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Contact information for Edward Baker Lions onlyAbout-Baker: I was named "Boy of the Year" by the BHS administration my senior year, played center on the varsity football team, was named to the All State team my senior year, was president of the Junior Civitan Club, was a National Merit Scholar and was a member of the student council throughout my years in high school. I warmed the bench of the varsity basketball team, scored two points my junior year and didn't go out my senior year, which to this day remains a regret. But I loved it all at Baker (even the bench).
After-Baker: I received a BA from Vanderbilt University in politics and literature, then spent three years in the army, including a year in Vietnam as a second lieutenant and combat engineer adviser to the Vietnamese. I returned to get an MA in international politics and economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University, and then went into journalism, which is what I have done with most of my professional life ever since. I began as a part time copy editor at night for The Boston Globe, moved to reporting for The Quincy Patriot Ledger outside Boston and then went to Japan for a year as a Fulbright Fellow. In Japan, I began stringing for The New York Times and The Washington Post. I returned to Boston to the Patriot Ledger again, covering busing in Boston for them and The Washington Post. I then moved to The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I covered higher education, hung out with the IRA in Northern Ireland and people smugglers in Tijuana, where I was the first journalist to be smuggled across the border and write about it in what was then a new swelling of illegal immigration. I was part of a team at the paper that won a Pulitzer Prize for the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island. After two years in Philadelphia, I was hired by The New York Times to write about the economic development of New York City, only to find myself in Cuba during the Mariel boat lift as the only reporter inside Mariel and hanging on for dear life on a half swamped boat on the way back to Key West. The Times then sent me to Buenos Aires for four years, where I covered the fall of military governments, the war in El Salvador, the Falklands War and uncovered former German Nazi Klaus Barbie in Bolivia. I was arrested several times, threatened to be "disappeared" often, had a pistol pointed at my head once and generally had a whopping good time. After four years, I was transferred to more peaceful Spain, where I covered that country's transition into NATO and the European Union, ate extremely well, smoked good cigars but was sometimes bored. That was alleviated by trips into Morocco, the Sahara, the rest of North Africa and finally Libya, where I had the pleasure of meeting several times with Arafat and Qaddafi and being in Tripoli the night of the US bombing. It was quite a fireworks show. I left the Times in 1988 with a US-Spain Bi-National Commission Fellowship to write two books, one on Spain and one related to Vietnam, and never finished either. Must be a mark of character. I did, however, move a physically threatened, largely Jewish chamber music orchestra, the Moscow Virtuousi, from Russia to Spain, families and all, in the early years of Glasnost. I returned to New York as head of the Spanish Institute, a non-profit dedicated to Spanish cultural and political affairs, but found the society dames of New York clamoring to meet the king of Spain to be far more treacherous than a Third World terrorist. After two years, I returned to journalism, to The Wall Street Journal, where I started up The Wall Street Journal Americas and where I still am today, as managing editor. The WSJ Americas is a nascent Latin American edition of the Journal, in Spanish and Portuguese. We have a circulation of almost three million but are still a section of 2 to four pages inside other people's newspapers. But we keep growing. Along the way, I have written for lots of folks, including Foreign Affairs journal and chapters in several books. But more importantly, I married a Cuban, Maribel, whom I met in Miami (at a wedding, of course). That was 21 years ago, and we're still together. She is an entrepreneur who produced a movie in Argentina, started a record company in Spain and in New York has been VP for marketing, sales and artist development for Warner Music International, of AOL Time Warner. And together, God knows how, we produced two daughters who are now young women. Well, I know, how we produced them, but I don't how we managed to raise them and get them to be the wonderful girls they are. Twenty-year old Alexis went to Vassar College for a year, took a year off to work in Spain and this fall is transferring to the London School of Economics to study philosophy. Her real interest, however, is writing pop music and she is trying to record a few demos. Karina turned 18 today and will enter as a freshman next week at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She plans to study international relations. Both are fluent in Spanish, but Karina has signed up for Chinese, so lets see where that leads her. My ambitions? To grow old and fat and lazy and watch them grow. But then, if you totally believe that, I suggest you come up here to visit me in New York, where I have a bridge I can sell you. I figure I still have a few tricks up my sleeve.
August, 2001
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