Weingarten is 60.Wow. Happy birthday, Gene! I know that 60 seems old, but look at it this way: You’re simply entering your seventh decade. You’re only halfway to 120. You’re only a quarter of the way to 240.

It’s not like you were born in the 17th century or anything horrendous like that. You were born during the Truman administration.

When you were born, “I Love Lucy” was already almost on the air for the first time. The top pop-music performers included Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Patti Page, Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, all of whom are still making really good, edgy, “hip” music except the ones who are dead. There are lots of ways to spin this turning-60 thing that won’t make you sound as old as Kennewick Man.

(Fortunately Gene is not too obsessed with degeneration, death and the inevitability of total oblivion, as you can see in his latest column.)

I asked Shroder (Tom the Butcher) what the classic Gene piece is, and he voted for The Great Zucchini. Good choice -- with all due respect to the others, including the fiddler in the subway and, way back, Clinton’s Secret Brother (how many journalists have ever discovered that the president of the United States has a secret brother???). But as I’ve said a thousand times, what makes a journalist great is not just the occasional grand-slam home run; it’s also the day-in, day-out, mundane, routine three-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. Like just about any of Gene’s columns in which he dials 800.

Will Gene change as he ages? Of course. When Gene is 100 his poopy jokes will have become diaper jokes.

He’ll have won 17 Pulitzers by then, including for breaking news photography and (new category) online chatting. Lots of young journalists probably say to themselves: How can I become as successful as Gene Weingarten? The answer is, just start with abundant natural writing gifts and a probing intelligence, work really hard for about 45 years in a mad frenzy of perfectionism, and then you’ll be just as good.