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I guess I was probably somewhat naive," says Terry Baker of
the young man from Oregon State who came east in December
1962 to receive the Heisman Trophy.
"I met President Kennedy at the Army-Navy game, and he knew my
schedule better than I. He said, 'You're
meeting my brother at the Heisman banquet next
weekend.'" I said, "I
am?"
Now 56 and a lawyer in Portland, Baker is a vestige of an
era in which malt shops and sock hops had not yet given way
to sit-ins and dropouts. In 1962 Baker, a clean-cut
engineering major who quarterbacked not only Oregon State's
9-2 football team but
also, as guard, its Final Four basketball squad, was truly
everybody's
All-America. Besides winning the Heisman and Maxwell
awards, he was a consensus football All-America and our
Sportsman of the Year. In the Liberty Bowl, Baker put an
exclamation point on his magical season by scoring the
game's only points on a 99-yard
quarterback keeper in the Beavers'
6-0 win over Villanova. "I've given all my trophies to
Oregon State except for the Sportsman
amphora," says Baker, who went to the school on a basketball
scholarship.
His pro football career would be less distinguished. Three
years after selecting Baker
first in the 1963
NFL draft, the Los Angeles Rams cut him. By then Baker was
already, as he puts it, "on a different track,"
married to his college sweetheart, Marilyn Davis, and
attending law school at USC. Though he did play a final
year of football, for
the CFL's Edmonton Eskimos, Baker never chased after the
contrails of fame. "I think I've been back to the
Heisman banquet twice since I was inducted," says
Baker, who has a son,
Brian, 32, and a daughter, Wendy,
30.
Baker's
fortuitous meeting with Robert Kennedy—they sat side by side at the
1962 Heisman banquet—awakened him to the politicized era
that was dawning. When Kennedy sought the Democratic
nomination for president in '68, Baker accompanied him on
campaign swings through
Oregon. In the wake of the Kent State tragedy in
'70, he took part in a commission to investigate campus
unrest. "We met for three months in Washington, D.C., that
summer, and there were no incidents during that
time," says Baker.
"Then again, school was out of
session."
Today Baker—divorced and remarried, to his high school
sweetheart, Barbara Ginther—tackles less divisive
causes as chairman of the AAA. "I'm the ideal
member," says Baker, who drives an '87 Acura Legend with
some 140,000 miles on it. "My car's in the shop right
now.
—by John Walters cover photograph by Neal Barr
Issue date: December 22, 1997
Past Editions of Catching Up With...
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