Confessions of a Reporter Named Smith

For 20 years, I’ve done my best to work incognito as just another reporter named Smith. But almost every day brought the risk of exposure.

I introduce myself and people ask, “Are you any relation to Jack Smith?”

It can destroy an interview. The reporter is thrusting at his victim--as post-Watergate reporters are expected to do--digging out chicanery, insensitivity, vanity. Then comes the question:

“Are you the one who’s married to the French daughter-in-law?”

The risk of this happening loomed over most interviews. Usually, I’d squirm, just waiting for the question. When it came, I’d try to deflect it with one of my own: “What would make you think that?”

Futile. They had already read the truth in my face. The best I could ever do was answer with blunt and monosyllabic honesty, and move on, hoping to make clear the subject was off-limits.

I’ve long fantasized that I would someday put the question to rest with a full and voluntary confession.

This I propose to do today.

Let me begin on Oct. 23, 1958, the day the following conversation between a boy and his father was printed in The Times:

“What’s new, Doug?” the father-narrator began.

“Oh, we saw a horr movie today,” the boy replied.

“A what?” the father pressed on.

“A horr movie,” the boy said. “You know, about a monster. . . . It was about this monster who was thousands of years old. All the other monsters like him were extinct except him. I think that’s phony.”

Under questioning, the boy described the monster as a river creature with fish scales and gills, but said he thought it was phony because he saw it breathing through an Aqua-Lung.

“Was it scary?” the father asked.

“Naw, it was funny. We laughed whenever this monster came flopping around, but the girls they screeched like crazy.”

The Young Skeptic was one of the early roles I played in my father’s column. As the years went by, many more conversations appeared, some with my brother Curt. They covered my experiments in science class, my devotion to the Pittsburgh Pirates one glorious season, my quest for transcendentalism, my summers packing mules in the High Sierra and finally my courtship of, and marriage to, the French daughter-in-law.

I grew into an almost mythic character, my life being chronicled as it was being lived. My friends alternately thought I was important because I was in the newspaper or ribbed me as an oddity. Some would report that their mothers were in love with my father. Strangers startled me by commenting on the intimate details of my life. People I didn’t know introduced me to others as the son of Jack Smith. I had, in a way, become public property.

It was fun. It’s better to have been a celebrity than not. It’s an indulgence you never grow tired of, even though you’ve done nothing to deserve it.

But sooner or later, a man has to strike out on his own. That happened to me on Sept. 7, 1970, the day I became a sports desk assistant at The Times.

I joined a handful of baby-boomer children of Times staffers who took lowly positions at the newspaper to bide some time while pondering a career. We called ourselves, appropriately enough, “The Neps.” Most eventually moved on. But I was hooked. I always knew I would rather work with words than tools.

From the day I declared my ambition, my father did me the honor of withholding my name from print and also from private conversations among colleagues, unless they inquired. He allowed it to be my career. (There was nothing so precious along the way as a word of praise from someone who had no idea I was the husband of the French daughter-in-law.)

As for myself, I never mentioned his name. I wasn’t going to let myself be promoted because my superiors liked my father, or belittled because they thought he was coddling me. But in spite of my insistence on being me, I could never be sure how to read either warmth or coolness in some colleagues. I’m sure many people I worked with had difficulty separating me from my father.

Now, years later, the anonymity no longer seems so important. Sometimes, in fact, it can be awkward.

So I’ve learned to say nonchalantly, “My father is Jack Smith.”

It relieves the tension of the moment.

And it’s humbling to reflect that my father--who has described, entertained and, in some ways, defined Los Angeles for 35 years--has carried on the last 20 without my help.