From the Baltimore Sun:Alistair Cooke, famed journalist and BBC broadcaster who was most widely known for his reports from America, died earlier this week at the age of 95.
Soon after Cooke arrive in the United States during the 1930s, he became interested in the origins of American English. This interest led him to Baltimore native H.L. Mencken, who had gained a reputaiton as an authority on the subject. Cooke and Mencken quickly struck up a friendship after Mencken invited him to Baltimore for "crabs and beer." Upon meeting the Baltimore scribe, Cooke recalled his somewhat odd appearance:
"A little man, a stocky man with a bull neck, eyes as blue as gas jets, white hair parted exactly down the middle in the fashion of the early years of the century, and tiny hands and feet that added four surprising grace notes to the solid theme of his body, which was that of an undersized German pork butcher," Cooke recalled in his weekly Letter From America radio broadcast after Mencken's death in 1956.
Tony
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