Russell Baker

Russell Wayne Baker (August 14, 1925 – January 21, 2019) was an American journalist, narrator, writer of Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical commentary and self-critical prose, and author of Pulitzer Prize-winning autobiography Growing Up (1983).^[1] He was a columnist for The New York Times from 1962 to 1998, and hosted the PBS show Masterpiece Theatre from 1993 to 2004. The Forbes Media Guide Five Hundred, 1994 stated: "Baker, thanks to his singular gift of treating serious, even tragic events and trends with gentle humor, has become an American institution."^[2]

Born in Loudoun County, Virginia,^[3] Baker was the son of Benjamin Rex Baker and Lucy Elizabeth (née Robinson).^[4] At the age of eleven, as a self-professed "bump on a log", Baker decided to become a writer at such an early age since he figured "what writers did couldn't even be classified as work".^[5]

He attended and graduated from Baltimore City College in 1943 (a "magnet" secondary school with selective admissions and a specialized curriculum focusing on the humanities, social studies, liberal arts and classical studies). City College is considered the third oldest public high school in America - founded 1839, and has a long extensive list of prominent, influential and successful loyal alumni and faculty (especially for a public secondary school).

It is located on a prominent park-like tree-shaded hilltop campus of 39 acres in a huge Collegiate Gothic architecture structure of rubble stone with limestone trim topped by a 150-foot landmark bell / clock tower. Located at 33rd Street and the Alameda in the northeast quadrant of the city, the edifice was built two decades before in 1922-1928, as the largest and most expensive school construction project in the country up to that time, and its stone cathedral-like tower was visible throughout much of Baltimore. For three-quarters of its existence, 140 years until 1979, it was with an all-male student body, admitting girls and becoming co-educational that year after considerable initial controversy now settled for the past 45 years since.

The school has a big influence on the young Baker, and he wrote extensively about his youth in Baltimore and his experiences there at the nicknamed "Castle on the Hill" four decades later in his best-selling 1982 first memoir Growing Up, one of seventeen books he was to later write.

Leaving high school at "City" in 1943, he took a scholarship nearby to Johns Hopkins University also in Baltimore, studying for a year before leaving to join the United States Navy in the middle of World War II (1939/1941-1945) as a pilot in naval aviation. He left the service as the war ended in 1945, returning and continuing his coursework for two more years for a degree in English at Johns Hopkins at their Homewood campus, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1947.

Shortly after graduating from Johns Hopkins in 1947, Baker took a job at The Evening Sun, in his hometown (one of the three papers published by what was known around the city and state as "The Baltimore Sunpapers") of the two major competing publishers in the city (other was the Hearst Corporation) - Baltimore News-Post (1871/1922) in the afternoon / evening, six days a week, and the oldest paper in town, the Baltimore American (since 1773/1799) now only published on Sundays in the last decade. Both were strongly oriented towards blue collar / working-class readers and then had the largest circulation in town, with featuring graphic pictorial page lay-outs. The Hearst papers, (merged in 1964) mainly competing with Abell's Evening Sun with a similar style of reporting which was started in 1910 by the additional investors / co-owners of the Black family and editors joining the Abell family sons who controlled the publications. This continued up to May 1986, and the subsequent sale then to the Times Mirror Company chain / syndicate of the Los Angeles Times. Unfortunately also marking within a few days almost the simultaneous and coincidental, the closure by Hearst of its longtime competitor of The News American, after 213 years.

Baker started out as a night police reporter. This was with the more locally-oriented afternoon daily of The Evening Sun which was a younger version since 1910 of its more international / nationally pointed columns in the morning edition of the more well-known "The Sun" and weekly companion in "The Sunday Sun" published by the A.S. Abell and Company, owned by the family and descendants of co-founder Arunah Shepherdson Abell (1806-1887), who began his paper as a "penny press", begun in the 1830s with a cheaper price for issues to appeal to the increasing mass urban audience of workers and new professionals with the growing educated literacy rate (first public high schools beginning to be established), and a style of an eye-catching pictorial / illustrated graphic page lay-outs and type of reporting with coverage of more sensational news events following the first examples in New York City by publisher tycoons such as Benjamin H. Day, in his precedent-setting New York Sun, and James Gordon Bennett Sr. (New York Herald) as Abell and his partners followed in their first attempt a few years earlier in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Public Ledger. But Abell's new paper still continued a strong reputation established early on for accuracy and comprehensive text articles plus reliability first being brought to "The Monumental City* among its dozen of first competitors then in town in those pre-Civil War years.

Baker described in his first memoirs learning his way around and working his way up experiencing the journalism trade among the many legendary old-timers, first at the old longtime Downtown Baltimore editorial offices and with basement presses for printers in a marble / granite Beaux Arts/ Classical Revival style architecture palace at what was known around town as "Sun Square", and the actual geographic center of the city (southwest corner of North Charles and West Baltimore Streets), since 1906. Then after 1950 move to the "Sunpapers" new red brick modern industrial style office building and printing plant four blocks northeast at 501 North Calvert Street occupying two square blocks (on east side, between East Centre and Bath / East Franklin Streets).

He soon improved enough to be sent overseas to Britain as The Sun's London correspondent in 1952. Just in time for the death of King George VI in February after a reign of only 16 years and the accession of eldest daughter as Queen Elizabeth II and subsequent coronation that June 1953. Later he returned home to be assigned 40 miles southwest as then White House Correspondent shortly thereafter.^[3]

After covering the White House, United States Congress, and the United States Department of State for The New York Times for eight years, Baker wrote the nationally syndicated Observer column for the newspaper from 1962 to 1998; initially oriented toward politics, the column began to encompass other subjects after he relocated to New York City in 1974. During his long career as an essayist, journalist, and biographer, he was a regular contributor to national periodicals such as The New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, The Saturday Evening Post, and McCalls. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.^[6]

Baker wrote or edited seventeen books. Baker's first Pulitzer Prize was awarded to him for distinguished commentary for his Observer columns (1979) and the second one was for his autobiography, Growing Up (1982); he is one of only six people to have been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for both Arts & Letters (for his autobiography) and Journalism (for his column). He wrote a sequel to his autobiography in 1989, called The Good Times. His other works include An American in Washington (1961), No Cause for Panic (1964), Poor Russell's Almanac (1972), Looking Back: Heroes, Rascals, and Other Icons of the American Imagination (2002), and various anthologies of his columns.^[7] He edited the anthologies The Norton Book of Light Verse (1986) and Russell Baker's Book of American Humor (1993).

Baker wrote the libretto for the 1979 musical play Home Again, Home Again, starring Ronny Cox, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Barbara Fried, choreography by Onna White, and direction by Gene Saks.^[8][9] After an unsuccessful tryout at the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Connecticut, the show closed in Toronto and never made it to Broadway. "That was a great experience," Baker said in a 1994 interview with the Hartford Courant. "Truly dreadful, but fun. I was sorry [the show] folded because I was having such a good time. But once is enough."^[10]

In 1993, Baker replaced Alistair Cooke (1908-2004), (longtime Briton host and American observer / correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as the regular host and commentator of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS-TV) long-running drama television series Masterpiece Theatre, continuing for a little over a decade until 2004. "That's talking-head stuff," he said. "Television is harder than I thought it was. 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."^[11]

In 1995, he narrated the Ric Burns documentary The Way West about American western expansion for The American Experience long-running documentary series (then in its ninth season) on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS-TV).^[12][13]

In 1950, Baker married Miriam Nash, who died four years before him in 2015. The couple had four children, Allen, Kasia, Michael, and Phyllis.^[1][3]

Baker died at his longtime home in Leesburg, Virginia (Loudoun County), on January 21, 2019, after complications following a fall.^[3] He was age 93.

Neil Postman, in the preface to Conscientious Objections, described Baker as "like some fourth century citizen of Rome who is amused and intrigued by the Empire's collapse but who still cares enough to mock the stupidities that are hastening its end. He is, in my opinion, a precious national resource, and as long as he does not get his own television show, America will remain stronger than Russia." (1991, xii)

• 1978 – George Polk Award for Commentary
• 1979 – Pulitzer Prize Winner in Commentary
• 1983 – Pulitzer Prize Winner in Biography
• 1993 – Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement^[14]
• 1998 – George Polk Award for Career Achievements
• Baltimore City College Hall of Fame^[15]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Russell Baker.

• Baker author page from New York Review Books
• Baker article archive from New York Review of Books
• Appearances on C-SPAN