Iconic columnist knew how to turn a phrase

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This article was published 30/01/2019 (2734 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I hate to bum you out in the middle of a soul-destroying cold snap, but the world just got a little less funny, and a lot less classy.

That’s because one of my heroes, the legendary newspaper columnist Russell Baker, died on Jan. 21 at his home in Leesburg, Va., from complications caused by a fall. He was 93.

Some of you — and, yes, I am scowling at you, young people — probably never heard of Russell Baker, which is sad because he was one of the great journalists and columnists of any generation.

Some of you only knew him as that genial curmudgeon who hosted Masterpiece Theatre on PBS from 1993 to 2004, having succeeded Alistair Cooke.

With his kindly blue eyes with droopy lids, unruly thatch of hair, folksy manner, rumpled appearance and a voice that was the audible equivalent of maple syrup being poured over a stack of buttered pancakes, he was a comforting presence on television.

“Television is harder than I thought it was,” he once said. “I can’t bear to look at myself. I fancied that I was an exceedingly charming, witty and handsome young man, and here’s this fidgeting old fellow whose hair is parted on the wrong side.”

I never met him personally, but I got to know Russell Baker through some of the roughly 5,000 syndicated columns he wrote for the New York Times — and hundreds of other newspapers — from 1962 until his retirement in 1998.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for distinguished commentary, then again in 1982 for the book Growing Up, a coming-of-age story about his Depression-era youth, his inspirational mother and American life between the world wars.

He wrote about politics, of course, but I came to love his work for the whimsical, irreverent way he made real life seem just a bit funnier, a bit more tolerable.

“His targets were legion: the Super Bowl, Miss America, unreadable menus, everything on television, trips with children, the jogging craze, the perils of buying a suit, loneliness and book-of-the-month clubs,” Robert McFadden wrote in an obituary last week for the New York Times.

The Times and other papers shared my favourite anecdote, namely the time Baker was speaking to a group of college students when one of them demanded to know which courses a journalism school should teach.

Here’s what he sagely replied: “The ideal journalism school needs only one course. Students should be required to stand outside a closed door for six hours. Then the door would open, someone would put his head around the jamb and say, ‘No comment.’ The door would close again, and the students would be required to write 800 words against a deadline.”

What I really want to tell you is that when I became a columnist for the Free Press 13 years ago, one of the first things I did was drop in at the Children’s Hospital Book Market at St. Vital Shopping Centre, where, among the thousands of used books, I discovered a copy of one of Baker’s column anthologies, 1983’s The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams.

The first thing I did when I got home was climb into the bathtub and lie there for a couple of hours, flipping through the pages, and laughing myself silly.

“What are you doing in there,” my wife shouted after hearing me cackle like a hyena while reading one of Baker’s surreal pieces.

“Nothing,” I replied, lying.

“You’re a weirdo,” is what my wife shouted back.

What I think I’m trying to say is that Baker’s unique gift for being silly gave me a taste for what it is possible to do in roughly 800 words in a family newspaper. He inspired me, mainly through his ability to be joyful amid chaos.

In response to a Times food critic’s piece on a US$4,000, 31-course gourmet meal, Baker described his own dining experience involving a peanut butter and banana graham cracker sandwich washed down with soda pop.

“The meal opened with a 1975 Diet Pepsi served in a disposable bottle,” he wrote. “Although its bouquet was negligible, its distinct metallic aftertaste evoked memories of tin cans one had licked experimentally in the first flush of childhood’s curiosity.”

I can still recall chortling out loud in the tub while reading a column entitled “The Only Gentleman,” wherein Baker tweaked the noses of officials arguing about whether the Mark Twain Intermediate School of Fairfax County should stop teaching Twain’s iconic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Among other things, he said: “Under my system, any teacher caught assigning Dickens to a person under the age of 25 would be sentenced to teach summer school at half pay. Punishment would be harsher for assigning Moby Dick, a book accessible only to people old enough to know what it is to rail at God about the inevitability of death.”

He had a gift for playing around with the English language, as he did in a column entitled “Back at the Manse,” wherein he created his own Gothic novel: “A governess arrives at a sinister manse. It feels like the nineteenth century, not only because there are sinister manses all over the countryside, but also because the governess’s bosom is heaving. There is also a lot of embonpoint, not to mention a fierce brooding laird striding the grim battlements, a pack of ravenous mastiffs and a suspicious excess of adjectives.”

Sadly, I owe Russell Baker a debt that I will never be able to repay, especially now that he’s gone. If you feel a craving for a good laugh, search out his work online or at your local bookstore.

I personally will be paying tribute to the man who paved the way for the rest of us to write humour by making a peanut butter and banana sandwich, washing it down with a Diet Pepsi, then climbing into a scalding tub, where I plan to laugh myself silly, taking care not to drop a beloved dog-eared book in the water.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca