Goodbye, Mr. Smith : He wrote about it all. Column after column, year after year. Through him, we got to know about the city we love most, about him, about each other. : He Was Honest, Graceful, Wry --He Was Jack

Many times, toward the end, I received the panicked calls from readers.

“Where is Jack Smith?”

“Is Jack Smith OK?”

“He’s ill,” I’d say. Or, “On a cruise. Don’t worry. He’ll be back. Jack always comes back.” That’s what we thought anyway.

For a child of Los Angeles, who grew up to the thump of The Times on her porch every morning, this page without Jack Smith is nearly inconceivable.

Jack is and has always been. He was from some kind of mold they don’t make anymore. I sat at his feet at a Christmas party in 1994, asking him about the old days at The Times. When he first became a columnist, he said he was writing almost every day. Almost every day! It got so exhausting, he said, that he finally pleaded with his editor, “You know, I’m here so much, I bump into myself coming and going.”

Ever so graciously, the editor allowed Jack to reduce some of his non-column responsibilities.

At his peak, Jack was an extraordinary writer--graceful, agile, wry. I admired that. But what I grew to love was the unflinching way he faced his physical disintegration. He wrote it, and you felt it: the tedium and terror of falling apart, of becoming dependent--and even worse--of becoming a nuisance.

As his health worsened, he wrote of passing out at lunch; of throwing up at the captain’s table on a cruise ship. He wrote of bad moods and hopelessness, but in a way that made you feel that here, in the City of Eternal Youth, there is nothing shameful in growing old. Jack taught us: Infirmity happens.

There’s another thing I loved about Jack--in the age of abstinence, 12-step programs and sorry public confessions, here was a man who adored his cocktails and wasn’t afraid to admit it. He wrote lovingly of his vodka-and-tonics, of his glasses of white wine; he wrote irascibly of those who would deny him their glow. Here was a man, rare today, who never in his life apologized for taking a drink. At least not in print.

And so we toast Jack Smith today.

It’s going to be a long, sad hangover.