Word: carly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
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 He went back to Hopkins on the G.I. Bill, met Miriam Emily Nash, married her, wrote a novel that went unpublished and after a time began working nights for the Baltimore Sun, at $30 a week...
...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...
...really out of it. "A penny saved is a dollar earned," he said. I had kept him in the dark for years about the price of shoes. Whenever I assembled the dollars required to buy new shoes he would gaze at them disapprovingly. "Buying another new car?" he would