Maybe it’s something I ate, but I’ve had an incredible appetite recently for newspaper columnists. They’re a dying breed, these “pencil pushers.” When the bean counters start looking at places to cut staff, why pay for someone’s inflamed ego?

“I think columnists have become less of a priority for some newspaper editors. One, they simply don’t understand how important good columnists are to their franchise. Two, good columnists can be a handful to deal with, and if they’re really good, they provoke controversy on occasion. And three, good columnists generally cost real money.” – Ellen Soeteber, editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Reporters serve meat and potatoes. I make goulash, which, depending on luck and ambition, may include facts, opinions (well-founded or half-baked), and suppositions (right, wrong or we’ll never know). It could be my particular column is not to your taste and, of course, whether to spit or swallow is your call.” – Amy Pagnozzi of the Hartford Courant

(more from “What ever happened to local columnists?)

I recently ordered a book called “Baker’s Best: Selected Essays of Rick Baker.” See, Rick Baker was a columnist at my place of work in the 1980s before his life ended suddenly in a car accident. The only reason I’d know such a thing is because our managing editor Jack Brimeyer recently retired and decided to print a previously spiked column about Jack’s heralded arrival at the Peoria Journal Star. Baker didn’t think much of it, to say the least. But the frankness and simplicity of his writing sent me on a mad dash to find some of his old work. (more memories on Baker)

Here’s a few examples from several different columns (some courtesy Don):

All the “how it plays in Peoria” stories are naturally dumb, because all the reporters who come here and do them are dumb. If they weren’t, they’d find real stories where they live.
They all read like: “I been to Peoria, the heartland. I seen a river with ducks. I ate a chicken and a potato. I seen Big Al’s and a factory that was closed. Yes, I seen America.” – 1984

Ronald Reagan and I are good friends. Reagan and I go back to 1976, when I was standing in a Champaign airport trying to get some gum off my shoe with a popsicle stick. Reagan was running against Gerald Ford in the primaries and had just gotten off a plane. I’d been assigned to cover Reagan, but I’d forgotten the film and didn’t have enough money to buy anymore. So while I was working the gum off the shoe he brushed by and said something – I’m not sure what it was. It sounded like: “You’re a fine journalist, Baker,” or: “Look at that fool.” – 1982

Re: a government affairs cable network documentary on then-U.S. Rep. Bob Michel:
At this point my arm bumped a control that switched the channel. I was 45 minutes into the 4-hour program about Bob Michel and was going to turn it right back, except the channel flipped to “The Beverly Hillbillies,” It was the one about Jethro becoming a brain surgeon and I’d only seen it three times before. – 1984

Re: His first drive after the 65 mph speed limit was legalized:
At 64 (mph), I begin to feel my face flattening out, like in those old astronaut movies where everybody’s face gets flat, and they start getting real red and shaky like my old man when I’d bring home report cards.
I try to keep my hands on the wheel despite all the pressure against them, and the skin of my knuckles has been pressed back around my elbows. By now my ears are flapping against my head, and they’re really starting to bug me. I knew I should have taped them down. – 1987