Prize-Winning N.Y. Times Writer Signs Off

NEW YORK —  Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize winner who amused readers of the New York Times with his gentle humor for 36 years, wrote his final column before retirement Friday, listing some of the historical moments he had the good fortune to witness.

Baker, 73, began writing his nationally syndicated column “Observer” for the Times in 1962.

“Since it is Christmas, a day on which nobody reads a newspaper anyhow, and since this is the last of these columns titled ‘Observer,’ which have been appearing in the Times since 1962, I shall take the otherwise inexcusable liberty of talking about me and newspapers. I love them,” he wrote.

He wrote of meeting Pope John XXIII, receiving an apology from Richard Nixon, watching Charles de Gaulle speaking as if from Olympus, and seeing Nikita S. Khrushchev emerge from a belligerent meeting with President Kennedy to clown with the press.

“Thanks to newspapers,” he wrote, “I have made a four-hour visit to Afghanistan, have seen the Taj Mahal by moonlight, breakfasted at dawn on lamb and couscous while sitting by the marble pool of a Moorish palace in Morocco and once picked up a persistent family of fleas in the Balkans.”

“I could go on and on,” he concluded, “and probably will somewhere sometime, but the time for this enterprise is up. Thanks for listening for the past three million words.”

Baker began his career as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun in 1947 before moving to New York.

He has twice won journalism’s highest honor, the Pulitzer Prize: in 1979 for commentary and in 1983 for the book “Growing Up,” which chronicled his childhood in the backwoods of Virginia. He also won the George Polk Award for commentary in 1979.

Baker succeeded Alistair Cooke in 1993 as the armchair host of public television’s “Masterpiece Theatre.”

As a follow-up to the success of “Growing Up,” Baker wrote “The Good Times,” which recounted his odyssey as a reporter, from writing crime stories for the Sun to stories about the Queen of England.