It’s the birthday of Russell Baker (1925-2019, #nicelonglife), the celebrated newspaper columnist, humorist, and host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre who won one Pulitzer for commentary and another Pulitzer for biography and who later served on the Pulitzer Prize board. (Ah HA.)

Baker was born into extreme poverty in Loudoun County, Virginia. When he was five, his father drank moonshine, went into a diabetic coma, and died. His mother was left with three children and gave the youngest, a baby girl, to relatives to raise. She and Russell and his other sister lived with her brother and survived the Great Depression on his income as a butter salesman. (I know that must have been a brutally hard life, but doesn’t it also sound delicious? Butter. Mm.)

Baker attended high school in Baltimore, studied English at Johns Hopkins University (with a couple years off to serve in the Navy—but was never sent abroad), and began his journalism career at The Baltimore Sun in 1947 as a night police reporter. In 1954 he switched to the Washington bureau of The New York Times, covering the State Department (which bored him), Congress, and the White House. He was restless until finally in 1962 he got permission to write a largely satirical column called “The Observer”—a column that ultimately ran until Christmas Day, 1998. A collection of his columns in 1979 won him the first ever Pulitzer given for humorous commentary, and he began publishing more collections (So This Is Depravity, 1980; The Rescue of Miss Yaskell and Other Pipe Dreams, 1983).

Baker’s memoir, Growing Up (1982), won him a second Pulitzer, and he published a sequel, The Good Times, in 1989. His other books include An American in Washington (1960), Poor Russell’s Almanac (1972), and Looking Back: Heroes, Rascals, and Other Icons of the American Imagination (2002), among others.

Baker married Miriam Emily Nash in 1950. They had three children and were married until her death at 88 in 2015.

When Baker was once asked by college students what courses a journalism school should offer, he responded: “The ideal journalism school needs only one course. Students should be required to stand outside a closed door for six hours. Then the door would open, someone would put his head around the jamb and say, ‘No comment.’ The door would close again, and the students would be required to write 800 words against a deadline.”

Have a bittersweet Wednesday still laden with summer’s glories yet tinged with thoughts of school supplies and stay scrupulously honest to the data.