Country Boy

By DonaldMorrison

GROWING UP by Russell Baker Congdon& Weed; 278 pages; $15

"I| was issued uneventfully into the governance of Calvin Coolidge," writes Russell Baker in this beguiling memoir.

"World War I was seven years past, the Russian Revolution was eight years old, and the music on my grandmother's wind-up Victrola was Yes, We Have No Bananas. Unaware of history's higher significance, I slumbered through the bliss of in fancy, feeling no impulse whatever to make some thing of myself." He did, eventually. Baker's elegantly literate humor column for the New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1979. Yet Baker, born into an age when boys still dreamed of be coming President, refused to dream of becoming anything.

He was the victim of a weak national economy and a line of strong women. The latter included his grandmother, an un challenged matriarch of Morrisonville, Va.; his wife, an orphanage-hardened shopgirl; and especially his mother, who had a "passion for improving the male of the species, which in my case took the form of forcing me to 'make something of my self.' " She had him, at a tender age, delivering newspapers, flogging the Saturday Evening Post and, in preparation for a career in show business, taking banjo lessons.

He failed at everything. "My idea of a perfect afternoon was lying in front of the radio rereading my favorite Big Little Book, Dick Tracy Meets Stooge Viller . . . seeing me having a good time in repose, she was powerless to hide her disgust. 'You've got no more gumption than a bump on a log,' she said," dispatching her errant son on some new mission of self-improvement.

Morrisonville was heavily populated with Bakers, and on soft summer nights young Russell would listen quietly as they gathered on his grandmother's porch to swat flies and swap news. Someone had lost his arm in a thresher accident, some one else had a sick cow, the crops were burning up for lack of rain. A branch of the family in the funeral business was stuck with a monstrously expensive glass coffin. Fortuitously, the area's biggest illegal distiller expired. His widow, impressed with the glass box and its air-tight rubber seal, bought the thing on sight.

"Like most country bootleggers, Sam bottled his moonshine in canning jars," Russell recalls. "The mourners approved of the fitting way in which Liz, as a grace note to his life, had him buried in the fanciest Mason jar ever sold in Loudoun County."

Baker's father was a gentle, good-humored laborer who liked booze and died at 33. They laid him out in the living room. Russell was five. The Depression began to howl. His mother took him and a sister to live with relatives in Newark and later in Baltimore. The world became a gray hell of treeless streets and schoolyard bullies. But Baker had a platoon of entertaining uncles. There was Uncle Hal the blowhard, who turned up en route he said, to a major business deal involving "a forest full of walnut of the finest, rarest quality. Its location was known only to him. He would need great cleverness to keep New York businessmen from wheedling its location out of him, but he wasn't worried. He knew how to handle such men." He stayed for months and left only after wheedling Baker's mother out of much of her bank account.

There was Uncle Charlie the recluse who in his first days as a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle was frequently mistaken for his double, a notorious mobster. Shaken, Charlie never left the house again There was Uncle Harold the liar, who had been shot between the eyes during World War I, seen dead men dance the Charleston in their shrouds and knew for a fact that Franklin D. Roosevelt was accepting cash bribes.

The transplanted country boy recalls it all: "Often, waking deep in the night, [ heard them down in the kitchen talking' talking, talking ... the great Depression pastime. Unlike the movies, talk was free, and a great river of talk flowed through he house, rising at suppertime, and cresting as my bedtime approached." Baker rode that river to his life's work. Forsaking the banjo, he nurtured "the suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."

After Johns Hopkins and the Navy, he took a job on the Baltimore Sun and soon was turning out 5,000 words on a busy night as a rewrite man.

There followed a happy marriage, children, success, fame.

Throughout his early years, Baker remained basically a listener, searching for clues about who he was, and why life could be so rich and yet so difficult. The man who might have had the answers, and whose unspoken presence hangs over the book, drank too much and died too young. After his father's death, writes Baker, "I never cried again with any real conviction, nor expected much of anyone's God except indifference, nor loved deeply without fear that it would cost me dearly in pain." That is, of course, what growing up is about. A pity anyone has to endure it. A blessing Russell Baker chose to recall it. --By Donald Morrison

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