Art Buchwald

I remember Art Buchwald from years back-- he was one of the guys that occasionally showed up on Carson's and Letterman's couches when I started watching Late Night TV. He was an esteemed Washington Humorist, but was not that notable for a 10 year old kid.

But his Obituary filled out some details of his interesting life. He's friends with Mike Wallace, so automatically that makes him cool. But he also overcame a start as a orphan in Depression-era New York to become a famous columnist that found the humor in the people (not the politics) of Paris and Washington.

Art Buchwald, Whose Humor Poked the Powerful, Dies at 81 - New York Times

In the early 1960s, Mr. Buchwald theorized that a shortage of Communists was imminent in the United States and that if the nation was not careful, the Communist Party would be made up almost entirely of F.B.I. informers.

“The joy of his column was not that it was side-splitting humor,” his friend Ben Bradlee, the former editor of The Washington Post, said last February, “but that he made you smile.”

It was an amiable and wry brand of wit that sprang from a man who had been reared in foster homes and an orphan asylum and who had decided, when he was 6 or 7, that his life was so awful that he should make a living making everybody laugh, even if he did not always laugh along with them. He had at least two serious bouts of depression in his middle years and regarded himself as occasionally suicidal.

Arthur Buchwald was born on Oct. 20, 1925, in Mount Vernon, N.Y., to Joseph and Helen Buchwald. His father had fled Austria for the United States to avoid service in the Austro-Hungarian army and opened a business making drapes and slipcovers. His mother, the former Helen Klineberger, had immigrated from Hungary.

The youngest of four children and the only son, Mr. Buchwald virtually never saw his mother. Suffering from delusions, she was admitted to a mental hospital a few weeks after his birth and was confined for the remaining 35 years of her life. Her son was not permitted to visit her when he was a child and decided not to after he became an adult. “I preferred the mother I had invented to the one I would find in the hospital,” Mr. Buchwald wrote in a best-selling 1994 memoir, “Leaving Home.”

By his own account he had always wondered whether his birth had somehow been responsible for her illness, and when he sought help for his depression, he said, he confessed to his psychiatrist that he had conducted “a lifelong search for someone to replace her.”