World has lost a quality writer

Russell Baker, who died on Jan. 21 at age 93, has joined the likes of Mike Royko, Jimmy Breslin and Art Buchwald in the special part of heaven reserved for those who could make millions laugh on deadline.

Baker’s New York Times “Observer” column ran at various frequencies from 1962 to Christmas Day 1998.

Inviting the risk of a big “So what?” I’ll say that as a journalism student in the early 1970s, Baker’s work inspired me to want to write.

I’ll qualify that — not just to want to write (Hemingway did that for reasons I still can’t fathom) — but to want to write as well as Russell Baker.

Baker’s prose went from the eye to appreciation as easily as butter sinks in to warm toast.

I could hear the music of good writing, too, as I read Baker’s columns on everything from the arrival of fall to presidential inaugurations.

He was quotable, but I remember him mostly for being readable.

He termed the writing of his twice-weekly columns, each confined to 750 words, as “ballet in a phone booth.”

He was known mostly for his humor, as a few quotes illustrate.

Here’s one that resonates today:

“A group of politicians deciding to dump a president because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.”

He observed that, “New York is the only city in the world where you can get run down on the sidewalk by a pedestrian.”

Asked what courses journalism schools should teach, he responded only one:

“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.”

I would add, for the front page.

He got bored covering Congress, which he wrote, consisted of standing outside of closed doors and “waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me.”

In his last column, published on Christmas 1998, he expressed gratitude.

“Thanks to newspapers,” he said, “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.”

Seldom, if ever, have I fulfilled my ambition to write as well as Russell Baker, but he taught me that good writing and deadlines were not necessarily incompatible.

I like to think that once in a while, I was able to make the two converge, even if I could never match the quality in quantity of Baker’s work over 36 years under pressure.

Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:

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