"Just A Newspaper Stiff"

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...Smith shook his head...

...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...

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

...But what of the legs...

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

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

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

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

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

...Sam Muchnick, a St...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...Happy) Chandler...

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

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

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

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

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

...That entertainment was a failure...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

...Smith was raised a Catholic...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...During his St...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...Louis...

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

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

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

...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...

...Sept...

...In St...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

...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...

...It was just awful...

...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 flunked one semester and quit...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

...Louis...

...Louis...

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

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

...The series delighted St...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...He paused judiciously...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...never has heard a radio...

...Now he went out slowly...

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

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

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

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

...Lapham has a point...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...Louis to record his reactions...

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

...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...

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

...never ridden in an elevator...

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

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

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

...I was no account athletically...

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

...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...

...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...

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

...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...

...He trusted people too much...

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

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

...But Smith does not oblige...

...They never come back...

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

...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...

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

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

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

...Louis...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...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...

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

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

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

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

...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 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 to do it differently...

...But I turned them down...

...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...

...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...

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

...Louis Browns...

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

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

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

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

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

...The hero is the writer...

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

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

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

...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...

...Louis Post-Dispatch...

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