Jack Smith (columnist)

Jack Smith
Born Jack Clifford Smith
August 27, 1916
Long Beach, California, U.S.
Died January 9, 1996 (aged 79)
Los Angeles, California, U.S.
Occupation Journalist, writer, reporter, columnist

Jack Clifford Smith (August 27, 1916–January 9, 1996) was a journalist, author, and newspaper columnist who wrote about Los Angeles during its period of greatest growth and increasing influence. His Los Angeles Times column, which ran for 37 years, chronicled or poked gentle fun at Los Angeles, his family and himself in an urbane, witty style that became a defining voice for the booming city. Throughout his long tenure as a Times columnist, he came to be closely associated with the city, as Herb Caen was to San Francisco or Mike Royko to Chicago. He was the author of 10 books, many of them based on his columns, and won the Los Angeles chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists' Distinguished Journalist award in 1981.

Early years

Smith was born in Long Beach on Aug. 27, 1916, grew up in Bakersfield and Los Angeles, and spent some time in the Civilian Conservation Corps before joining the United States Merchant Marine at age 21. He went into journalism, first for the Bakersfield Californian, then for the Honolulu Advertiser, United Press, the Sacramento Union, the San Diego Daily Journal, the Daily News, Independent and Herald-Express, before joining the Los Angeles Times in June 1953.

He remained with the Times until his death. He got to the Honolulu Advertiser by working his way there on a passenger ship. During World War II, he joined the Marine Corps and was a combat correspondent who took part in the assault on Iwo Jima, going ashore with his rifle but without his typewriter, which had been lost at sea. At Belmont High School in Los Angeles, Smith served as editor of the student newspaper, the Belmont Sentinel.

The Black Dahlia

It was as a rewrite man for the Daily News in 1947 that Smith had what he later called "perhaps my finest hour as a newspaperman": his stories on the infamous Elizabeth Short murder case. The police beat reporter phoned in the bulletin to Smith, who recounted the moment this way in his book Jack Smith's L.A.: "Within the minute I had written what may have been the first sentence ever written on the Black Dahlia case. I can't remember it word for word, but my lead went pretty much like this: 'The nude body of a young woman, neatly cut in two at the waist, was found early today on a vacant lot near Crenshaw and Exposition Boulevards.'" His editor added one adjective, making Short "a beautiful young woman ... Our city editor, of course, no more knew what the unfortunate young woman had looked like than I did ... But the lesson was clear. On the Daily News, at least, all young women whose nude bodies were found in two pieces on vacant lots were beautiful. I never forgot it."

Jack Smith, columnist

At the Times, besides his duties as a rewrite man, in which he would quickly assemble stories based largely on information from reporters who phoned in from the field, Smith began writing humor pieces for the op-ed page. He was awarded his own column in 1958 and continued it until his death. "He was a hard drinker, prone to three-day binges that not only jeopardized his health but his job. When the Times gave him a column it probably saved his life. It also gave Los Angeles a voice and gave him a voice", wrote Rob Leicester Wagner in Red Ink, White Lies (2000), a history of Los Angeles journalism.

At their height of his popularity, Smith's columns were distributed to almost 600 newspapers worldwide by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. For most of his career he wrote five columns a week, a pace later eased to four per week.

In 1992, he went into semi-retirement, writing one column per week. In his later years, his columns often concerned his declining health and the infirmities of age. Smith had quadruple bypass surgery in 1984 and a heart attack later that year, a second heart attack after prostate surgery in 1994 and a final heart attack in late December 1995. His last column appeared on December 25, 1995. He died on January 9, 1996, aged 79. His papers were donated to the Huntington Library in 2005. An exhibit, "Smith on Wry: Jack Smith, Columnist for Our Times" was on view at the Huntington in 2008. It featured original newspaper columns, drafts and galleys of his books, and other materials.[1]

Awards

Jack Smith won the Greater Los Angeles Press Club's highest honor, the Joseph M. Quinn Memorial Award, in 1991. According to his Los Angeles Times obituary: "He occasionally joked that he had come close to winning a Pulitzer Prize but that 'one can't talk about having won second place in the Pulitzer Prize.'"

Quotes

In Westways Magazine, Smith wrote about driving down the Los Angeles River: "As we came out of the river I saw the Queen Mary. I thought that it was fitting to have a ship without engines sailing up a river without water."

"I've heard it said that men first begin to realize their youth is over when policemen begin to look like college boys. That's true, but there's a much more alarming sign, and that's when a man's doctors begin to die."

Describing a book publication party in 1973 for Norman Mailer's Marilyn: "[Mailer] stood in a slight crouch, feet apart, toes in, like a fighter; a good middleweight, over the hill, but game. His pale-blue eyes seemed alternately to burn and disconnect, as if his circuits were overloaded...They [Mailer and Monroe] had never met in life, and here was now, revealing himself as her last, most passionate, most hopeless lover...They seemed an odd couple: Mailer so open, Marilyn so closed. He should have called their book The Naked and the Dead."

Defending Los Angeles from Woody Allen's remark that making a right turn on a red light was Los Angeles' only contribution to culture: "What about the drive-in bank, the Frisbee, the doggie bag? What about our Hansel and Gretel cottages, our Assyrian rubber factory, our Beaux-Arts-Byzantine-Italian-Classic-Nebraska Modern City Hall? What about the drive-in church?"

On his Baja house: "When we reached the house, the rain had stopped, but the wind off the ocean was like wild organ music in the roof tiles. We lighted lanterns and I built a fire; that is to say, I put an ersatz log from the supermarket in the grate and put a match to it."

Bibliography

References

  1. ↑ Smith On Wry: Jack Smith, Columnist for our Times, Huntington Library (2008); accessed October 6, 2014.

External sources