The New York Times, by Russell Baker

By Russell Baker

The papers keep saying the dollar is very weak. This is nonsense. The truth is that the dollar is absolutely powerless. I sent one out for a pound of cheese the other day and it was thrown out of the shop for giving itself airs.

I used to send the dollar to the grocery with orders to bring back a pound of coffee. I figured this would teach it humility. Instead, it went into a severe depression which psychiatry couldn't cure because it has no way of treating a dollar unless accompanied by 34 others, which I didn't have at the time.

The reason I didn't have them was that one of the children had just stopped by and asked to borrow $470. The measure of how impotent the dollar has become is that children trying to cadge money no longer ask you for a quarter, but for $470. Another measure is that a parent can now borrow a dollar from a child without having to promise to take that child on the roller coaster the following Saturday.

I lent the kid the $470. His grandfather was shocked. "How do you expect children to learn the value of money?" he inquired. I was about to administer a poultice and put him to bed with a nice cup of sassafras tea and the latest list of automobile spare-parts prices when the doors caved in.

Not literally, of course. The tax people are nicer than everyone thinks. Still, they were pretty angry In their polysyllabic way and endless subordinate clauses, and you couldn't blame them.

I had sent a dollar to the newsstand for papers. The tax people naturally wanted their share of it, but it had outraced them and been battered down to a mere 35 cents by the newspaper seller before they could reach it. They were getting soft. It was the first dollar that had outrun a tax man since the South Vietnamese ruling families skipped to Switzerland with the United States Treasury.

There was nothing to do but soothe them with dollars, although what they wanted with them I don't know. Neither did Grandfather. "You'd never satisfy me with a dollar that couldn't give you more than 35 cents change after buying three newspapers," he said. "In my day, with a dollar you could buy a Hearst newspaper and weigh yourself 98 times."

Poor Grandfather. He was really out of it. ''A penny saved is a dollar earned," he said. The tax people were sympathetic and left without taxing him for being a priceless antique, although they pointed out that if I died before he did his value could create estate-tax problems for my heirs.

Tax problems! It was to laugh. I had plans for Grandá father. Curators of the museums of three continents were already dickering for the right to display him. Mounted handsomely behind velvet ropes, running on about the value of money and a penny saved, he would be a bigger museum draw than a petrified dodo egg. If only I could keep him pure, untainted.

For this purpose I had kept him In the dark for years about the price of shoes. Whenever I assembled the dollars required to buy new shoes he would gaze at them disapprovingly. "Buying another new car?" he would ask. "Yes, Grandfather," I would say. "You just bought a new car last year," he would say. "Nowadays, Grandfather," I would say, "they wear out at the heels faster than they used to."

"No wonder," he would say. "They ought to put tires on 'em the way they used to." My plan, of course, was not to sell him. I may be cruel but I am no fool. You don't get a priceless grandfather from me for a basket of dollars too weak to stand up to a pound of cheese. No. I intended to trade him for a tract of ocean-front real estate, the perfect hedge against inflation, preferably on the Swiss Riviera.

One day, however, during my absence one of the children who wanted to cadge movie money broke the padlock and braced Grandfather. Grandfather gave him a dime, the sum that had often bought him a double feature plus a cartoon, a Ted Fio Rilo short subject, an installment of "The Black Ace Flies Again" and previews of coming attractions.

"Cut the horsing around, Grandpa," the child said. "I need $4.50 plus 35 cents for a candy bar and 50 cents for popcorn." It was the end of my villa in Switzerland. The child wept, of course. I blotted his tears with dollar bills.”

By Russell Baker

Here is a letter of friendly advice. "Be serious," it says. What it means, of course, is, "Be solemn." The distinction between being serious and being solemn seems to be vanishing among Americans, just as surely as the distinction between "now" and "presently" and the distinction between liberty and making a mess.

Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. You probably have to be born serious, or at least go through a very interesting childhood. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared to adults as a class.

Adults, on the whole, are solemn. The transition from seriousness to solemnity occurs in adolescence, a period in which Nature, for reasons of her own, plunges people into foolish frivolity. During this period the organism struggles to regain dignity by recovering childhood's genius for seriousness. It is usually a hopeless cause.

As a result, you have to settle for solemnity. Being solemn has almost nothing to do with being serious, but on the other hand, you can't go on being adolescent forever, unless you are in the performing arts, and anyhow most people can't tell the difference. In fact, though Americans talk a great deal about the virtue of being serious, they generally prefer people who are solemn over people who are serious.

In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like General Eisenhower. This is probably because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, especially in politics, but comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is as commonplace as jogging.

Jogging is solemn. Poker is serious. Once you grasp that distinction, you are on your way to enlightenment.

To promote the cause, I submit the following list from which the vital distinction should emerge more clearly.

(1) Shakespeare is serious. David Suskind is solemn.

(2) Chicago is serious. California is solemn.

(3) Blow-dry hair stylings on anchor men for local television shows are solemn. Henry James is serious.

(4) Falling in love, getting married, having children, getting divorced and fighting over who gets the car and the Wedgewood are all serious. The new sexual freedom is solemn.

(5) Playboy is solemn. The New Yorker is serious.

(6) S.J. Perelman is serious. Norman Mailer is solemn.

(7) The Roman Empire was solemn. Periclean Athens was serious.

(8) Arguing about "structured programs" of anything is solemn. So are talking about "utilization," attending conferences on the future of anything, and group bathing when undertaken for the purpose of getting to know yourself better, or at the prescription of a swami. Taking a long walk by yourself during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Cartier’s is serious.

(9) Washington is solemn. New York is serious. So is Las Vegas, but Miami Beach is solemn.

(10) Humphrey Bogart movies about private eyes and Randolph Scott movies about gunslingers are serious. Modern movies that are sophisticated jokes about Humphrey Bogart movies and Randolph Scott movies are solemn.

Making lists, of course, is solemn, but this is permissible in newspaper columns, because newspaper columns are solemn. They strive, after all, to reach the mass audience, and the mass audience is solemn, which accounts for the absence of seriousness in television, paperback books found in airport bookracks, the public school systems of America, wholesale furniture outlets, shopping centers and American-made automobiles.

I make no apology for being solemn rather than serious. Nor should anyone else. It is the national attitude. It is perfectly understandable. It is hard to be Periclean Athens. It is hard to be Shakespeare. It is hard to be S.J. Perelman. It is hard to be serious.

And yet, one cannot go on toward eternity without some flimsy attempt at dignity. Adolescence will not do. One must at least make the effort to resume childhood's lost seriousness, and so, with the best of intentions, one tries his best, only to end up being vastly, uninterestingly solemn.

Writing sentences that use "One" as a pronoun is solemn. Making pronouncements on American society is solemn. Turning yourself off when pronouncements threaten to gush is not exactly serious, although it shows a shred of wisdom.

By Russell Baker

Greta Garbo wanted to be alone, but most people didn't. They thought It exotic. That one .of the great beauties of the age should choose loneliness when all humanity was available for her companionship seemed spooky and probably added to Garbo's allure by suggesting a dark preference in tastes that was utterly alien to the American zest for human commotion.

This was in time past, in the 1930's and 1940's, when Sweden and solitude were still as remote as Cambodia and sheriffs campaigning for the homosexual vote. In time present, loneliness seems to be the aspiration of depressingly large numbers of Americans. Looking at the growing numbers of persons proclaiming happiness from the solitude of private burrows, you wonder whether we are becoming a race that is simply afraid of people or whether we are finding such joy in self-love that it can only be spoiled by human contact.

Youth is reluctant to marry. When it does, it Is reluctant to produce children, but quick to divorce. When men and women live together, in wedlock or out, the arrangement Is often formalized as a "relationship." Sometimes this Is defined in legal contracts, as though It were a deal for an exchange of services between parties who distrust each other.

These "relationships" are commonly designed to provide the parties with escape clauses to be invoked when long-term human involvement produces its inevitable messiness. The distaste for the messiness of human relationships is not new, of course. It has always been a characteristic of one of the stock comic figures or American society, the crotchety bachelor who avoids entangling alliance because he can't stand babies' diapers and women's stockings drying over his bathtub.

What made the bachelor comic was his willful refusal to undertake life's interesting complications, the sterility of the life he deliberately chose because he was too timid to try the water. Nowadays, however, the bachelor is no longer the source of comic literature and film but a figure of admiration whose example is celebrated as a happy adjustment to the exigencies of a mean-spirited society.

The women's movement attempts to lionize the female bachelor. Newspapers, books and magazines recite happy tales of women who, having successfully skirted the perils of husbands and nest-building, have found contented anchorage in private harbors alone with their TV sets, their books, their wine, their pictures, their telephones and their self-fulfillment.

This is a long remove from the day when settlers traveled heavy miles a few times a yáear to escape the loneliness of prairie solitude in quilting bees and harvest feasts. A long distance even from a not-so-distant time when Americans pulled out of one-horse towns and dusty backwaters and poured into New York seeking people, life, adventure, love and the messiness of human connections.

Nowadays Americans come to New York to be alone, and the drift toward loneliness is nowhere better illustrated than In the changing sexual customs. A recent report In The New York Times tells of a spreading "asexuality'' among New Yorkers. Increasing numbers of persons, it states, are finding that abstinence from sex develops into atrophy of sexual appetite, which makes it quite easy for them to live contentedly without sex.

Not long ago a man told me or a woman who went to an "asexual bar" to pick up men because she could be sure there was no risk of any human involvement. I thought he was joking, but now it seems entirely probable that ''asexual bars" will sprout throughout the city to accommodate the growing demand for places where people who want to be alone can do so with people like themselves.

"Asexuality" was preceded by "solosexuality," a practice, heavily dependent upon machinery, which permitted people toá subdue the natural instinct for human companionship with the aid of mechanical devices and illustrated manuals on the art of being your own irresistible lover.

"Solosexuallty" developed out of "omnlsexuality," a product of improved contraceptive technology which permitted people to satisfy the craving for human relationships almost as readily as the craving for an afternoon newspaper, and without much more risk of human involvement. "Asexuality," however, opens the possibility of a society in which perfect loneliness can finally be achieved.

There is a rather elegant nursing home I visit from time to time. In a certain wing almost everyone Is totally alone except, now and then, for the occasional visit of someone like myself, the small residue of long forgotten, messy human relationships. Minds wander in the past here, coming to rest briefly in a moment in 1910 when a younger brother got a thrashing from his daddy, then lurching forty years ahead to the moment of a son's marriage, a husband's death. Loneliness is almost absolute to the visitor unable to cross into those dead worlds. He realizes that he may very well end here if he jogs assiduously and avoids tobacco. And If so, will there be people out of the past, people who have to be married, people who have to be buried, day after day, to pass the time? If not, what a loneliness.

By Russell Baker

Mrs. M.L. of Hackensack had passed out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York Friday just before the bullets started flying and, so, did not get shot. Even had she been there during the gunplay the odds on her escaping would have been excellent.

This does not comfort her. Mrs. M.L. is not impressed by odds. The odds against her being accidentally destroyed during air travel are far higher than the odds against her being shot beaten, mugged or raped in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but this does not persuade her to fly. In fact, she had chosen to travel by bus because she firmly believes that any airplane she boards will defy the odds and fall down.

I have all this from a Jetter she sends from New England where she is on vacation. "l was reluctant to take a vacation at all," she says, "and now that I am here, I am reluctant to come back. Because of my psychological handicap, I am unable to fly. Train travel is virtually nonexistent, and now that I understand the probability of being killed or maimed in the bus station, I am at a complete loss as to how to get back home.''

The automobile, of course, is out of the question. This is not merely because a new car nowadays costs more than a three-bedroom house cost when Mrs. M.L. first turned to heavy consumption and, therefore, seems as extravagant as buying a yacht. It is also because Mrs. M.L. worries about the energy crisis and fears being denounced as one of those disgusting squanderers of gasoline who increase air pollution and the balance of payments deficit by burning valuable petroleum for non-productive travel.

In any event, Mrs. M.L. has been so terrified by warnings from various high-minded safety institutions about the perils of highway travel that could not possibly drive without first tranquilizing herself with large doses of alcohol.

This she refuses to do. Having been fully informed by a rich variety of uplift organizations that alcohol leads to the evils of alcoholism, she never lets anything livelier than seltzer pass her lips.

Not taking alcohol is only one among many pastimes Mrs. M.L. is eschewing on her vacation, upon the advice of learned persons. She is not taking soft drinks because of their high sugar content which causes tooth decay. She is not taking diet soft drinks because the saccharin causes cancer in mice.

"While I am not certain I am a mouse," she writes, "the high amount of timidity I feel in the presence of almost everything makes it inadvisable for me to take chances.”

Naturally, Mrs. M.L. Is not eating any hamburger either. Hamburger-eating mice have turned up with cancer. Vegetables are out. Who knows what lethal chemical sprays they contain?

Her plans to play tennis were ruined when she arrived in New England and remembered that she had forgotten to have a heart examination before leaving Hackensack. Even if she hadn't, it would have been out of the question.

The only tennis courts there, are outdoors in the sunshine. Since being warned that exposure to sun causes cancer, Mrs. M.L. never goes outdoors without carrying an open umbrella, which plays hob with her backhand.

She can take an umbrella to the beach, of course, and carry it with her while floating in the ocean, but her acquaintances are so embarrassed about being seen floating with a woman carrying an umbrella that she can no longer get anyone to go in with her. And so, heeding warnings never to swim alone, she avoids the water by staying home.

Until a few years ago she passed time by fishing the streams. This is impossible now that she has been warned the streams are filled with dreadful, possibly radioactive, industrial wastes, and that any fish she catches might speed her smoothly toward the grave. She doesn't eat swordfish either, not since the Government warned her they contained mercury.

With so little she can do and practically nothing she can eat these days, Mrs. M.L. had planned a unique bit of vacation fun this year. She had decided she would spend her vacation eating lead.

Just before leaving Hackensack, however, she read in the papers that some scientists have found that people who eat lead end up with lower scores on I.Q. tests than people who abstain.

"The news that lead causes low I.Q. has left me at wit's end as to what to do with myself up here," she writes, "which makes me wonder if I have been eating lead these past few years without realizing it."

This worries her, and she fears that worrying will lead to high blood pressure, so she has quit eating salt, except for a small serving of poached salt at breakfast time. She worries about what she will eat if science discovers that salt causes cancer in mice. She is worried about worrying. She is worried about getting home through the Port Authority Bus Terminal. She is worried about the possibility of falling in love with a smoker who will endanger her health with his used cigarette fumes.

She has closed all the doors and would like to lie down and breathe, tf only she didn't have to worry about prowlers.

By Russell Baker

A show-business man told me recently of an actor who turned down a role because it required him to die at the end of the movie. The actor thought it would be bad for his career. Having enjoyed a run of successes during the past few years, he felt like a man with a future and believed that dying might put an end to it.

Whatever his motives, this actor deserves a standing ovation. Dying threatens to replace getting the cattle to Abilene as the central theme of American theatrical and cinematic endeavor. Jack Lemmon is getting laughs by dying on Broadway, and Burt Reynolds - Burt Reynolds! - is dying in his latest movie.

The big prize winner on Broadway last year was about dying, and this season we have had "Cold Storage," which the critics also applauded. Its subject is aptly described by the title. All this occurs at a moment when educational gurus are urging curricula that acquaint the young with the facts of death right along with the facts of the multiplication tables, and it is widely acclaimed as healthy.

Maybe it is, although in my experience things that are widely acclaimed as healthy usually tum out to be bad for you. I remember when they used to say sunshine, plenty of milk and eggs and a good thick steak were healthy. Now they say they're all terrible for you.

Dying, of course, has always been an important dramatic activity, but it is usually fitted into other entertaining events. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, John Ford, Warner Brothers - all the giants had people dying in droves, but these people didn't just sit around for two or three hours waiting to die, as people do in the new style.

Dying, let us face it, is a very ordinary activity. As Tolstoy illustrated in "Anna Karenina," it can even become unbearably tiresome on the audience - Kitty and Levin in the Tolstoy book - if not necessarily to the party undergoing the experience.

This spate of entertainments about the humdrum of dying probably reflects the disappearance of the old entertainment moguls. By moguls, I refer to studio heads like Louis B. Mayer, Harry Cohn and Sam Goldwyn, who were always referred to in the Hollywood copy as "moguls." The word became so firmly attached to Louis B. Mayer that I have always thought of him as Louis B. Mogul.

None of the moguls would have put up with anybody on the lot who wanted to make a movie about people sitting around waiting to die. With showmen's instinct, they knew that death was ordinary and, hence, had to be elevated into a big moment when it was used. Occasionally, though very rarely, it was necessary for a star to die at the end of the show.

When this had to happen, the death scene customarily took as long as an afternoon at "Die Walkure" and often, in the final shot, the deceased star would be revivified up in the clouds doing something vital.

When Cecil B. DeMille was compelled to kill Gary Cooper as Wild Bill Hickok in "The Plainsman," he didn't shrug it or with a quick fade-out. He sent in Jean Arthur for a long bout of weeping, made Gary's eyelids flutter in a close-up, and then closed with a beautiful shot of Gary up in the sky driving a team of horses hitched to a wagon with Jean Arthur beside him. How Jean got up into the clouds is a question that had never bothered me until this very moment, such is the power of a really good mogul.

There is a story of Louis B. Mayer flying into a rage after seeing footage of an Andy Hardy scene in which Mickey Rooney, as Andy, was praying for the life of his ostensibly dying mother. The director had shown Andy standing at Mother Hardy's bed in prayer. "When Andy Hardy prays, he gets down on his knees," Mayer is said to have screamed. The scene was reshot.

Andy got down on his knees. Mother Hardy recovered. If you dealt with death, Mayer seemed to believe, you didn't handle it as an ordinary event, you did it in a big way.

The moguls all are gone now. I asked Calvin Trillin, an authority on such things, what happened to the moguls. He tells me they were replaced by the wheeler-dealers, but that the wheeler-dealers have mostly vanished too, and are being replaced by the hustlers.

I don't know that the hustlers are particularly interested in the humdrum of death. But, being hustlers, they are apt to have little time for the details of multimillion-dollar schemes brought to them by actors and independent filmmakers. Since people of this class usually have to be middle-aged to get a hustler's ear, it is only natural that they would be bemused by death and intent on working out their own philosophies about it in their productions. The philosophies of such persons are likely to be humdrum, commonplace and unedifying.

Though death is ordinary, for each of us individually it is too big a moment to be reduced to ordinary entertainment. The moguls may not have had much philosophy, but they understood our commonplace need to associate the end with grandeur, or at least a little tinsel.

By Russell Baker

A long time ago I lived in a crossroads village of northern Virginia and during its summer enjoyed innocence and never knew boredom, although nothing of consequence happened there.

Seven houses of varying lack of distinction constituted the community. Α dirt road meandered off toward the mountain where a bootleg still supplied whisky to the men of the countryside, and another dirt road ran down to the creek. My cousin Kenneth and I would sit on the bank and fish with earthworms. One day we killed a copperhead which was basking on a rock nearby. That was unusual

The heat of summer was mellow and produced tweet scents which lay in the air so damp and rich you could almost taste them. Mornings smelled of purple wisteria, afternoons of the wild roses which tumbled over stone fences, and evenings of honeysuckle.

Even by standards of that time it was a primitive place. There was no electricity. Roads were unpaved. In our house there was no plumbing. The routine of summer days was shaped by these deficiencies. Lacking electric lights, one went early to bed and rose while the dew was still in the grass. Kerosene lamps were cleaned and polished in an early‐morning hubbub of women, and children were sent to the spring for fresh water.

This afforded a chance to see whether the crayfish population had multiplied Later, a trip to the outhouse would afford a chance to daydream in the Sears, Roebuck Catalogue, mostly about shotguns and bicycles.

With no electricity, radio was not available for pacifying the young. One or two people did have radios that operated on mail‐order batteries about the size of a present‐day car battery, but these were not for children, though occasionally, you might be invited in to hear “Amos ‘n’ Andy.”

All I remember about “Amos ‘n’ Andy” at that time is that it was strange hearing voices come out of furniture. Much later I was advised that listening to “Amos ‘n’ Andy” was racist and was grateful that I hadn't heard much.

In the summer no pleasures were to be had indoors. Everything of delight occurred in the world outside. In the flowers there were hummingbirds to be seen, tiny wings fluttering so fast that the birds seemed to have no wings at all.

In the heat of mid-afternoon the women would draw the blinds, spread blankets on the floor for coolness and nap, while in the fields the cattle herded together in the shade of spreading trees to escape the sun. Afternoons were absolutely still, yet filled with sounds.

Bees buzzed in the clover. Far away over the fields the chug of an ancient steam‐powered threshing machine could be faintly heard Birds rustled under the tin porch of the roof.

Rising dust along the road from the mountains: signaled an approaching event. A car was coming “Car's coming” someone would say. People emerged from houses. The approaching dust was studied. Guesses were hazarded about whom it might contain.

Then — a big moment in the day the car would cruise past.

“Who was it?”

“I didn't get a good look.”

“It looked like Packy Painter to me.”

“Couldn't have been Packy. Wasn't his car.”

The stillness resettled itself as gently as the dust, and you could wander past the henhouse and watch a hen settle herself to perform the mystery of laying an egg. For livelier adventure there was the field that contained the bull. There, one could test his courage by seeing how far he dared venture before running back through the fence.

The men drifted back with the falling sun, steaming with heat and fatigue, and washed in tin basins with water hauled in buckets from the spring. I knew a few of their secrets, such as who kept his whisky hidden in a mason jar behind the lime barrel, and what they were really doing when they excused themselves from the kitchen and stepped out into the orchard and stayed out there laughing too hard.

I also knew what the women felt about it, though not what they thought. Even then I could see that matters between women and men could become very difficult and, sometimes, so difficult that they spoiled the air of summer.

At sunset people sat on the porches. As dusk deepened, the lightening bugs came out to be caught and bottled. As twilight edged into night, a bat swooped across the road. I was not afraid of bats then, although I feared ghosts, which made the approach of bedtime in a room where even the kerosene lamp would quickly be doused seem terrifying.

I was even more afraid of toads and specifically of the toad which lived under the porch steps and which, everyone assured me would, if touched, give me warts. One night I was allowed to stay up until the stars were in full command of the sky. A woman of great age was dying in the village and it was considered fit to let the children stay abroad into the night. As four of us sat there we saw there a shooting star and someone said, “Make a wish.”

I did not know what that meant. I didn't know anything to wish for.

By Russell Baker

Norman Rockwell and I never saw things eye to eye when we worked together on The Saturday Evening Post. Norman was illustrating covers and I was trying to sell the finished product. The selling was hard labor.

I would strap on my roller skates, sling a canvas bag containing two dozen Saturday Evening Posts over my shoulder and begin by ringing doorbells. The sales pitch was simple: "Want to buy a Saturday Evening Post?" As the week progressed, it became tinged with subtle pathos: "You don't want to buy a Saturday Evening Post, I suppose?"

During the final day or two of each week's sales campaign, when the imminent arrival of next week's batch of Posts loomed like the Wehrmacht massing on the borders of the soul, I would post myself at a strategic traffic light and dart among idling cars shouting, "Saturday Evening Post!"

In good weeks, the sales profit ran as high as 25 cents, which, even though a nickel could buy three apples in those days, did not strike me as the kind of revenue that was going to induce J.P. Morgan to put out the red carpet when I arrived to establish a line of credit.

It was clear to me that the fault was largely Norman’s. Although I was only eight or nine, or ten at the time, I had seen enough of the mass market to realize that Norman's vision of reality was hopelessly askew. The world whose doorbell I rang hungered for tales of illicit passion, gore and depravity, and was shameless about saying so.

Mounting three flights of stairs on wheeled feet, banging at apartment door, flashing Norman's vision of America, I would be met by a slattern in beer fumes declaring the only magazine she wanted was True Confessions.

Men sat around the house in their undershirts growing whiskers in that America. Permanent unemployment tends to make a man indifferent to the dictates of Gentlemen's Quarterly and sour of temper toward midgets on roller skates peddling Norman's wholesome folks.

"Why don't you sell something good like True Detective?"

" ... Spicy Adventure?"

" … Doc Savage?"

I never told Norman what the world was really like out there. The Saturday Evening Post did not tolerate its business officers trying to interfere with its editorial content. Consequently, Norman never drew a boozy woman in bare feet at the front door announcing her preference for tales of adultery, nor the look in the eye of an unshaven man in his undershirt when he tells you that he'd really rather look at pictures of mutilated bodies (preferably female).

The disagreement between Norman and me was never expressed. As a result, Norman went on painting dogs as winsomely lovable pooches instead of nasty, snarling carnivores ready to pounce at the first sound of a roller skate wheel on the front porch.

Long afterwards it occurred to me that If I had gone to him and said, "Look, Norman, I'm dying out here trying to sell these wholesome characters and phony mutts you're painting," he would have smiled and painted me as an apple-cheeked nine-year-old with a patch on my corduroy knickers and innocence sticking out all over my cowlick. He was that insistent about refusing to see the world as it is instead of as it should be.

When he died the other day, people who have to comment on such things stated that despite his mass audience - perhaps the largest any painter has ever had - he was not an artist but an illustrator. I don't know. There are many definitions of art. Somebody has said that art is a lie that helps us to perceive the truth, and it seems to me that this pretty well expresses what his work was about.

His paintings are graphic fairy tales about Americans. They speak of a people unbelievably decent and innocent. That we were not during the age he painted is beside the point; the fact is that Americans In that time thought of themselves as such. And, indeed, acted on that assumption when the age culminated in World War II.

In "Not So Wild a Dream," one of the definitive books for students of World War II, Eric Sevareid writes that he was frequently astonished and appalled by the innocence in which American soldiers went to death for a purpose of which they understood nothing except that it was fundamentally decent.

This old sense of innocence, which we have now lost, had bleak political consequences, beginning with our refusal to set realistic war alms in the 1940s and ending with the triumph of the notion that the alternative to innocence must be cynicism.

I didn't understand Norman's significance in the old days. All I could see was that he didn't know what it was like trying to sell The Saturday Evening Post on roller skates. He saw things truer than I did. It was an honor to work with him.