Kindergarten Graduate, 1957

After years of covering Mafia trials and plane crashes, Super Bowls and championship bouts ending with the mumbled words "No mas," I discovered the joys of placing my byline over a recipe for peach cobbler.

Recording 'Artist,' 1979

Editor & Publisher, 1994

Actor, as TJ, 1997

     No, uh, that was David Copperfield. Before he learned a few magic tricks.

     As the author of more than 30 published books, most about food and drink, I trained for my numbingly difficult and unpleasant career the best way I knew how. I arranged to be born in New Orleans, to parents who spent most nights sitting at the kitchen table, drinking Dixie beer and debating recipes in New Orleans cookbooks. I also, later in life, managed to eat my way (on almost no money) through 120 foreign countries - becoming deathly ill in only two of them, Mexico and Egypt. I love both places anyway. If I recall, both featured some kind of pyramids.

     I had the usual array of dreams growing up: saying on one TV kids show I wanted to be a fireman, playing football, singing and strumming in a rock band, boxing because I idolized Muhammad Ali but then hating to spill blood (especially my own), deciding to be an infantry commander after seven viewings of "Patton." As it turned out, the one job that tied all desires together was "writer." As a writer, I was hungry for life, for love, for sex, for violence, for meaning, for your basic stuff to write about. Somewhere along the way, I discovered I was also just plain hungry. My fate was sealed.

     I lucked into worldwide acclaim as THE food editor of United Press International. After years of covering Mafia trials and plane crashes, Super Bowls and championship bouts ending with the mumbled words "No mas," I discovered the joys of placing my byline over a recipe for peach cobbler. My readers, as it were, ate it up. I was real sorry when UPI went bankrupt and eventually laid me off. I never got the chance to tell them, "Why yes, I WILL do this job for free!"

So Mr. Food Writer, enough whining about UPI. What have you really written?

     My 30 books ramble through several known and a few unknown categories, from cooking to drinking to traveling to, yes, believing in God. I’ve never written a romance novel under any pseudonym resembling Honorina Des Grieux. I would if I could, but those things are harder to write than people think. And I can’t get revved up about muscular, long-haired men in kilts.

     In third grade I wrote "Arctic Fury," an icy action-adventure starring me and the object of my affection, Faye Ann Pamela Cauthen. When she read my masterwork, she confronted my chubby self in the schoolyard of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, tore the manuscript in shreds and showered me with it, shouting a reference to the popular weight-loss product of that day. "Take Metracal!!"

     Obviously, I have forgotten that event entirely.

     Somewhere along the way, I discovered writing books for reasons other than impressing girls - making money first among them. I’ve enjoyed considerably more success with the latter than the former. My food books include several on New Orleans and several more on the Caribbean (my spiritual home), plus a growing list penned with chefs (after losing touch with Faye, I had to get my abuse somewhere), and a collection of one-person dramas for the stage. Other than that, I have very high standards: I’ll write anything that doesn’t write me first.

Didn't you become an actor or something?

     Yes, but I didn't inhale. I only did it because the real actor who was going to perform my first play, a passionate two-hour embodiment of the guilt-tormented apostle Paul, decided to move to New Jersey instead. Surprisingly, I made several costumed appearances on national TV and did 130-plus live performances for about 28,000 people before that actor wised up and lifted the role off my shoulders. Today, Charles D. Baker lives on Maryland's Eastern Shore and travels the country performing three of my plays - "I, Paul," "The Last Canticle of St. Francis" and "Baptizer." I've also written "Servant of Slaves" for brilliant African-American actress Carol Sutton (I told her she couldn't quit, because here was a role I couldn't do!) and starred in my own show about Thomas Jefferson. I perform "TJ" a lot in schools, because people keep telling me kids these days have no heroes. I don't understand. I'm nothing but a collection of my heroes. I think it would be bad not to be.

     After all these years on stage, I don't recall one moment of wanting to be an actor. I did, however, always want to be a rock star. Paul McCartney... St. Paul... Like that guy keeps saying in "Jurassic Park," life will find a way.

Aren’t you on radio and television?

    As a would-be rock star growing up, I never could keep my hands off the radio dial – especially late-night “underground” stations from San Francisco that I played at zero volume so my parents could sleep. I remember hearing my first Jimi Hendrix recording, with one ear pressed tight to the scratchy speaker and the rest of me thinking Jimi and I couldn’t possibly be playing the same instrument. Later, as a graduate student, I learned of the power radio has in our society, a power no amount of older newspapers could deny and no number of later televisions and Internets could diminish. 

What did you learn from all your travels?

     That people are very different and very much alike. That cultures are very different and very much alike. That the more you love home, the more you need to get away. That the more you get away, the more you need to go home. It’s worth noting that for all the museums and churches I visited, I mostly remember sharing meals, bus tokens, umbrellas, espressos, $3 rooms and even 50-cent showers with an incredibly long list of wonderful young women - most of whom I never managed to sleep with, none of whom I’ll ever manage to forget. Travel, as they say, is broadening.

What does it all mean?

     Even as a child of the ‘60s, I never found "free love" to be free. Everything has a price tag, expressed in one currency or another, written in one alphabet or another - and you never really know what’s inside the box. Sometimes, Forrest, life isn’t a box of chocolates; it’s an expensive designer box with little or nothing inside.

     I never had a clue what the Beatles meant when they sang, "And in the end, the love you take… is equal to the love you make." Like most men, I can usually tell when I’m making love. But how do I know when I’m taking it? Is that good or bad? And who makes sure both columns come out even? As I say, I never had a clue.

     To me, love is not a feeling (though I have felt it). To me, love is not a state (though it has caused me many, ranging roughly from confusion to hysteria). To me, love is an action verb. Its only real meaning is in what it does. It gives. It creates. It nurtures. It protects. It heals. It reaches out. It risks. It sacrifices. Maybe the whole idea is we’re supposed to be empty by the end. But then again, maybe that’s only if we ever want to be full.