Russell Baker

Every big storm brings forth recollections of the snows of yesteryear. Every generation seems to have its own memorable blizzard. We recall some that are worth looking back at on a snowy morning. After surviving the Superstorm of 1993, Russell Baker, columnist, essayist and memoirist, asked if a storm of the century was worse than a mother of all storms or a world-class storm. He forestalled calamity by rushing out to buy wine to drink by a roaring fire.

LOS ANGELES -- Don't tell Helen Mirren her character, Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, is unhappy with her career-driven life.One male reporter made that mistake during a press conference here to promote "Prime Suspect 3," which will air on PBS in April.'Do you really think she's unhappy?" Mirren asked the reporter."Yes," the reporter replied."Yeah, sure, well, that's because you're a man, you know. Hey, she's unmarried. She doesn't have a baby. She must be unhappy, right?" Mirren said.

THERE'S A COUNTRY IN MY CELLAR. By Russell Baker. William Morrow and Co. 432 pages. $20.95.THIS HAS BEEN a fine literary season if you like the work of witty American journalists. First there was a collection of "Writings from the New Yorker, 1926-1976," by the late E. B. White, one of the most talented writers of his generation (born 1899). Now we have these 138 New York Times "Observer" columns, 1964-1989, by Russell Baker (born 1925 in Virginia, raised mostly in Baltimore, educated at Johns Hopkins)

AN EDITORIAL in The Sun last month referred to "the tattered banner of states' rights," in a context that suggested the banner deserved to be tattered.This month in a column published in The Evening Sun, Russell Baker sneered at what he called "that threadbare old banner. . . of states' rights."I guess this means The Sun and Baker won't be endorsing Sen. Bob Dole's presidential bid. Senator Dole's campaign tee-shirts are emblazoned as follows:"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

THIRTY YEARS ago today, Russell Baker gave up the dispiriting role of a Washington reporter for the New York Times, in which he found himself compelled to sit around waiting for officials "to come out and lie to me," and assumed what he thought would be the less confining, more comfortable mantle of thrice-weekly columnist.He quickly discovered that column-writing was no picnic."Notified that I was now free to write three columns a week about almost any subject on Earth, I was exultant," Mr. Baker recalled a few years ago. "I was at last free to disgorge the entire content of my brain."

SOME YEARS ago, I wrote a column about how much I loved country music, which was a bunch of hooey, but it got in the newspaper anyway.I only wrote the thing because there was nothing else to write. What happened was, my deadline was two hours away and this one editor, who was a royal pain in the behind and had the shoe-banging temper of Nikita Khrushchev, kept calling out: "YOU GOT SOMETHING FOR ME?! HUH?! YOU GOT SOMETHING FOR ME?!"God, he was making me nervous. Finally, with the clock tick-tick-ticking, I threw up my hands and said: " Country music."

Harry A. Deems, who retired as home delivery manager of the News American in 1975, died March 7 of a ruptured aneurysm at his home in Northeast Baltimore. He was 82.Mr. Deems began his newspaper career in 1933 in the circulation department of the Baltimore News-Post. When the paper closed, he moved to the News American, where he worked as home delivery manager for 30 years.He did not miss a day of work in his 42-year career.Mr. Deems earned a reputation with young newspaper carriers as a tough boss.

Today, people will grab Ogden Nash, tackle Anne Tyler and rough up Russell Baker.The displays of rudeness will occur at the 33rd annual Smith College Club used-book sale, a literary bazaar for Baltimoreans with short budgets and hearty reading appetites. The sale ends Sunday.It's hard to say whether this sale is Baltimore's literary rite of spring or the city's way to clutter a home library. Readers and book collectors love the event. I have never heard of anyone who left the Towson Armory without buying at least one book.

Last week's column about presidential cussing brought an unusual amount of e-mail from readers who either agreed with the column or were annoyed by its subject matter. Some were strictly reflective of the correspondent's political persuasion, while others raised that old complaint about the liberal bias of the press. Of the sources that I contacted for the column, Russell Baker, former Sun reporter and noted columnist, author and Pulitzer Prize-winner, came in for the most drubbing. "A reading of the body of Ronald Reagan's correspondence and speeches over the years demonstrates that he personally scripted the overwhelming majority of it," wrote Robert Loskot.

THERE WAS once a Baltimore where one could walk the streets without worrying about getting mugged, where one traveled by street car, when real people lived in the city and those in Glen Burnie or Cockeysville were farmers; when one could drop down to The Block for a couple of beers to leer at a young Blaze Starr or guffaw at Battleship Maggie without worrying about one's moral fitness.It was a time when television was something dumb and fuzzy on a round screen in a big box, nothing dazzling like the store windows on Howard Street.