Dan Baum
Dan Baum was born in Orange, New Jersey (or South Orange, New Jersey) to Seymour and Audrey Bernice (Goldberger) Baum. His father, Seymour, was an executive with Colgate-Palmolive. His mother, Audrey Bernice (Goldberger) Baum, was a social worker. Raised in South Orange, Baum graduated from Columbia High School in 1974. He graduated from New York University in 1978.
Over the years he worked for various publications as a journalist. He was staff writer for The New Yorker, for which he covered Hurricane Katrina. In addition to that famous magazine he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Asian Wall Street Journal, and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He also freelanced for various publications such as Rolling Stone, Wired, Playboy and Harper's Magazine. He also wrote several books: Gun Guys: A Road Trip, Citizen Coors: An American Dynasty and Smoke and Mirrors: The War on Drugs and the Politics of Failure.
In 1987 he married fellow reporter Margret L. Knox and they had one daughter, Rosa Baum. Over the next thirty-three years he and Margaret would makes their home in various places across the globe: Zimbabwe, France, Missoula, Mont., rural Mexico, Watsonville, Calif., and Boulder, Colorado (where he passed away).
For many years, Mr. Baum and Ms. Knox collaborated on writing projects that carried only Mr. Baum’s byline, though she was a full partner, he wrote on their website. They wanted their writing to speak with a strong individual voice, and they thought a double byline would undermine that goal.
He died on Oct. 8, 2020 at his home in Boulder, Colo., at 64. Cause of death was glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer.
“Life in New Orleans is all about making the present--this moment, right now--as pleasant as possible. So New Orleanians, by and large, aren't tortured by the frenzy to achieve, acquire, and manage the unmanageable future. Their days are built around the things that other Americans have pushed out of their lives by incessant work: art, music, elaborate cooking, and--most of all--plenty of relaxed time with family and friends. Their jobs are really just the things they do to earn a little money; they're not the organiing principle of life. While this isn't a worldview particularly conducive to getting things done, getting things done isn't the most important thing in New Orleans. Living life is. Once you've tasted that, and especially if it's how you grew up, life everywhere else feels thin indeed.”
“Anybody could rise above anything in America. ...No, they can't, Marie said, from the backseat. How was I supposed to break out of there? What were my people going to say? Uppity. That's what. 'Cause if I can, why can't they? But I tell you what, I don't even know how it's done. I never seen nobody do it.”
“In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.”
“That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur....To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous.”
“But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.”
“Other people's children went off to college, which for years Ronald had interpreted as a positive thing. Lately, though, he wasn't so sure. The children who went off to college hardly ever came back. It was as though the hard work of getting that college degree bent them out of shape, focused them too much on their own personal achievement. Once you got that degree, it was all about getting ahead in that monetized struggle, and they forgot the community that raised them. Ooh, live in the Lower Nine; not me. Ooh, do a day's work with your hands; I won't touch that. The neighborhood gained something when one of its children went off to become a doctor or an engineer, but it lost something, too.”