Growing Up by Russell Baker Essay Example

five-years-old. This was Baker's first experience with tragedy and he was caught virtually unaware. Two days before the family had dressed in their best clothes and driven five miles away to Taylorstown to spend the night with Uncle Miller. Russell was excited to be traveling so far from home. During supper that night Baker's father was forced to leave the table. Baker remembers that everyone sat there "not saying a word, listening to him outside vomiting (Baker, 1982, p. 58). This was the first time Baker had much indication that his father was severely ill.

Baker's mother told him that his father was ill and was being taken to the hospital by a doctor. When Baker kissed his father good-bye his father told him, "Daddy'll be home in a day or two. Be a good boy till I get back" (Baker, 1982, 59). That was the last time Baker saw his father alive. The next morning at 4:00 a. m. Benny Baker died while in a diabetic coma. As will happen in a small town other people in town knew it before Russell did. He was told by his cousin. "'Your father's dead,' he said. It was like an accusation that my father had done something criminal, and I jumped to his defense. He is not,' I said" (Baker, 1982, p. 60).

As he ran home, he became convinced his cousin had been right. Women relatives had swarmed on the house and were clean and cooking in preparation of the funeral and funeral meals. Baker was sent to Bessie Scott's house so he wouldn't be in the way. Sitting at Bessie's kitchen table, Baker cried himself out.

For the first time the little boy thought about God and "decided that God was a lot less interested in the people than anybody in Morrisonville would admit" (Baker, 1982, p. 61). At the age of five Russell Baker had become a sceptic.

Once his father died, women affected much of Baker's childhood. There was not of interaction with men. However, it doesn't appear to be the case that his death made any difference. His mother was at the very least a formidable woman. She tried to reform men as if that were her calling in life "she had tried it [to reform] on her brothers without much success. When she married she had tried it on my father with no success at all" (Baker, 1982, p. 18). That left her with all her reforming energies focused on her only son, Russell Baker.

Lucy Elizabeth Baker moved her family from rural Virginia to Newark, New Jersey in 1931. They stayed with his Uncle Allen and Aunt Pat. He recalls a time when a "streetwise" girl who towered over him promised to give him cake. When he went with her to her house she told him he had to remove his pants before he could have the cake. Baker had no objection, "[b]eing only five years old, I still wore short pants, and since authoritative maternal women had been removing my pants all of my life, I let her have her way" (Baker, 1982, p. 73).

In chapter seven Baker writes about a romance between is mother and Oluf, a baker by occupation if not by name. The romance was held mostly be letter since Oluf traveled. It's a

very sad tale. The letters Baker includes in the book detail Oluf's life during that period. He was optimistic throughout 1931, but his optimism gradually failed. In the spring of 1932 he lost all of his property because he was unable to pay his taxes and asked Lucy Elizabeth to not write him anymore letters. Baker concludes the chapter with a sad, melancholy, "Oluf disappeared into the depression.

My mother's hopes for finding love and security vanished with him ((Baker, 1982, p. 89). In 1932 they moved to Belleville New Jersey. This was at the depth of the Great Depression and money and jobs were at a premium. While they lived there, Lucy Elizabeth determined to help Russell "make something of himself. " This was the She got him a job selling the Saturday Evening Post, thirty copies each week. He was completely unsuited for the job. After three years, she decided he didn't have the personality for sales. The Bakers next moved to Baltimore.

Baker worked as a newsboy. Shortly after Baker entered high school, his mother married Herbert "Herb" Orrison. Baker reacted negatively to this. He gave Herb the silent treatment and would have nothing to do with him. Baker even refused invitations to go to a ballgame (baseball was his favorite sport), to go for ice cream or for a chance to learn to drive Herb's car. Herb remained remarkably patient and as an adult Russell had matured enough to accept him and learned to like him. Shortly after they married, they had a baby girl they named her Mary Leslie.

At this time, Lucy Elizabeth Orrison, Russell Baker's mother, decided it would be best

if they moved from their apartment so they purchased a house in Baltimore. At this time Baker was in his last year of high school. He had no thought that he might go to college so he assumed he would go to work in some job. He had however, been toying with the idea of becoming a writer, but did not consider it a real job for a lower class boy, but something rich people did. He applied for and received a scholarship to Johns Hopkins.

In October 1943 Baker entered the Navy Air Corp. He trained as a navy pilot, but the war ended in 1945 before he was deployed. He returned to Baltimore where he met the young woman he would later marry, Mimi. He re-enrolled at Johns Hopkins and studied journalism. Upon graduation he began his lifelong career in journalism by becoming a reporter for the Baltimore Sun. Clearly Lucy Elizabeth was a heroine in the thirties. She kept the family together and provided for them. "If anyone had told me we were poor, I would have been astounded.

According to Baker, since her relationship with Oluf had come to a tragic end, his mother would "spend her middle years turning me into the man who would redeem her failed youth (Baker, 1982, p. 94). I found Baker's relationship to his mother to be fascinating. It strikes me as being very Freudian. Throughout his youth Baker was embarrassed about anything to do with the human body, particularly the female human body. Just as his mother had wanted him to be a good man, she had instilled in him that he should marry a "good

girl.

Although Baker had multiple opportunities to lose his virginity, Baker may well be the only non-priest who was in the military during World War II to celebrate VJ Day as a virgin. Obviously Baker's mother had influenced him greatly. I enjoyed reading this book. It was well written, at times charming, at times very sad, and sometimes sensitive almost to the point of being overly sentimental. It was refreshing to read a memoir that does not spend all of its pages detailing what a horrible life he or she lived. Instead, Baker remembers his life, warts and all, and is mature enough to accept it all, both the good and the bad.