baker

TOPEKA, Kan. — Nancy Kassebaum Baker, a Kansas governor’s daughter who became the first woman elected to the U.S. Senate without following a spouse into office, has died. She was 94.

Kassebaum Baker died Friday of natural causes, according to her son, Bill Kassebaum.

“She loved Kansas. She loved people from Kansas and representing Kansas for 18 years in the U.S. Senate,” he told the Associated Press. “She was an independent-minded Republican who was willing to stand up for what she thought was right, even if that meant going against the party.”

She was elected to the Senate in 1978 and served three terms. Her modest demeanor endeared her to voters of all political stripes, though she shared the moderate, progressive Republican politics of her father, Gov. Alf Landon, the unsuccessful 1936 GOP nominee for president. Even after leaving the Senate early in 1997, she continued taking on public service roles.

She married former Sen. Howard Baker, a Tennessee Republican, in 1996. He died in 2014.

Kassebaum Baker was widely admired among Kansans generally. She could work with Senate colleagues of all political philosophies, and a 1996 health insurance law bore her name, along with that of liberal Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy.

Part of a dwindling GOP bloc

Her election to the Senate brought her immediate national attention. When she announced her retirement, she was among eight women senators and the only one to chair a Senate committee, the Labor and Human Resources panel.

She was also in a dwindling bloc of moderate to liberal Republicans, having supported, for example, a ban on assault weapons championed by President Clinton.

Yet she never polarized Kansas conservatives as some GOP moderates did. She connected with voters because she never seemed caught up in the trappings of power, and when she retired, she acknowledged, “I’d rather cuddle up and do needlepoint all day.”

She was born on July 29, 1932, as her father, an oilman from Independence, was running for the first of his two terms as Kansas governor. She earned a political science degree from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in diplomatic history from the University of Michigan in the mid-1950s.

She was a radio station executive, spent a year in the 1970s on the staff of Sen. James Pearson (R-Kan.) and served on the school board in the Wichita suburb of Maize. She had four children with her first husband, Phil Kassebaum, including Bill, who served a term in the Kansas House of Representatives. The marriage ended in divorce in 1979.

A moderate who sought sensible solutions

When Kassebaum Baker decided to run for the Senate, she figured that “a woman with a background different from a man might be appealing” to people growing weary of politics. Pundits at the time estimated a Senate race would require the then-huge-for-Kansas sum of $1 million. In the first quarter of 1978, she spent less than $12,000 on her campaign, and saw herself “at the bottom of the totem pole.”

But nine candidates crowded the primary field, including three state senators and a prominent Wichita businessman. Kassebaum Baker won the GOP nomination with less than 31% of the vote.

Running as Nancy Landon Kassebaum, she won almost 54% of the vote that November against former two-term Democratic congressman Bill Roy.

Her moderate politics quickly came to the fore, when only months later, she refused to endorse an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to require a balanced budget.

“We should be wary of the seemingly simple solution,” she said.

Her father, who would die at age 100 in 1987, still cast a long political shadow during her first years in office. Though Landon overwhelmingly lost the 1936 presidential race to Democratic incumbent Franklin D. Roosevelt, he later became an elder statesman for the Republican Party. A lecture series named for him at Kansas State University attracted presidents and foreign leaders.

Kassebaum Baker became even more popular in her time. She won reelection in 1984 with 76% of the vote and in 1990 with 74%.

But she frustrated conservative activists, despite her popularity. She said her vote in favor of the assault weapons ban inspired the angriest mail of her career.

A public servant to the end

She’d contemplated not seeking a third term, but Republican leaders had prevailed upon her to run one more time. In 1996, when she decided not to seek reelection, she said she would return to a ranch and 90-year-old farmhouse in Kansas’ scenic Flint Hills and babysit her grandchildren — she had seven, as well as two great-grandchildren.

When there briefly was talk of naming a new highway in Topeka after her, she said, “Oh, goodness. Absolutely not — no.”

She and Baker kept their romance low-key, and speculation about a possible marriage didn’t emerge until mid-1996, in a Washington Post story. They married that December.

It was the first time a man and a woman who had both served in the Senate had wed. Baker was elected to three terms, serving from 1967 to 1985 before becoming President Reagan’s chief of staff. His first wife, Joy, had died in 1993 after a long battle with cancer.

After the marriage, public service still beckoned, including as a member of a bipartisan commission on campaign finance reform under Clinton and on a British commission in Africa in 2004-05.

President George W. Bush named her husband ambassador to Japan in 2001, and she went with him for the four-year posting. Baker said she became an important figure in the Asian nation.

Before she left for Tokyo, she told a reporter she saw her stint in Japan as an adventure, but added, “All I can say is, I will miss the Kansas prairie.”

Not a fan of Trump

Later in life, Kassebaum Baker broke with the Republican Party as it became more conservative, endorsing Democratic candidates for Kansas governor and U.S. senator, including Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly both times — even though Kelly’s 2022 GOP opponent, then-state Atty. Gen. Derek Schmidt, had worked on her Senate staff.

In 2021, she supported the impeachment of President Trump for incitement of insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol that sought to keep him in power after he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden.

“This just has gone too far,” she told Kansas City’s KMBC.

Hanna writes for the Associated Press.

In 2022, Joshua Cain and his partner, André Reyes, stepped into the foyer of the home on Monrovia’s South Ivy Avenue and gaped in wonder. The red and white Victorian farmhouse had belonged to their friend, the late Steve Baker, who served as the city’s longtime historian and had packed the property with thousands of antique relics over his lifetime.

André Reyes, Jeff Godbold and Joshua Cain transformed Steve Bakers home into an inn with modern comforts.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Cain rattled off a few of the treasures: “Nineteenth-century etched glass dishes stacked up to the ceiling in the dining room, dozens of antique plumbing fixtures in the backyard, and five pump organs, of which we saved two.” And then there were oil lamps. Hundreds and hundreds of oil lamps.

Baker was known to regale locals with the history of their own homes and the founding Monrovians who lived there before them. One day in 2021, the couple had left the front door of their restored 1887 Monrovia home open and Baker wandered in uninvited. Reyes found him standing in his living room, wearing his signature top hat.

“Excuse me, who are you and how can I help you?” Reyes recalled asking.

Inn guests can ride one of the Viribus bikes lined up near the Blair House porch.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Baker introduced himself and said he appreciated the thoughtful period-appropriate restoration, the work of Cain and Reyes, who are preservationists. He asked them where they procured the redwood to renovate their shingle roof and the trio spent the rest of the morning excitedly discussing restoration techniques and comparing notes.

Over the next year, Cain, Reyes and Baker grew closer as fellow members of the Monrovia Historic Preservation Group, bonding over their desire to preserve the town’s historic character, especially its Victorian homes.

When Baker died abruptly in 2022, the couple set out to honor his dream of transforming his home into a restored inn with modern comforts (read: air conditioning and electricity). With Cain’s business partner Jeff Godbold, they purchased Baker’s 1887 home (originally bought by Baker’s great-grandfather Bradford Arthur in 1888) along with the estate’s more ornate Eastlake Queen Anne Victorian-style Blair House next door, built the same year by architect Luther Reed Blair. After three years of renovation, the Arthur Blair Historic Inn opened to guests this summer. Set across three homes and with 11 guest rooms, it’s a rare place where both locals and out-of-towners can escape the demands of the city and play board games in a room filled with Victorian books or borrow one of the cheery robin’s egg-blue Viribus bikes and ride to the coffee shops, bakeries or parks around town.

The Blair House parlor.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

One thing to note: There are no TVs on the premises.

“You won’t be staying in a gray and white corporate hotel doomscrolling or watching television,” Cain said.

Staying at the Arthur Blair is meant to feel like entering a time warp. “You can imagine stepping off the train in 1880s Monrovia and going and staying in this exact inn in the prettiest little town in the Old West,” Cain said.

Restoring the home was no easy task for Cain, Reyes and Godbold, who worked with along with design assistant Jorge Ochoa. While Baker had meticulously preserved the vintage collectibles in his family’s historic home, he often struggled to afford structural repairs. Time had punctured the roof with 20 holes and whenever it rained, Baker would run around placing buckets under them and emptying them when they were full, like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

The rooms feature many vintage collectibles that Steve Baker had meticulously preserved. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

But Cain, an interior decorator for 25 years, wasn’t daunted by the chaos that came with such an extensive project. “I’m a glass half full person and I like to take risks,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘I’ve done much more with much less.’”

The team revived original furnishings and interior and exterior walls, while constructing a new ADA-compliant Victorian carpenter gothic cottage with stylish board and batten siding, modeled after a 19th-century Sears kit house. They often used salvage materials from Cain and Baker’s collection.

For the buildings to join the National Register of Historic Places — a goal for the team — intact elements like the Arthur House’s original timber frame, Italianate cast-iron mantelpiece and redwood millwork fitted by hand over a century ago needed to be polished up. And some features that had previously been eliminated needed to be returned to the home, including original roofing, porches and even light switches.

Each of the 11 guest rooms features unique, textures and personalities. One of two rooms at the Saxony Cottage has a spiral staircase that leads to an upstairs bedroom. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

It would’ve been easier to create fresh builds or buy new decor and furnishings, Cain admits, but then it wouldn’t feel like the right setting to him. “We restore for a sense of time and place,” he said.

The team hit a speed bump with the Blair House’s front porch spindles, which had been removed. They located an original spindle and replicated it, including the complex crane cutouts. “I could’ve just gone online to Home Depot, cut their spindles in half and thrown them up on the porch,” Cain said. “But instead, I took the original ones to my carpenter and we had to pull the porch apart to reinstall them, and then we painted them eight different colors.”

The Arthur House and the Blair House are a study in contrasts: a simple two-story farmhouse with plain wood siding and a sturdy brick chimney, plopped right next to a flashy showpiece featuring a roofline with projecting gables. In the front gardens, yellow and red roses bloom to match the houses’ exteriors; in the back, a sunny 4-foot cocktail pool with a natural limestone border awaits guests. Each of the 11 guest rooms is different — the classic heritage king, for instance, melds lush silk vermilion drapes with dark wood paneled ceilings and striped blue wallpaper, much of which Baker saved from the 1980s, and which Reyes and Ochoa painstakingly applied.

A writing desk in the Blair House’s Luther Reed Suite.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The inn will soon open a restaurant, Viola’s Bar and Bistro (named after Baker’s grandmother), serving French cuisine with Southern tinges on the vintage servingware Baker collected. The Arthur House parlor is already open to the public for drinks and dining, and features a pump organ that guests can play.

The two parlors in the Blair House, reserved for inn guests only, are a Victorian dream, each adorned with 1880s Eastlake restored mahogany parlor sets, including settees, rockers, bustle benches and side chairs, reupholstered with colorful period appropriate fabric and trim. A highlight is a circa 1874 Haine Brothers solid rosewood square grand piano.

Now that Cain and Reyes have built it, they wonder who will come. Cain has a hunch the clientele will be as special as the place itself. “Monrovia is not a tourist haven, so guests to our inn will be destination-oriented,” Cain says. “People who come here will want the experience of letting Monrovia unfold around them as they’re experiencing the inn.”

The pool at the Arthur Blair Historic Inn.

(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

In the future, Cain and Reyes, who also co-own Visalia’s JD Hyde Historic Inn, hope to create a nationwide alliance for high-quality inns offering historic charm, so that guests can find more of the same unique properties that connect visitors to time and place.

“It’s very deliberate to call this a restoration and not a renovation,” Reyes said. “We are preserving and restoring the past for future generations to see what happened in 1887 in Monrovia — and how and why.”

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — Dusty Baker could sense a portion of his life as he entered the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s Plaque Gallery on Saturday night. He couldn’t help but notice that some of his contemporaries from when he played with the Braves and Dodgers were walking slower, in some cases with the help of a cane or an assistant.

“I’m glad to see everybody,” said Baker, 77. “But you know, we’re getting old. I see guys in walkers who used to run fast, (and) their kids that are grown. You kind of see your life flash before your eyes.”

A record 60 Baseball Hall of Famers were in Cooperstown as Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltran and Andruw Jones were inducted Sunday. Baker traveled with the San Francisco Giants’ contingent to celebrate Kent, who credits Baker with helping transform him into the National League MVP, All-Star and eventually a Hall of Famer.

As much as Baker tried to keep his focus on Kent, however, many kept telling him that this visit was a prelude to his induction next summer. They reminded him that he’s expected to be on the Hall’s Era Committee ballot in December.

If Baker receives at least 12 votes from the 16-member committee, he’ll become the first Black manager elected into the Hall.

“I know the history,” Baker said. “I was fortunate enough to be around Hank (Aaron) in the beginning.”

Baker grew up idolizing Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color barrier on April 15, 1947, 26 months before Johnnie B. “Dusty” Baker was born in Riverside.

Through 1953 National League Rookie of the Year Jim Gilliam, who spent three seasons with the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro Leagues before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers, Baker met several Negro League greats.

Gilliam once took Baker to eat lunch at Negro League legend Cool Papa Bell’s home in St. Louis. He also spent time with Satchel Paige and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe. Because of his friendship with Aaron, his Braves mentor, and his time with the Dodgers, he met Hall of Famer Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe, who spent time in the Negro Leagues before joining the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Bell, Paige and Campanella were all inducted into the Hall. Paige was the first Negro Leaguer inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971, five years after Ted Williams used his induction speech to advocate for Negro Leaguers.

“Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel, not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better than someone else,” Williams said on July 25, 1966. “This is the nature of man and the name of the game, and I’ve always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape-measure home run.

“And I hope that someday the names of Satchell Page and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol of the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.”

Robinson became the first Black player elected into the Hall by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America in 1962. Negro Leaguers weren’t considered for the Hall until Paige was elected into the 1971 class. A year later, Gibson was inducted.

Baker first visited the Hall of Fame to play an exhibition in 1974. He made his third trip to Cooperstown this weekend, which marked his first visit for an induction weekend.

Exactly 60 years after Williams induction speech on the steps of the Hall of Fame, Baker walked into the Hall and was greeted by the loud roars of another Boston Red Sox legend, David Ortiz. Baker smiled widely, nodded his head, greeted Ortiz in Spanish, chuckled and walked over to Ortiz and Vladimir Guerrero, giving each of them hugs and pats on the back.

A few seconds later, Dave Winfield joined the trio for a picture before Baker and his wife began to mingle with other Hall of Famers and guests.

Later that night at a party the Giants held in Kent’s honor, Kent paid tribute to his family, Baker and a few teammates during a short speech.

Then Kent predicted that Baker will return next year to take his place among baseball’s immortals. Baker won a World Series title and three pennants as a manager while leading a record five teams to the playoffs over 26 seasons as a manager.

He’s eighth on baseball’s all-time managerial wins list with 2,183 as the only Black manager in baseball history with 2,000 victories.

While sipping on his coffee and munching on extra crispy bacon and blueberry pancakes Sunday morning, Baker sat at the Otesaga Resort where the Hall of Famers stay during induction weekend. He looked out at Otsego Lake while several Hall of Famer stopped to say hello.

Chipper Jones stopped by and said, “You dusting off that chair for next year, Dusty?”

Baker laughed and shook his head before calling Chipper by his first name, Larry.

“There ain’t no guarantees, so why am I going to look forward if there ain’t no guarantees?” Baker said. “I’m serious. People think I’m kidding when I’m saying that. When Bill Belichick did not get in the (Pro Football) Hall of Fame anybody has a chance to not get in the Hall of Fame.

“Am I right? That’s how I look at it. I was shocked. They can talk about Deflategate, they can talk about the media. What about the other six (Super Bowls) he won?”

Nonetheless, Baker appreciates what it would mean for a Black manager to finally be elected to the Hall.

“But most of my life had been full of ‘First Black Guy stories, Black man stories’ from the time I was in high school,” he said. “The two blacks at my high school were me and my brother in my last year of high school.

“That’s some of the reasons I went into the wine business. There’s not many Blacks in the wine business. One reason why I started but stopped in the energy business was because there’s not many Blacks in the energy business.”

There have been 354 inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame, 23 of them as managers.

Baker will likely be the first Black manager next summer.

“I was taught pride from my mom and dad in culture about being Black,” he said. “My mom was really big (on Black history) because she was a Black Studies teacher, so we had books that I read. …

“I’m hoping I can motivate other young brothers and sisters to achieve some things that don’t seem achievable. It’s a little bit disheartening when I see regression of Black coaches, Black players, Blacks in baseball.”

Countryfile presenter Matt Baker and his wife Nicola have opened up about how they manage time apart due to his filming commitments

Matt Baker shared a rare insight into his marriage.

In a previous interview on ITV’s Lorraine, broadcast last year, Matt Baker and his wife offered candid insight into how they keep their relationship thriving despite lengthy stretches apart owing to Matt’s filming schedule.

As the conversation turned to Matt’s TV series and Nicola’s book, host Lorraine Kelly quizzed the couple on how they first met.

With a cheeky grin, she asked: “Now, you two met when you were babies, right? Teenagers. Nicola, were you into farming? Were you a farm girl?”

“No, I wasn’t a farm girl,” Nicola replied warmly. “I loved being outdoors. I loved just the outdoor life. But farming was something that came to me when we met.”

Lorraine then turned her attention to how the couple copes with prolonged time apart, particularly when Matt heads off to film Countryfile and other projects. She probed: “Obviously, you know, you go off and do your own thing writing the books, and you go off and do your own thing around Britain,” reports the Express.

She continued thoughtfully: “So there are times when you’re apart, but you don’t think sometimes that works. It just does. You know, you’ve always got something to talk about.”

“We are such do-ers, really,” Matt chipped in, adding: “We are so supportive of what each other wants to do.”

He concluded: “But yeah, we’ve just sort of found our way through because we sort of focus on what we’re passionate about.” Nicola offered her take on their situation: “And then we make the most of the time when we have together, you sort of prioritise that and make the most of that.”

When Matt isn’t busy filming, he often keeps his Instagram followers updated with his day-to-day life. In one of his most recent posts, the Countryfile presenter shared the heartbreaking news that his dog had died.

In an emotional social media post, Matt confirmed the loss of his cherished companion, writing: “R.I.P Bob”.

He wrote alongside the post: “It’s with a very heavy heart that I’m letting you know our wonderful Bob is no longer with us.

“He’s been gone a while, but I haven’t been able to talk about it as I’ve been finding it so incredibly sad. Bob was a brilliant dog. He was there for me with his gentle soul as the ultimate companion through some of the greatest chapters of my life, from raising our kids to all the changes we made on our family farm.”

He continued, “It’s broken my heart, but I feel hugely grateful to have had him in our lives, and I thank him from the bottom of my heart for everything he’s taught me and brought to our family.

“I’m sure all you dog lovers will agree the reason we love our dogs so much is because the only time they break our hearts is when they leave us. RIP Bob X.”

Lorraine airs weekdays at 9.30am on ITV and Countryfile airs on Sunday on BBC One.