lets me write, something I enjoy.
One of the January 2009 postings was about a just published obituary of Bill Werber, the oldest living former major leaguer, who has passed away at 100. He was teammate of Babe Ruth's and could tell you the story of his being on base when Babe, following him in the batting order, belts one over the fence. As a youngster, Bill is so excited he runs around the bases and steps on home plate. Babe follows with his patented trot and later in the dugout tells the still excited and out-of-breath Bill that he doesn't have to run around the bases when the Babe hits one.
I recount the story of my father telling me he saw Babe play in right field at Yankee Stadium with an arm so strong he could throw a catcher out at first who might have just hit a single. I also marvel at the connection to the past Bill Werber represented—the human linkage to the past. Paul Mellon's father was 10 years old when Lincoln was assassinated. Imagine being brought up by a father who was 10 when Lincoln was killed.
That's the thing about obituaries: The linkage backwards. Scrolling through the #russellbaker postings is one Linda Gartz, a writer, who puts a quote out there from 'Growing Up,' Mr. Baker's Pulitzer Prize winning biography that I of course read. I don't remember the passage but it goes like this:
"We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from the time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud."
I couldn't ever have put "linkage" as eloquent that.
The second posting I put in the envelope was the one, 'A Sit-Down at Woolworth's.' It is a story told by my daughter's father-in-law who is a retired NYC cop who told us at a Christmas gathering of how his mentor, when he came on the force, would tell him of the times he would collar a perp and take him into the photo booth at Woolworth's, and make him fork over the 25¢ needed to produce a strip of black and white photos, what today would be a selfie on paper. His mentor then would write the perp's name and vitals on the back of the photo and tell them he was keeping it as a reminder of what he looked like, and that if he ever caused any more trouble in the precinct he was going to run him in. The cop was keeping his own database. and of course in his own way, hoping to prevent further incidents.
Mr. Baker responded warmly to my offerings with a hand-written one-page letter that said he enjoyed the blogs. He further told me to check out the stories of of Carl Furillo, the right fielder for the Brooklyn Dodgers who had a howitzer for an arm. He wrote the Times did a story on Carl years ago and found that he was an elevator mechanic at the World Trade Center in NYC in the 70s.
He also said he enjoyed the story of the cop at Woolworth's. He said Joseph Mitchell would have turned that into a 20,000 word profile for The New Yorker. (Something surely out of my league.)
How gracious can you be? With Baker's retirement from 'The Observer' columns in 1998 I've often felt deprived of what he might have been writing about events since then. Surely he's thought about them. Wouldn't it be great to have Nat King Cole still be around and listen to him sing songs that were written after he passed away in 1965? Or Sinatra in 1998?
So when I wrote a recent blog 'The Shutdown' about the closing of the Federal government that is still going on, and I compared it to the 114-day NYC newspaper strike that started on December 8, 1962 and ended on March 31, 1963, and the principal antagonists, Betram Powers for the union and Amory H. Bradford for the publishers, I could think of no one I wanted more to write about the shutdown than Russell Baker.
Since this wasn't going to happen, I figured the best I could do was send him my offering of how the shutdown should be resolved: A cook-off referred by Chef Ramsey between President Trump and Speaker Pelosi.
I knew Mr. Baker was into his 90s. The last correspondence I got from him was a hand-written scrawl that stated that since he was now in his 90s he didn't feel he needed to answer mail. I fully understood. I think I had sent him the posting, 'The Work Ethic' a criticism of Maureen Dowd, who I only read to ensure I stay mad at her. And reading her is easy. She only writes once a week, and probably not even 10 months a year.
My dislike for Ms. Dowd stems from her sort of inheriting the spot that 'The Observer' was in. Her first columns were under the banner of 'Liberties.' She certainly takes them.
But the Shutdown is the daily story that keeps the news going right now. So, knowing full well I wasn't going to get a response from Mr. Baker, I still sent him a hard copy of 'The Shutdown' in the hope he would get a kick out of my comparing the shutdown to a historic labor dispute that he would have been affected by. I felt it might have been a connection he would himself make.
I mailed the piece on Saturday, and since Monday was a mail holiday, there is no chance he would have been in a position to read it, since he passed away on Monday after complications from a fall.
McFadden wrote that Baker was like Mark Twain. I never read much of Mark Twain. I read Russell Baker. And now I miss him even more.
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