"Just A Newspaper Stiff"

...While negotiations with Wray were underway, Smith received a cable from the PhiladelThe American Spectator November 1977 27 phia Record, offering him a job...

...Thus Smith and his first wife (the former Catherine Cody, of St...

...At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, Smith had written in a similar vein of former President Harry Truman and his ill-fated opposition to the nomination of Adlai Stevenson...

...We need to remind ourselves today that Mencken's targets—Babbittry, the rude American cheerfully ignorant of European refinement—have become, 50 years later, the very centerpiece of received wisdom among the intelligentsia, in academe and the press...

...I remember how I used to reach way out for a lead, a new figure of speech, anything to set off what I was writing that day from what I'd done the day before...

...He jots down names and numbers and remembers the rest until he gets home...

...To get away from Cox, I signed up as a miler and finished last in the only race I ever ran...

...I never had any notion of being a sportswriter...

...Taylor wanted me to find someone who'd never seen the city and bring him back to St...

...It accounts for the enduring success of such classics as "Twilight Zone," "As The World Turns," "Guiding Light," and many others...

...Louis...

...Then the firm became John M. Smith Sons, when my grandfather took it over, and finally Smith Brothers Co., which went broke in the Depression...

...That is why academics and journalists 28 The American Spectator November 1977...

...Smith does complain that his memory isn't what it used to be—"I can't remember a column more than 24 hours after I've written it," he says—but it still serves ably...

...Max Boo-Boo Hoff and alley beer, and watched dawn curdle a sky from which shone little promise of better days to come...

...In those days I hardly ever got a day off, but I was younger then and I loved it...

...The next year he jumped to the St...

...They were living on relief, drying their own tobacco...

...I blacksmith it out paragraph by paragraph on the typewriter...

...Sept...

...Full of years and honors, Smith still writes 3,000 words a week and says he would just as soon write 4,000...

...He was reading Roger Angell's latest collection of baseball pieces, in which was inscribed, "For Red Smith, my favorite...

...Louis Browns...

...That is definitely a "foul...

...Red was there to cover the race, and he had to be in St...

...As a boy, Smith found a hero in one Vincent Engels, a Notre Dame journalism 26 The American Spectator November 1977 student and angler who showed him how to fish with flies and, by his own example, suggested a livelihood that did not involve the lifting of heavy objects...

...When we got to Terre Haute, he dropped off the copy at the Western Union office...

...Those are the days on which Red Smith, who writes about pitchers, horses, and prize-fighters for a living, does not grace the pages of the New York Times...

...These do not include Women's Wear Daily, which carried his stuff in the late sixties, between the demise of the New York The American Spectator November 1977 25 Herald-Tribune and his joining the Times in 1971, and for which he endured much rough derision at the hands of his colleagues...

...He trusted people too much...

...But Smith calls Young a "malicious son of a bitch," and so his words occasioned no introspection...

...But Smith does not oblige...

...Louis, Smith worked for Frank Taylor, a managing editor steeped in the legends of Ben Hecht...

...As man of letters, Smith's training was broader, though still outside the classical tradition...

...I wanted to be a newspaperman...

...Smith's friends are dying, and the past for him is something alive...

...The place was settled by the French about the same time that St...

...Smith," wrote a University of Missouri committeeman, in a wonderful turn of phrase two autumns ago, "is expected to retire soon and lock up his covetedtypewriter for good...

...When Evel Knievel announced last Christmas that he intended to soar above a pool of man-eating sharks in the glare of prime-time television, Smith made order of the chaos: The refined and discriminating taste of the American television viewer has been the subject of more than one treatise by students of behavioral science...

...Louis...

...She was immediately attracted to Kay, my wife, and she agreed to return with us to civilization...

...Smith saves almost nothing, including, until very recently, his own columns...

...The art of Red Smith is half a century old and counting...

...To his small frame, assiduously unattended over the years, age has added few pounds...

...The year was 1970," Muchnick says, "because Dust Commander had won the Derby...

...Western Union, he maintains, is incompetent with any message longer than ten words that doesn't end in "love...

...Bovard, managing editor of the rival St...

...Too much," he said a moment later...

...Louis Star, for $40 a week...

...but the rest of the message was lost from view...

...never ridden in an elevator...

...This was important, because the Post was the only paper in town that paid real money...

...Alas, with the advent of the Drug Era a decade ago, the Realist too went to pot...

...At first he was a timber scaler," Smith relates...

...It carried a Philadelphia dateline and began this way: "Twenty-two sleepless ballplayers opened leaden-lidded eyes this morning in this, the home of Ben Franklin, Mr...

...Gentlemen,' he said, 'I think that is enough,' and he lifted his hands...

...Among Smith's literary heroes is E.B...

...I had to do it differently...

...Louis girl, and I didn't want to leave town...

...He gave away celery to promote celery eating and got a dollar apiece for cantelope, but didn't make much money at that, either...

...Smith prefers, as he always has, labor to capital, and holds Bowie Kuhn in the same perfect scorn as he held a previous incumbent of the baseball commissioner's office, A.B...

...Two years ago, when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the world took note of his years and marvelled...

...It was just awful...

...I had a miserable beat, and I didn't do any work...

...At the age of 72, Smith does nearly everything but retire...

...Once a publisher asked me out to lunch," Smith recalls...

...I'd gallop out and write about the high school championships because I didn't want the season to end...

...I rather enjoyed it, although was never very good at it...

...On an interview, he says, he listens for a turn of phrase...

...Walter Wellesley ("I hate the name" is customarily inserted here, but Smith says he doesn't hate the name at all) Smith was born in Green Bay, Wis., on September 25, 1905...

...He paused judiciously...

...She was sitting out on the porch," Smith relates, "smoking a corn cob pipe, wearing a black sunbonnet, living with her husband, and a rather new husband, in a shack...

...He proposed that I write a book—a book on anything...

...World of Movies, Radios and Airplanes Unknown to Ozark Dweller—Her Chief Interest in the 'Outside' World is to See the Mississippi...

...I rarely sit down and write a column on four pieces of paper...

...One time Bovard had fired a reporter and the guy came back the next day to cop a plea," Bob Burnes, sports editor of the Post-Dispatch, relates...

...Sam Muchnick, a St...

...Smith wrote as follows: Fletcher, Mo...

...Upon graduation in 1927, he got a job at the Milwaukee Sentinel, for $25 a week, working whatever story the city desk was pleased to send him on...

...Some people write a fast draft and then rewrite...

...I don't regard myself as a cruel man, and yet I love to hear an opponent's bones crack...

...I discovered in high school that I couldn't run fast, so I decided to run long...

...One night, there was a big silvery moon hanging over right field...

...He summers in Martha's Vineyard, where he watches the Red Sox on TV, and maintains a year-around residence in New Canaan, a fashionable community even now beyond the financial reach of many major-league ball players...

...I hated my gym instructor in my freshman year at Notre Dame," Smith reflects...

...The hero is the writer...

...It's a wonderful thing...

...When I went to see him.in New Canaan, I brought a copy of a story he had written in June 1932, when he was covering the St...

...Articles advocating "Opportunities for Women at the Administrative Level" appeared as early as 1953...

...Louis to record his reactions...

...It was not until the 1953 landmark A.P...

...I flunked one semester and quit...

...Nowadays, Smith is a stiff-squire...

...batted balls and galloping steeds are the props of Smith's stage...

...Smith case that the New Jersey Superior Court upheld the right under common law of a manufacturing company to contribute funds to Princeton University...

...Louis...

...The freezing ennui of the 1976 World Series was transformed by a sentence of Smith's: "Looking like something that had been in the water for days and days, the Yankees went down for the fourth time last night...

...Gentlemen,' he said, 'I am Abe Attell, featherweight champion of the world...

...He says that he gave up tennis after losing repeatedly to a girl...

...Years ago, I realized that I wasn't a fast writer...

...Later in life, I learned that my father despised it, too—he did it out of duty...

...The seasons still lead him from diamond to stream to gridiron, and none of it bores him...

...the air smells of books and summer...

...The series delighted St...

...He wore black horn-rim glasses...

...Now he went out slowly...

...It is useful to know that not until a.1935 amendment to the Internal Revenue Code could corporations deduct pre-tax income for charitable contributions...

...I turned it down," Smith says, "because Kay was a St...

...Leaden-lidded' is too much...

...Louis days, when he worked too hard and stayed out too late, Smith's immediate boss at the Star, Sid Keener, personally roused him and drove him to work in the morning...

...In St...

...The office is furnished with plumbing, books, and pictures of men and horses...

...Then, as now, Smith wasted few tears on the vanquished...

...The words still arrange themselves on the page in perfect grace...

...For example, Lapham suggested, Mencken today might say "that blacks (i.e., 'Moors') do not think as well as whites, that homosexuality constitutes a mental disorder rather than a political choice, that women, no matter how well-meaning or enraged, simply cannot make art, government, or law...

...and he wrote it himself, with the acknowledged encouragement of Dean Wallace B. Donham of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration...

...Louis, who died in 1967) set out by flivver to Old Mines...

...White, whose work he calls an "unbroken crystal stream...

...That was what she really wanted...

...He cleared a cedar swamp in the northeast corner of town and started a wholesale vegetable business...

...Somehow, one was reminded of Abe Attell as an old man fighting a kid in St...

...I was all set to sign the contract when it dawned on me that this involved sitting down and writing an extra 90,000 or 100,000 words...

...And before his death last summer, Professor Bauer and his colleague Dan H. Fenn, Jr., who spent years on the subject and wrote a book on The Corporate Social Audit (1972), were not yet ready to prescribe what a workable social audit should look like...

...I became slower and slower when I started writing a column...

...My feeling," he says now, "is that I'll keep on going as long as I enjoy it, or until someone I respect says, look, give it up, you're losing the hop on your fast one...

...Taylor," Smith says, "wasone of those guys who'd read all about how managing editors are supposed to act—very gruff, tossing off assignments as they came into his head...

...That was the lead of a story on the sports page of a New York daily 45 years ago...

...This is as far as I can go.' The old champ had come in briskly...

...I'd cover a Villanova game Friday night, Penn on Saturday, and the pros on Sunday...

...He'd just come across a feature about some place called Old Mines, Mo., in the foothills of the Ozarks...

...He was not a maudlin man...

...That was a misnomer because it came out irregularly, and it finally folded at the end of my freshman year...

...2. "The Raw Materials Outlook" appeared in 1952, and "Population & Technology," in 1957...

...Like White, Smith has never written a full-length book from scratch...

...But this is the right of age...

...Actually, I think he's getting better...

...They never come back...

...Smith shook his head...

...A few days later, when I looked in the back seat, I found about twenty crumpled up pieces of paper, leads that Smith had tried then ripped up because he didn't like them...

...3. Socially responsible big-business behavior requires a publicly-owned corporation to spend money for non-corporate purposes...

...Louis but failed to impress O.K...

...To hear Smith himself tell it, no man cuts a less probable figure in sports...

...More and more, Smith seems to write of the past, of the death of friends, and of games long forgotten...

...In Philadelphia, I wrote seven a week, at the Trib I started with six and later cut down to five...

...She adored Stan Musial and we went to see him whenever we could...

...Ten minutes after the fight," he-wrote in 1961, "they scraped Ingemar Johansson off the floor, propped him up on a stool, bundled him up like a sore thumb, and nudged him gingerly on his first step on the long road back to Goteborg...

...The more audacious Taylor's stories, the more stubbornly Bovard refused to credit them...

...But I couldn't fight my way past Bovard, and I got the Record to renew its offer...

...I think the man's name was Cox, a senior who ran on the track team...

...Never made much money at it, though...

...I never had any remote interest in going into the business...

...During his St...

...A pair of drumsticks lies on a table (Smith isn't sure where he got them...

...Yogi Berra loiters in pen and ink and huntsmen harass a fox on the wall above Smith's typewriter, an Olympia manual...

...I'm unhappy if I don't have at least two hours at the typewriter, although I've done it in as little as 35 minutes...

...Bovard said the story was a movie scenario and that I was a faker," Smith says, still indignant (and embarrassed, for Taylor had ordered him to use the words "the writer of this article," which appeared throughout...

...And I realized then that I wasn't going to get any faster...

...Smith was raised a Catholic...

...James Grant is an associate editor of Barron's Financial Weekly...

...As it happens, Dick Young of the News suggested just that at the height of the Seaver controversy, saying that Smith is the "pitiable shell of a once-great writer...

...But I turned them down...

...My first wife, Kay, was a Cardinals fan," said Smith, as the talk turned to busmen's holidays...

...His great grandfather, John M. Smith, came to Green Bay from Morristown, N.J., before the Civil War, and made a name for himself as a horticulturist...

...When I went to Philadelphia in 1936, I told the managing editor that I'd do either, sports or local...

...Though a life in newspapers is filled with temptation—press agentry, bad fiction, and, at last, social security—Smith retains his innocence...

...Smith's brow was lined and his head thatched white...

...A milestone in theatrical history was passed a couple of summers ago when thousands bought tickets for a closed-circuit TV show on the promise that if all went well, they would see Evel Knievel disemboweled on the rocks at the bottom of the Snake River Canyon...

...As we got up to leave, Kay turned to me and said, 'I'm the luckiest girl in the world.' " ^ Tom Bethell Capitol Ideas On magazines, metrics, "mental illness," and moralism...

...The older I get, the more I admire the simple declarative sentence...

...Jet planes, arc lights, and the other icons of progress have made sports writing a less civilized calling...

...He rigged up a table in the back seat for his typewriter, and Phyllis sat up front with me...

...He's what you call a picture-book writer," Muchnick said...

...In San Francisco, at the 1956 Republican convention, Smith and Art Buchwald proposed that they interview "Machinegun Kelly" at his home in Alcatraz...

...He was pointed to Calico Creek Hollow and advised to look up Mrs...

...Louis wrestling promoter who worked on the Times when Smith was on the Star, recalls a column written in the back seat of his Pontiac, between Louisville, Ky., and Terre Haute, Ind., a distance of under 200 miles...

...Someone asked me how long it takes me to write, and I said I use all the time I have...

...And here was a magazine I had not heard of cheerfully violating this taboo...

...There was a slight tremor in his hands...

...She had never seen a car, a telephone, an electric light, anything of the kind...

...I asked Muchnick if he thought Smith's copy was losing any of its edge...

...I had all these shapeless troglodytes struggling in the primeval mud...

...The same applied to donations to help improve community education, health, recreation, and cultural facilities...

...Louis for the price of a hotel room, but that was in the Great Depression, a hungrier and more permissive era...

...It is a highly complex document, offered "as a start," which did not itself define or describe "social responsibility...

...The concept of "blue collar blues" was anticipated in a 1952 article on "Man on the Assembly Line...

...That entertainment was a failure...

...never worn street clothes, chewed gum, eaten in a restaurant or talked over a telephone...

...Learned in all sports, Smith never earned a varsity letter and last sat atop a horse in 1946...

...Bovard just kept on reading copy...

...I sent the contract back, and told him that I couldn't do it...

...He added that writing newspaper stories about Seaver was the lowest calling in town, a brave claim which, if it stands at all, stands on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday...

...Whereas baseball writers once traveled regally, in smoking cars, filing their copy at leisure, they nowadays are hurtled through the skies from one lighted stadium to the next...

...Posterity might well discount that confession, for in his junior year, Smith was elected editor of the Dome, the university annual...

...Smith pleads guilty to another foible in those years—that of overwriting...

...Treading the path of Engels, Smith entered Notre Dame and enrolled in journalism, having already copped first prize in his high-school essay contest with, as he recalls, "a witty description of the East High debating team...

...The old champ looked fit," Smith said on the front page, "square of shoulder and springy of tread, his skin clear, his eyes bright behind the glittering glasses...

...1. The author was Chester I. Barnard, president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company...

...He played two or three rounds of golf, years ago, to humor his son, Terence (now assistant foreign editor of the Times and one of the paper's most shot-at foreign correspondents), and claims that he could swing at the ball and find it lying behind him...

...There were so few people on the staff, I sat at a smoking typewriter for twelve hours a day...

...4. In 1973, John Humble, director of the international consulting firm, Urwick Orr & Partners Ltd., described in detail how an organization might conduct a continuing audit of how it performs its social responsibilities (Social Responsibility Audit: A Management Tool for Survival...

...I was a reporter for it but a lousy one...

...He was the guy who could look at a forest and tell you how many board feet were in it...

...When I met Smith, he was dressed in khaki pants, brown loafers, and blue button-down shirt...

...In 1961, three years before "Bull" Connor put down the Birmingham civil-rights marches with fire hoses, snarling dogs, and cattle prods, and long before "Black" had replaced "Negro," the Review published Henry Allan Bullock's influential articles on "Consumer Motivations in Black and White...

...James Grant "Just A Newspaper Stiff" The art of Red Smith is half a century old and counting, and though life as a sportswriter is filled with temptation, Smith retains his innocence...

...Louis the next day for a speech...

...Mencken, if he were in our midst he would undoubtedly go so much against the grain that he might find it hard to get published...

...Deadlines come earlier, games run later, and Smith rarely gets to the ballpark, on business or pleasure...

...5. Nor do mitbestimung in Germany, employee cooperatives in Sweden, or nationalization in Britain (to mention only democratic nations) provide any reassurance that those who run the enterprise will act in the best interests of the public...

...A strike was in progress, and Smith stopped by union headquarters to ask directions to the wilderness...

...At the time of the Ali-Inoki rassling-boxing carnival, while young men wrote earnestly of the here and now, Smith favored his readers with an item of history: " ' "Perhaps it is some atavistic instinct in me," Jimmy Londos said today...

...I'd had so much invested in sports by that point—you know, I knew the way to the Yankee dugout without asking directions that I couldn't give it up...

...I care less and less for adjectives," he remarked not long ago, suggesting that time is on the side of the writer...

...Breslin called the pitcher a hero to a heroless city, ornament of the borough of Queens, and thus the most important man in all New York...

...The panelists were given a word and they'd have to trace it back to its roots...

...Four days out of seven, however, Jimmy Breslin is kidding himself...

...One guy, who seemed to be a real dees, dems, and does kind of character, was just great at it...

...Tom Bethell is Washington editor for Harper's and contributing editor of the Washington Monthly...

...I started on local, went to sports, got bored, and went back to the city desk," Smith recalls...

...For years, Smith has explained his success by protesting that writing a column is the easiest thing in the world: "I just open a vein and let it bleed out," he says, "drop by drop...

...This was his mother's wish and his father, who wasn't a Catholic, acceded gladly, insisting only that Walter attend public schools...

...As a small boy," he recalls, "I was always the littlest kid, four-eyed from the first grade on...

...At the Star, when I was on rewrite, I was fast because I had to be fast...

...I don't think I have any gift of tongues," he continued...

...I really enjoyed that show and envied them so...

...He did keep, however, a note from Branch Rickey, the peerless baseball executive, which ended with this PS: "You understand me better than most, perhaps...

...I got a letter a while ago from a guy who used to play halfback for a high-school team and he enclosed a story that I'd written about him...

...I had two years of high-school French," he recalls...

...Mary Susan Coleman Tigert, who proved the incarnation of Taylor's richest dreams...

...Musial hit two home runs into that moon, and the Cardinals won the game, by, I think, two to one...

...Smith marvels that White wrote simply even as a sentimental youth (a fact apparent in his published letters, which Smith devoured...

...2—In the deep quiet of Calico Creek Hollow, at the end of a flinty Ozark Trail that meanders three miles through the woods from this quiet cross roads post office, the writer of this article has discovered a woman 73 years old who in her entire life has never seen a railroad train, gas stove, street car, movie, taxicab, sewing machine, airplane, hotel, vacuum sweeper, department store, lamp post, traffic cop, apartment house, boat or dentist...

...Here Smith writes his columns, including the headlines, and phones them in to a tape recorder at the Times...

...Louis was settled, and you could still hear French spoken there...

...He was light of heart and light of foot," Smith wrote of Art in a column after his death, "and he would quit a job to go to the circus...

...Advice on "Management of Voluntary Welfare Agencies" appeared in 1964...

...I don't know why I hated his guts, maybe because he had the bearing of a drill sergeant...

...A liberal in politics—"I've spent most of my life voting against Richard Nixon"—Smith, in matters of sport, is an Old Whig, conserving here and improving there, friend alike of real grass and free agents...

...Happy) Chandler...

...Alley beer," he murmured...

...Smith had applied to the Post-Dispatch on the invitation of Ed Wray, sports editor, but Bovard wouldn't hear of it...

...The critics of business (and even some of its practitioners) want their own kind of utopian perfection without understanding the difficulties or considering the price...

...They had something called the Notre Dame Daily," Smith recalls...

...Then I decided to branch out into Spanish...

...It was an old tiff-mining district, and the first hard road had just come in...

...Lapham has a point...

...Smith's office in Connecticut is in a converted barn, set back from a winding, narrow road much frequented by Mercedes Benzes, and a white clapboard house, where he lives with his wife, Phyllis...

...I have always given you a good show...

...She asked whether she could see the Big Creek, meaning the Mississippi River...

...In desperation, the guy blurted out, 'But Mr...

...for example, while it is okay to be a conservative, and it is okay to be a liberal, it is not okay to make fun of liberals...

...Through the Times News Service, Smith's column is syndicated to more than 400 papers around the world...

...The specimen evidently does not survive...

...But what of the legs...

...He grew vegetables in hotbeds—would force them up early and sell throughout northern Wisconsin and the Michigan peninsula...

...Smith had a sister, who died of tuberculosis when he was 19, and a brother, Art, an itinerant newspaperman, who died early this year...

...I was no account athletically...

...A few fast rounds, and then Abe turned to the crowd...

...Bovard, I've got to eat.' 'Not necessarily,' Bovard said...

...If they saw that the price might include their own freedom, not just the companies' money, they might for once stop to think...

...In a recent issue of National Review, Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, remarked that though journalists are forever bemoaning the absence of H.L...

...In the early days of television, there was a fine quiz show on the air...

...On September 2, 1935, the Star-Times (successor to the Star) ran the first of a series of articles by Walter W. Smith—his byline until he went to Philadelphia—under this bank of headlines: Woman, 73, Never Saw a Train, Lives only 70 Miles from St...

...Louis...

...All I ever wanted to be," he told the Pulitzer Prize people a couple of years ago, "was a newspaper stiff...

...The audit would be the social equivalent of an annual profit and loss statement...

...I've never had any Latin or Greek, and I deplore that...

...I was going to the Derby, too, so I offered to drive him and his wife, Phyllis, to St...

...never has heard a radio...

...The guy begged Bovard to give him back his job, nearly got down on his knees...

...Toward the end he seemed impatient for the final bell...

...As it happened, I went to sports and never left, except for covering the presidential conventions in 1956 and 1968...

...It is true that Smith once wrote society paragraphs for the Chase Hotel in St...

...Some of the rashest words provoked by the trade of Tom Seaver to the Cincinnati Reds last summer were those of Jimmy Breslin, columnist for the New York News...

...Smith's foray into politics nearly produced the story of the decade, scotched only by a jail warden's better instincts...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

...I loved football when I was in Philadelphia," Smith said...

...Prison management, however, rightly suspecting the pair dangerous, vetoed the idea...

...Even before the announcement, other honors committees were speculating on his mortality, more or less discreetly, sometimes leaving it to Smith to quash the rumors of his own impending retirement...

...My first encounter with The Alternative: An American Spectator was in the New Orleans Public Library, and my initial reaction was: How did this get past the "censor" ? I then realized—as indeed I had been vaguely aware—that public discourse is usually governed by tacitly agreed-upon ground rules...

...The face suggested the Ivy League, but the air of professorship dissolved with his laughter...

...I had a fine time in 1956, and the Herald-Tribune asked me if I wanted to cover politics permanently...

...I was so flattered that a real live publisher had asked me to write a book between covers that I said yes...

...Actually, according to surviving witnesses, very little impressed Bovard...

...Joseph P. Duggan lent a hand in the research for this article in St...

...The last time I had seen anything like it in American journalism was in the early to mid-1960s, when the Realist made great sport of conservative attitudes...

...That's a more personal thing...