Curt Smith (author)
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Curt Smith is an American author, radio/television host, columnist and former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush. He specializes in books on baseball and sportscasting, but he has also written extensively on politics and U.S. cultural history.
Smith grew up in Caledonia, New York and is a 1973 graduate of SUNY at Geneseo. He worked as a Gannett Company reporter, a speechwriter to former Texas Governor John Connolly, and an editor at the Saturday Evening Post. In 1989 he joined the Bush Administration as a speechwriter and helped write a large number of presidential addresses, including significant speeches on the Persian Gulf War and the 50th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack.
After Bush’s defeat in 1992 Smith lectured at the Smithsonian Institution and then turned to radio and television. From 1994 to 1996 he hosted the Midday Milwaukee talk show on radio station WISN. He also hosted WROC’s Perfectly Clear program from 2000 to 2002 and a 1997-2002 series on the Fox Empire Sports Network.
Currently Smith hosts the weekly Perspectives series on Rochester, New York’s NPR affiliate WXXI. The show deals with politics, pop culture, sports, and other topics. Smith also hosts the twice-weekly Talking Point show on Rochester’s CBS affiliate WROC, where he spars with co-hosts on political and other issues.
Smith is the author of eleven books: Voices of Summer, What Baseball Means to Me, Voices of The Game, Storied Stadiums, Windows on the White House, Our House, Of Mikes and Men, Long Time Gone, A Fine Sense of the Ridiculous, America's Dizzy Dean and The Storytellers. Perhaps his best known book is Voices of The Game, which recounts the history of baseball broadcasting from KDKA’s first Pittsburgh Pirates broadcast in 1921 to today’s enormous media coverage of the game. His writing style has been highly praised by pundits like Bob Costas, but he has also been criticized for overly florid and sometimes tangled prose.
Smith lives in Rochester with his wife Sarah and their two children. He writes columns for the Messenger-Post newspapers in upstate New York and is a senior lecturer at the University of Rochester.
