Even the deftest of writers might be excused for a little nervous clearing of the throat, perspiration on the palms and other involuntary manifestations of the trembles at the assignment: a cover story on Russell Baker, the humor columnist who writes so deftly himself that he won this year's Pulitzer Prize for commentary. But Contributor John Skow did not flinch. Says Skow: "I've followed Baker's column since he started it 17 years ago. You can tell merely by reading him that he's a very approachable man."

Skow approached Baker at his Nantucket Island retreat, where he found the columnist on his knees, plucking crab grass from a walk, and looking every bit the compulsive suburbanite sometimes mirrored in his column. Skow spent two days with the Baker family. He toured the island, shared the view from a widow's walk atop the house, and discovered that his 17-year impression of Baker was correct. Reports Skow: "He is not a performer. He is a man who lives very much inside his own head, a thoughtful conversationalist who would just as soon listen as talk."

Fortunately, Skow managed to get Baker talking--about himself, his humor, and the process by which he produces three columns a week. The first step: hours of vacant staring over a typewriter. Says Skow, who has dabbled with humorous writing himself in 23 years as a reviewer and journalist: "When I stare off into space, all I see are overdue phone bills. Baker gets a funny idea three times a week, while I get one about every four years. He is astounding."

Elizabeth Rudulph, the reporter-researcher assigned to TIME'S Press section, was not a Baker reader until she began working on this week's cover. "Baker is an acquired taste," says Rudulph, now a convert. "It takes a little more effort to read him, but you get a lot back." She interviewed several of Baker's colleagues at the New York Times, close friends like NBC Anchorman John Chancellor and Author David Halberstam, and a number of other leading humorists, including S.J. Perelman and, in a sense, Benjamin Franklin. (Franklin was the nation's first regularly published humor columnist, and Rudulph dug up an early example of his work.) "Everybody was happy to discuss Baker," says Rudulph. But no one was more pleased than Syndicated Columnist Art Buchwald, Baker's colleague in the American Academy of Humor Columnists, a select and wholly frivolous group. Summed up Buchwald: "Russ should be on TIME'S cover, because he doesn't have too many more good years in him."

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