Word: writes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
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...
...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...