The Good Humor Man

By John Skow

A man is getting ready for bed. He takes off his shoes, then his socks.

He looks idly at his feet. Hmmm.

They are feetlike, ordinary. They do not look interesting, but they look tired, and it is time to wedge them down between the sheets to the bed's own foot, where they will wiggle a bit and then fall dormant. The man lifts his feet into bed, but as he does, he feels the tingle of a half-formed thought. Oddly, it is about umbrellas. Something about umbrellas getting mixed up in restaurants. It is not the dazzling sort of thought that stings the thinker into wakefulness, and the man does not follow it to its conclusion, if there were any. Soon he is asleep.

Next day the man goes to his office, hangs up his coat and sits at a typewriter. Time passes. No typing occurs. The man's natural optimism wilts. He is vacant of ideas, except for one that grows progressively more attractive: this, finally, is the day for throwing himself out of the office window.

But, hark! A thought! It concerns, let's see, umbrellas, and--what's this?--feet.

Of course. The logical connection is clear.

The man's face takes on a look of confidence, and he begins to type. "The world is as follows," he writes. Nice, crisp beginning, no fooling around. He continues:

"Upon removing his shoes at bedtime, P.B. Sykes observes that the feet inside his socks are not his feet, but quite obviously someone else's feet. His wife, noting an unusual expression on his face, inquires if something is wrong. 'No,' says Sykes, quickly dousing the light."

The man, who is tall, high-shouldered and middleaged, and who seems sober, gets up from the typewriter and paces about the room. Time passes again, this time into the end zone. Is the writer faltering? No! He finds the thread, and hurriedly types: "Next morning he finds the strange feet still there. 'How's everything, P.B.?' a dozen people ask him before lunch. To each, Sykes replies, 'Fine.' He telephones a doctor. A receptionist says the next available appointment is three months distant. Sykes says he has an emergency. 'What seems to be the trouble?' asks the woman. Sykes cannot tell her the truth, for he is certain she is incapable of believing that feet can be switched like umbrellas traded in a restaurant mixup, and will think him mad and dispatch him to psychiatry."

By now the man is typing at great speed. Sykes never does find his own feet, but at a party one day he confides his loss to an editor, who signs him to a three-book contract. The surrogate feet become television celebrities, Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman star in the movie version of Sykes' life, and he goes off to make a television commercial for corn plasters.

There he meets Alexander Solzhenitsyn, another celebrity, who is making a commercial for Russian dressing in spray cans. The man's typescript concludes: "That is what the world is like."

It is 6 p.m., and once again the office window has been cheated of its prey. A few hours earlier P.B. Sykes and his strange feet did not exist. Now they do, brought into being by a process as astonishing and mysterious as the sprouting of legs on tadpoles. In Sykes' case, it happened five years ago. It still happens, three times a week, inside the wondrous mind of Russell Wayne Baker, 53.

For the past 17 years, Baker has written "Observer," a 750-word humor column that appears in the New York Times and 475 newspapers that subscribe to the Times News Service. This year Baker won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest award, for commentary. It was the first time a writer who is considered basically a humorist received the commentary award since it was established as a separate Pulitzer in 1970. Previous recipients have included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Marquis Childs, the New York Times's William Safire, the Washington Post Writers Group's George Will and other sober, important, no-nonsense dispensers of Op Ed-page wisdom.

Baker is something less than that, and something more. His column walks the high wire between light humor and substantive comment, a balancing act so punishingly difficult that in the entire country there are not a dozen men and women who can be said to have the hang of the thing. Of these good humor men and women, Baker is consistently the most literate. What impresses Pulitzer judges and other journalists about Baker's high-wire heroics is not simply the talent that they require, though the requirement is very high, but Baker's extraordinary range.

Humor is his usual vehicle, but he can also write with a haunting strain of melancholy, with delight or, as in his 1974 meditation on inflation-pinched old people shopping timidly at the supermarket, with shame and outrage: "Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for its price, putting it back... Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming."

The humanitarian element of New Deal liberalism--the sense that society's unfortunate people ought to have some help--is very much a part of Baker's makeup. He tends to be thoroughly cynical about Big Business and nearly as disenchanted with Big Government and Big Labor. But his scope is vast.

The ten columns for which he won the Pulitzer dealt with tax reform, the ever shorter life spans of trends, inflation, the difference between serious and solemn, loneliness, fear, dying, a boyhood summer, Norman Rockwell and the death of New Times magazine.

Baker's other great gift is his consistency. Each year he finds the endurance to be sharp and fresh and surprising nearly 150 times. The gross wordage he turns out over a year would amount to a fair-size novel. In Baker's book-lined office on the tenth floor of the Times building, just off Times Square, is a photo of the Marx brothers. The inscription is by Groucho, and it reads, "You are the reason I read the New York Times!"

Indeed, "Observer" is an island of mirth in one of the world's most authoritative--and dullest--newspapers. "He adds humor to the Times, "says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's executive editor.

"God knows we could use it." Other knowledgeable readers agree. "I can't remember when the best writing in the Times was not that of Russ Baker," says U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who himself uses words with polished ease and keeps a large supply of them around the house. "There is just a lucidity and a sanity about him that is so distinctive. He writes clearly because he thinks clearly." Presidential Aspirant Eugene McCarthy once jokingly proposed making Baker U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's; McCarthy confirms that the offer is still open. Says Humorist S.J. Perelman, whose fine, loopy wit has, almost unassisted, maintained The New Yorker's franchise as a funny magazine over the past couple of decades: "You can rely on Baker for honesty in his laughter and his anger. He has the courage to write a serious column when he's angry."

That courage sets Baker a little apart from the long and distinguished line of American newspaper humorists who preceded him, a line that is older than the nation itself. The first regular humor column in the New World appeared in Boston's New-England Courant in 1722 under the byline "Mrs. Silence Dogood," a pseudonym for young Benjamin Franklin. In one typical effort, Dogood/Franklin needled Harvard for turning out budding scholars who were "as great blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited." Well, it seemed funny at the tune.

In the 1860s Mark Twain wrote a humorous column for the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nev., about a horse that tried to eat a boy on his way to Sunday school ("The boy got loose, you know, but that old hoss got his bible and some tracts ..."). Twain overheard somebody laughing at it and decided to write more columns, all just as hilarious as the first.

In the early 20th century, Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" carved up public figures in a thick Irish dialect and coined a few deathless epigrams along the way:

"Th' Supreme Court follows th' illiction returns," "Politics ain't beanbag."

But perhaps because those masters flourished in simpler times, they were merely funny. Baker has taken newspaper humor a step further. He has turned it into literature--funny, but full of the pain and absurdity of the age. Those qualities probably keep a few readers away. Said an otherwise admiring Jack Rosenthal, assistant editor of the Times's editorial page, when asked to cite any deficiencies in the column: "Too serious."

Much of Baker's humor is the fife accompaniment to the Sousa march of his own sturdy good sense, as when he announced in a recent column his refusal to buy a car that cost more than the house he grew up in, $5,900. When Baker expresses pain, it tends to be with only the parody of a whimper, as in a 1977 column he titled "A Taxpayer's Prayer": "O mighty Internal Revenue, who turneth the labor of man to ashes, we thank thee for the multitude of thy forms which thou has set before us and for the infinite confusion of thy commandments which multiplieth the fortunes of lawyer and accountant alike ... Grant that this sacrifice not be found insufficient unto thy auditor..."

Baker and his wife Mimi rent three floors of a four-story brownstone ("a dilapidation," they call it) on Manhattan's East Side. But the Bakers' beloved sheltering place is a gray shingle and white clapboard summer house on Massachusetts' Nantucket Island. It was built by a whaling captain in 1835, at the height of the island's seafaring prosperity. Its present owners seem comfortable there, and with each other. Tall, handsome and merry of heart, Mimi is a good conversational match for Baker, and people who know the pair well tend to say "they" when talking of them, rather than "he" or "she."

Baker seemed comfortable with himself too a few weeks ago on Nantucket, though he had reason for discomfort. For a year or more he had worked on the script of an ill-fated play called Home Again, with music by Cy Coleman (On the Twentieth Century) and lyrics by Barbara Fried.

He burlesqued the experience in a column: "Just one more script and that island in the Aegean would be mine. I wrote another script... No longer were we doing a musical about a paraplegic cabdriver who falls in love with a tollbooth collector at the Lincoln Tunnel. Somehow, inexorably, because there's no business like show business, the musical had turned into the story of a fast-food-chain heiress who falls in love with a Marine corporal during the Boxer Rebellion."

Home Again was actually about a young man who goes out in the world to seek his fortune, gets married, has kids, moves to the suburbs, etc., etc. It foundered expensively in Toronto and was mercy-killed in April, just before its scheduled Broadway opening. The experience is instructive, "like being lost in a bog," Baker says. "I saw other musicals last year and sometimes asked myself, 'Didn't the producers and directors know they were awful?' I answered that question: 'No, you don't know.' I still think we folded the makings of a good show."

Baker is lean (172 Ibs.) and long (6 ft. 2 in.), although when he was encountered in his Nantucket backyard he was crouching on a brick wall, pulling an anarchy of weeds from between the cracks and muttering at the lawn's first dandelions, the very embodiment of compulsive suburban man. He has a full shock of sandy gray hair, bushy eyebrows of a color that somebody with a window dresser's vocabulary once described as "ginger," and a face easefully lined, like the leather seats of an old Jaguar. Friends say that women tremble in his presence. E.P. Dutton Editor Tom Congdon describes an incident that occurred once when he was walking with Baker on Nantucket: a stunningly beautiful young woman on a bicycle asked for directions. "Russ ambled over to her and started to tell her, in his deep, soft voice, and I could see his effect on her. Her cheeks turned pink, and she had trouble speaking, and when she left, her bike sort of wobbled away."

Baker did not see himself as a humorist when he started the column, he says, and still doesn't really. His intention was "to write plain English, Anglo-Saxon root words and short sentences for readers of the Times, who were suffocating on polysyllabic, Latinate English." If he had models, he says, they were E.B. White's "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker and his mentor at the Times, James Reston. Says he: "Reston taught the Times to write English."

When Baker began to write the "Observer," he says, he had no notion that failure was a possibility, only a determination not to let his columns fall into an easily identifiable category. "You get onto a columnist, you know. There's foxy grandpa, there's the font of wisdom, there's Mr. Inside Information, and I was trying to mix it up, like a junk-ball pitcher in baseball keeping them off balance." He laughs. "You get older and lose your fastball and there's more junk. It was easy to be angry, but I felt you couldn't go the distance being angry. God's Angry Man is delightful for the first six months, and then you wish he'd shut up. It wasn't easy to shut up when the Viet Nam War came along, and every once in a while I'd let out a shriek. People seemed to like that, as long as I didn't do it too often."

Baker's writing voice still darkens easily, though not often, from genial irony to grim satire. Every few weeks a sour mood fills the "Observer," as it did some time ago when Baker discussed the advantages of a return to public hangings, with the additional suggestion that if the society went back to killing people for the crime of murder, perhaps it should again cut off hands for theft and notch the noses of incurable double parkers.

Writing is hard work for him now: "You go into a dark room ind close the door, and you're alone inside your head." One pulls things out of the mental attic to use in the column, he adds, and the attic is depleted. You don't have time to add much to your store. "How many column ideas are there?" he asks. "There's the plumber, and your teenagers, and your car, and your house. If you're really desperate, you can write about your wife, and then it's time to hang up the typewriter."

Intensely personal columns by other writers make this private man uneasy. "It's a terrible problem examining one's entrails in public," says Baker. John Leonard, also of the New York Times, is a columnist whose bouts with existential despair are on weekly view, with results that range from considerable heroics to embarrassing displays of bad taste. Baker has never exploited his family for material, with the forgivable exception of some memorable columns celebrating the archetypal awfulness of vacation car treks along the New Jersey Turnpike. Now and then he rules out a topic for a while because he is tired of it or thinks readers are. Just now he is avoiding women's liberation, although its solemnities are "a gold mine," because the mail he receives when he mentions the subject is abusive.

He writes on Sunday afternoon for the Tuesday paper, Monday afternoon for the Sunday magazine 20 days hence, and Thursday afternoon for the Saturday paper. He makes no effort to store up ideas. "It's like analysis; you block out the time and see what comes out." If he writes what he thinks is a bad column, he does not wad it up and start over. He publishes it. "Observer" is not a single point in space but a curving line of ups and downs, and the sagging author figures he will have another shot at splendor in a couple of days.

Last July 4 Baker hit splendor dead-on with a misty, elegiac column called "Summer Beyond Wish." The piece was set in the rural Virginia of his boyhood. It was full of love, the rich, buzzing emptiness of a country summer and the sense that poverty was near.

For Baker, it was. He spent his early years in Morrisonville, Va., a crossroads between Leesburg and Harpers Ferry. "It was primitive, no electricity," he says. His father Benjamin was a stonemason who died when Russell was five. The parallel with Thomas Wolfe, another lanky, literary Southerner whose father was a stonemason, is striking. Baker says for that reason he was unable to read Look Homeward, Angel until he was 45. "I heard those train whistles in the night, and they spoke of something else to me than the wonder of America." What they spoke of, he says, was trainmen out of work as the Depression deepened.

When Benjamin Baker died, in the teeth of the Depression, his family was destitute. The only job in Baker's extended family belonged to one of his mother's brothers, who made $35 a week selling butter in Newark. So that is where Russell, his mother and his oldest sister went. Other impoverished relatives would arrive from time to time, generally in the middle of the night. "It gave an interesting texture to life," Baker recalls.

When he was eleven, the tribe moved to an apartment just off Baltimore's Union Square, where that famous curmudgeon H.L. Mencken lived. The future "Observer" satirist was unaware of that, though today he suspects that Mencken was the elderly gentleman who one day called the cops to chase Baker and some fellow ballplayers out of the square. In high school, young Russell was well liked, athletic (he ran the quarter mile) and showed promise as a humorist with a senior-year essay for

English class, "The Art of Eating Spaghetti." He barely remembers it and no copy has survived. Young Baker heard family stories of his mother's cousin, Edwin James, who was managing editor of the New York Times from 1932 to 1951, and understood the moral: words were a way out. He won a competitive scholarship to Johns Hopkins in 1942 and ambled through his first year with nonchalance.

Baker did not know how to drive a car but in the fall of 1943 he enlisted in the Navy as a pilot. "I loved it," he says. "I felt I was dashing. I was very disappointed when I got out after two years of training, without getting overseas and without killing myself." He went back to Hopkins on the G.I. Bill, met Miriam Emily Nash, married her, wrote a novel that went unpublished and after a time began working nights for the Baltimore Sun, at $30 a week.

Baker was a fast, accurate reporter, and when someone complimented him on a story he would say, "Aw, shucks," and shrug it off. When he did time on the rewrite desk, police reporters all tried to phone in their stories to him because he could turn two purse snatchings and a dog bite into a tone poem. By the time he was 27 in 1952, he took over as the Sun bureau chief in London.

The next two years were glorious for Russell and Mimi. Fleet Street is the home of some of the world's worst journalism, and also some of the best. But most important, says Baker, the intense competition often or twelve newspapers jostling for attention in London produced a kind of reporting in which, because everyone had the facts, interpretation was prized.

He was doing a weekly article for the Sun called "Window on Fleet Street," which attracted the attention of another old London hand, James Reston, then Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. "It conveyed a sense of London, what the melody really was," says Reston today. So he made the young man an offer, and in 1954 Russell and Mimi returned to Washington.

Baker was not entirely sure that this was an improvement. He had briefly covered the White House for the Sun, and he has described the job as "sitting in the lobby and listening to the older reporters breathe." He covered the State Department for the Times, and did it well, but the airy ambiguities of the place bored him stiff.

Congress, a beat he was given in late 1954, was different. Baker loved its ripe pomposities, its jostling overweeners, the interplay and foolishness of it all. Pat Furgurson of the Sun recalls joking with Baker in the Senate gallery: "Baker would look down and say, 'Look, there's Ken Keating, wearing Charles Bickford's old hair.'" Charles McDowell of the Richmond Times-Dispatch recalls Baker's work: "He'd start out writing about some Senator, and pretty soon it would turn into a piece of architecture. He'd set scenes and roll around in his story like an essayist.

He had the feel of Washington."

Washington had the feel of him too. Baker's friend John Chancellor reports that once Lyndon Johnson, then Vice President and lonely, threw his arm around Baker, pulled him into his office and began a long, intimate, anecdote-filled confession of his hopes for the coming political season. Baker had dealt with Johnson during L.BJ.'s glory days as Senate majority leader, but as the great man spoke he scribbled something on a piece of paper, buzzed for his secretary and handed the paper to her. Soon she returned and handed the paper back. Some time after that the interview ended with Johnson still effusing. Another reporter who followed Baker into Johnson's office got a look at the scrap of paper; on it was written, "Who is this I am talking to?" and below that, "Russell Baker of the New York Times."

The reporter may have been on a first-name basis with Washington's movers and shakers, but he was not having fun.

"Finally, I just got bored," says Baker. "I had done enough reporting. I began to feel like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, carrying that typewriter in one hand and that suitcase in the other and a dirty old raincoat into one more hotel lobby. It came to seem that this wasn't a worthy way for a grown man to spend his life. You have good seats, sure, but you're always on the sidelines. You're not making anything. Auden has a wonderful essay--it's in The Dyer's Hand--about how young people want to be writers. He says it's something the Greeks understood. The writer is somebody who makes something with his own hands. And he draws the distinction between being a maker and a drudge. Work is what a freeman did, and drudgery is what slaves did. Kids instinctively grasp that writing is being a maker. But reporting is drudgery."

The end came, he says, one afternoon when he had been sitting for some hours on the cold marble floor of a corridor in the Senate Office Building, outside a closed meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "I began to wonder why, at the age of 37, I was wearing out my hams waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me."

Deliverance was at hand:

Charles H. Dorsey, managing editor of the Sun, wanted Baker back and offered him a column on whatever subject he wanted. Baker accepted and told Reston. Baker says now that he thinks no one had ever quit the Times before. "They weren't used to it," he adds. So Reston persuaded the publisher, Orvil Dryfoos, to counteroffer him a column at the Times. The Sun lost Baker again, this time for good.

Baker's first column lampooned a J.F.K. press conference ("Q. Mr. President, can you tell us what you have done with Chester Bowles? ... A. The State Department is looking into this matter and we are expecting a report"). The attempt worked, partly because it shocked people; it was still a bit daring in 1962 to laugh at the Kennedy style. He wrote the column in its first years from Washington and had a splendid time unstuffing shirts, though he deadpans now: "It's depressing to read a politician's memoirs and realize how little you got right." But by the end of 1974 the stake had been hammered through Richard Nixon's heart, and Jerry Ford seemed to be doing an adequate job of satirizing himself. Baker felt that the column was too reportorial, and he was tired of politicians. He moved to New York City.

"I had always been exhilarated by New York," he says. He adds that he was frightened too--about being mugged, about burglars. "I felt I was hemorrhaging money when I came there on assignment. I felt there was no human space. I would arrive back in Washington with a great sigh of relief. But I've discovered that I'm urban. Chevy Chase, where I lived in Washington, is like a small town in Indiana, full of people certified orthodox by the U.S. Government. New York is the way cities used to be." Baker's existence in New York is the way life there used to be. He and Mimi generally avoid fashionable openings, trendy watering holes and other gossip-column venues in favor of reading, going to movies and plays and having dinner with friends. Russell, who netted $53,000 last year, moves among a small, distinguished circle of New Yorkers, and they cherish him. "He leads a rare honorable life. People look up to him," says New Yorker Writer Michael Arlen. "He never seems to get swayed by the bullshit. There is less trimming his sails in the prevailing winds than in any man I know." NBC Anchorman John Chancellor thinks Baker is "not a humorist but a moralist." Journalist David Halberstam (The Powers That Be) sees "an elegance within the man." Arthur Gelb, deputy managing editor of the Times, talks of "a twinkle in his eye."

Since the move to New York, the "Observer" column has turned away from politics. "I didn't know Jimmy Carter when I was reporting," says the writer. "I don't know him now. I find I'm not much interested." The column has instead taken an inward turn. Baker's close readers think it has become better. Its author sits alone in a room and wonders about children and parents. His own father cut stone, and as a little boy Baker saw him do it. What does the child of a systems analyst envision his father doing?

Baker's own three children knew very well what he did for a living and wanted no part of it. When his son Allen was twelve, Baker jokingly asked him whether he wanted to be a writer.

"You crazy?" said the boy. "Sit and stare at the wall all day?" The Baker children were teen-agers in the 1960s, and, perhaps as a result of the rebellion in the air then, none attended college. Allen, now 26 and married, is a contractor in Aldie, Va. Sister Kasia, 28, is divorced and worked until recently in a Manhattan boutique. Michael, 24, who was married this month at the Nantucket house, lives in New York and works as a television grip. The family is close and affectionate.

Some of Baker's friends think he is a bit ashamed to be using his talent for something as unsubstantial as a newspaper column. He admits he would hate to think the column expresses everything that is in him. He also says that "it's only daily journalism. The readers throw it away and forget it."

A deadline arrives, however, and he writes a lovely column about the child of the systems analyst. He toys with the idea of writing a book-length log of his failed theatrical adventure. Then he thinks he would like to write a book about growing up in America 50 years ago. Could he find the time?

Another deadline: he is working in his apartment in New York. His head is empty. Nothing comes.

Baker writhes, frets, then decides to take a walk. A few steps away from his door he hears a whizz-splatt!

close enough to be alarming.

Strange as it seems, a raw potato has fallen from a window high in a nearby apartment building and has nearly done Baker in. Splendid! A column idea from the gods.

New York has rewarded Baker for moving there.

He hustles to his typewriter and strums a slightly self-pitying ode to his own death by vegetable. In this column, he imagines an Associated Press report --POTATO MASHES MAN--and broods about his friends saying "Poor devil, he never knew what hit him." "What did hit him?" "Haven't you heard?" Baker's high-wire act has never been snappier. He finishes typing and thinks about making himself a drink. -- John Skew

* Another member, former Gary, Ind., Post-Tribune Columnist Don Ross, is now a public relations consultant in Tulsa. "I'm envious as hell of Russell's Pulitzer, which I think should have gone to a black," quips Ross, who is.

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