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It is 6 p.m., and once again the office window has been cheated of its prey. A few hours earlier P.B. Sykes and his strange feet did not exist. Now they do, brought into being by a process as astonishing and mysterious as the sprouting of legs on tadpoles. In Sykes' case, it happened five years ago. It still happens, three times a week, inside the wondrous mind of Russell Wayne Baker, 53.
For the past 17 years, Baker has written "Observer," a 750-word humor column that appears in the New York Times and 475 newspapers that subscribe to the Times News Service. This year Baker won the Pulitzer Prize, journalism's highest award, for commentary. It was the first time a writer who is considered basically a humorist received the commentary award since it was established as a separate Pulitzer in 1970. Previous recipients have included the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Marquis Childs, the New York Times's William Safire, the Washington Post Writers Group's George Will and other sober, important, no-nonsense dispensers of Op Ed-page wisdom.
Baker is something less than that, and something more. His column walks the high wire between light humor and substantive comment, a balancing act so punishingly difficult that in the entire country there are not a dozen men and women who can be said to have the hang of the thing. Of these good humor men and women, Baker is consistently the most literate. What impresses Pulitzer judges and other journalists about Baker's high-wire heroics is not simply the talent that they require, though the requirement is very high, but Baker's extraordinary range.
Humor is his usual vehicle, but he can also write with a haunting strain of melancholy, with delight or, as in his 1974 meditation on inflation-pinched old people shopping timidly at the supermarket, with shame and outrage: "Staring at 90-cent peanut butter. Taking down an orange, looking for its price, putting it back... Old people at the supermarket are being crushed and nobody is even screaming."
The humanitarian element of New Deal liberalism—the sense that society's unfortunate people ought to have some help—is very much a part of Baker's makeup. He tends to be thoroughly cynical about Big Business and nearly as disenchanted with Big Government and Big Labor. But his scope is vast.
The ten columns for which he won the Pulitzer dealt with tax reform, the ever shorter life spans of trends, inflation, the difference between serious and solemn, loneliness, fear, dying, a boyhood summer, Norman Rockwell and the death of New Times magazine.
Baker's other great gift is his consistency. Each year he finds the endurance to be sharp and fresh and surprising nearly 150 times. The gross wordage he turns out over a year would amount to a fair-size novel. In Baker's book-lined office on the tenth floor of the Times building, just off Times Square, is a photo of the Marx brothers. The inscription is by Groucho, and it reads, "You are the reason I read the New York Times!"
Indeed, "Observer" is an island of mirth in one of the world's most authoritative—and dullest—newspapers. "He adds humor to the Times, "says A.M. Rosenthal, the paper's executive editor.