Jack Smith

Jack Clifford Smith (1916-1996) was a journalist, author, and newspaper columnist who wrote about Los Angeles with wit and affection for almost forty years. As he once said of the city: "I’m sure there are more beautiful places, and better places to live, but not for me."

Born in Long Beach, Calif., on Aug. 27, 1916, he attended Belmont High School in Los Angeles (where he edited the student newspaper) and Bakersfield College. He also worked as a sportswriter for the Bakersfield Californian. He later served in the Civilian Conservation Corps and merchant marine, and was on the staff of the Honolulu Advertiser when Pearl Harbor was bombed. His two years as a combat correspondent with the Marine Corps included coverage of the bloody assault on Iwo Jima.

The war over, he continued his migratory ways, working at times for United Press, the Sacramento Union, San Diego Journal, and two erstwhile Los Angeles newspapers, the Daily News and Herald-Express. In 1953, at the age of 37, he joined the Los Angeles Times, where he remained for the rest of his life, moving from general assignment reporting to the rewrite desk (from which he wrote occasional humor pieces for the Op-Ed page), and finally to a regular column, which he undertook reluctantly in 1958, fearing he would fail. "His use of the language was meticulous, his manners were graceful – both in print and in public – and his middle-aged fascination with the trivia of a changing world was a constant delight to his readers," wrote the Times.

Smith shared his life with his readers, who, like him, were "members of the post-World War II generation that filled the Southland’s subdivisions and schools, built swimming pools, raised kids, supported the public library, watched football and went to the philharmonic," wrote Times reporter Bill Boyarsky. Everything and everyone around him became grist for his mill: his wife Denise, his children, the Smith home atop Mount Washington, bird watching, disappearing landmarks, L.A. traffic, L.A. goofiness, Woody Allen and other East Coast critics of L.A., English language and grammar.

"In many ways, Jack served as the country’s first -- and most enduring –- columnist of postwar suburbia," wrote Times reporter Robert A. Jones. "With his minimalist, non-intrusive style, he fit superbly with his era. He functioned almost as a diarist of the time when modern L.A. was being built."

Quoting a friend who believed that Los Angeles could be divided into two groups of people: "Those who ‘got’ Jack Smith, and those who didn’t," Jones added: "Jack’s message came down to this: Los Angeles operates rules that are different from other cities. Perhaps you can find the soul of New York or Chicago on the sidewalks, but not here. Los Angeles has an interior life that is private and hidden from view. L.A.’s soul can be found behind the hedges, in its backyards and patios, around the barbecues. And where other cities build communally, L.A. builds individually. Everyone here constructs their own universe behind their own fence. Like all great columnists, Jack understood that crucial difference between his city and others, and he exploited it to the full. He filled his column with his family rather than the mayor and his henchmen. The children fell off ladders and broke their arms, grew up, married French girls. Jack bickered over the selection of TV dinners. The bathroom got remodeled, the patio grew a little more grand."

Here is Jack Smith on the subject of East Coast journalists who put down L.A.:

"They are sent out here on expense accounts to write stories that will please their editors, and their editors want to be told that Los Angeles is a dreadful place, so they will feel better about living in New York or Boston or Philadelphia, especially in February. The reporter settles into the Beverly Hills Hotel in an ambiance of cantaloupe and is taken out to Malibu on his first night to a freestyle moonlight party where he is intoxicated by palatable California wines and surprisingly literate and friendly natives, including relays of suntanned beach girls. The next morning he wakes up in his hotel room with his New England conscience and a hangover and feels guilty for having had such a wonderful time. He looks out his window and can’t see the Empire State Building and is homesick. He calls room service and orders a bloody mary to exorcise his anomie, and while waiting for it he opens his portable typewriter and pecks out a few hundred words to reassure the folks back home that Nathanael West was right – that their correspondent is in the capital of kitsch at this very moment, wasting his talent away among Rotarians and retired chiropractors and mindless TV actresses in a plastic wasteland."

In time, Smith’s writings became as synonymous with Los Angeles as Mike Royko’s with Chicago, Herb Caen’s with San Francisco, and Jimmy Breslin’s with New York. "Los Angeles was his city and he never ceased poking into its corners, looking for signs of life," stated the Times.

Smith was the author of ten books, including one published posthumously, Jack Smith: Eternally Yours (1996), a collection of ninety columns, mostly from the last ten years of his life.  His first book, Three Coins in the Birdbath, appeared in 1965. His other books include: Smith on Wry (1970), God and Mr. Gomez (1974), The Big Orange (1976), Spend All Your Kisses, Mr. Smith (1978), Jack Smith’s L.A. (1980), How to Win a Pullet Surprise (1982), Cats, Dogs and Other Strangers at My Door (1984), and Alive in La La Land (1989). God and Mr. Gomez, which described the building of the Smiths’ beach home in Baja California, was a national best seller, proving again (if proof was needed) the universal appeal of Smith’s writing.

Finally, as the Times noted, "After about 6,000 columns over 30 years, bowing only slightly to declining health, Smith cut back in 1992 from four columns a week to one, which appeared on Mondays. For most of his career, he wrote five columns a week."

The final columns chronicled his own declining health, "the failures of a body that now needed the assistance of his wife, Denny, and others to get around town," stated Bill Boyarsky. "He’s covering his own death," said former Times editor Bill Thomas to Boyarsky. "And Jack was doing it, Thomas explained, just as he had covered everything else – with precision and a clear eye. No sentimentality or self-pity cluttered up his last story."

Smith’s final column appeared in the Times on Christmas Day, 1995, fifteen days before his death on Jan. 9, 1996, at age 79, from severe heart failure.

Jack Smith’s contribution to Los Angeles is remembered through the Jack Smith Community Enrichment Award presented each year by the Historical Society of Southern California to men and women whose service and accomplishments have benefited the city.

-- Contributed by Albert Greenstein, 1999

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