A Baker Sampler

Russell Baker's sustaining grace as a columnist is his remarkable repertory of styles and voices. One outing he will be just plain funny, calling up chuckles out of the absurd. The next time he will be an essayist, meditating on some social turn, usually for the worst. He can be wickedly satirical, his prose a dangerously lulling parody of the sort of nonsense that passes for sober commentary in too much of the press. And finally he can be a nostalgic, almost lyrical stylist. Examples of Baker in four moods and modes:

AS HUMORIST

The papers keep saying the dollar is very weak. This is nonsense. The truth is that the dollar is absolutely powerless. I sent one out for a pound of cheese the other day and it was thrown out of the shop for giving itself airs.

I used to send the dollar to the grocery with orders to bring back a pound of coffee. I figured this would teach it humility. Instead, it went into a severe depression which psychiatry couldn't cure because it has no way of treating a dollar unless accompanied by 34 others, which I didn't have at the time.

... Poor Grandfather.

He was 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

ask. "Yes, Grandfather," I would say. "You just bought a new car last year," he would say. "Nowadays, Grandfather," I would say, "they wear out at the heels faster than they used to."

AS ESSAYIST

Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. You probably have to be born serious, or at least go through a very interesting childhood. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class.

Adults, on the whole, are solemn. The transition from seriousness to solemnity occurs in adolescence, a period in which nature, for reasons of her own, plunges people into foolish frivolity. During this period the organism struggles to regain dignity by recovering childhood's genius for seriousness. It is usually a hopeless cause.

1) Chicago is serious. California is solemn.

2) Blow-dry hair stylings on anchormen for local television news shows are solemn. Henry James is serious.

3) Falling in love, getting married, having children, getting divorced and fighting over who gets ... the car and the Wedgwood are all serious. The new sexual freedom is solemn.

AS SATIRIST

Social historians will date the decline of the cocktail party from the summer of 1975, when chic people first asked for "a little white wine with soda and ice," instead of the traditional rum, whisky or gin. The reasons for this shift are obscure. It is usually said that Americans became tired of being blasted out of their heads by strong drink, but this makes little sense. The only point of a cocktail party was to take leave of the senses, it being universally understood that nobody in his right mind would want to be present at one ... A likelier explanation may be the tyranny of fashion. This theory gains support from the latest development on the party front, which is the replacement of weak wine with water. All over the East Coast this summer, and perhaps even in less benighted regions for all I know, ostensibly sane people are turning up at parties and ordering water. What is even more curious, they ask for imported water. American water isn't good enough for them...

If Americans were able to let their hair down over imported water, Prohibition might have succeeded. The cocktail party surely would never have been invented, no man would ever have insulted his boss, no woman would ever have been indiscreet ... I miss all these things at the im-ported-water parties nowadays, with their dedicated guests on lonesome pursuits sturdily keeping their hair up. Next morning, of course, there is a clear head but very little worth remembering in life.

AS STYLIST A long time ago I lived in a crossroads village of northern Virginia and during its summer enjoyed innocence and never knew boredom, although nothing of consequence happened there.

Seven houses of varying lack of distinction constituted the community. A dirt road meandered off toward the mountain where a bootleg still supplied whisky to the men of the countryside, and another dirt road ran to the creek. My cousin Kenneth and I would sit on the bank and fish with earthworms. One day we killed a copperhead which was basking on a rock near by. That was unusual.

The heat of summer was mellow and produced sweet scents which lay in the air so damp and rich you could almost taste them. Bees buzzed in the clover. Far away from the fields the chug of an ancient steam-powered threshing machine could be faintly heard. Birds rustled under the tin porch of the roof.

Rising dust along the road from the mountains signaled an approaching event. A car was coming. "Car's coming," someone would say. People emerged from houses. The approaching dust was studied. Guesses were hazarded about whom it might contain.

Then--a big moment in the day--the car would cruise past.

"Who was it?"

"I didn't get a good look."

"It looked like Packy Painter to me."

"Couldn't have been Packy. Wasn't his car."

At sunset people sat on the porches. As dusk deepened, the lightning bugs came out to be caught and bottled. One night I was allowed to stay up until the stars were in full command of the sky. A woman of great age was dying in the village, and it was considered fit to let the children stay abroad into the night. As four of us sat there we saw a shooting star and someone said, "Make a wish."

I did not know what that meant. I didn't know anything to wish for.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.