Word: whose
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
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...
...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...
Such is the state of professional relations among the nation's leading humor columnists that some of their best lines are written to each other, and some of their worst. Buchwald, 53, whose political word-cartoons now appear in 510 newspapers, has been trading quips with Baker since they met in Washington 17 years ago. On a bookshelf in Buchwald's office is a photo of Baker, with the inscription: "To Art Buchwald, who with Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon was all that made Washington worthwhile for ten long years...
...Humor Columnists, a nonpartisan, nonprofit and otherwise nonexistent organization that hands out awards to each member and encourages the exchange of funny memos. "If we put as much effort into our columns as we have into our correspondence, we'd all be millionaires," says Erma Bombeck, 52, whose madcap suburban comedies are syndicated to 800 newspapers, and who may be a millionaire anyway...