Jack’s Last--and Toughest--News Story

When Jack Smith began writing columns about his long, final illness, I had trouble accepting the change from his usual amusing tales of life on Mt. Washington.

I discussed this with a mutual friend, retired Times Editor Bill Thomas. “You don’t understand,” Thomas replied. “He’s covering his own death.”

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.

From then on, I read the columns with care, as Jack chronicled the failures of a body that now needed the assistance of his wife, Denny, and others to get around town. Step by step, each stage of deterioration was reported.

It was not a lonely, despairing death that he recorded. As always, Jack was surrounded by family and friends, the cast of characters we’d come to know, supplemented by newcomers, nurses, therapists, doctors and others, each of them captured by Jack’s undiminished ability to describe people.

Reading these columns, I thought about my elderly parents’ long decline, and their deaths, first my father and then my mother a month later. Jack’s column reminded me that my family was not alone in our experience. A colleague told me that many people wrote the paper to say they felt the same about Jack’s columns.

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I first met Jack 25 years ago when he was a rewrite man, working in the Times newsroom. He took the notes from field reporters and turned them into stories, as well as going out on interviews and to events himself and writing about them.

He was part of a cynical, hard-drinking generation of reporters who made fun of politics, love and death. The newspaper--and the nearby bar--were the centers of their social and professional lives. Standing at the pinnacle of this cloistered society was the rewrite man, and Jack was the best in town.

He was friendly to me, especially after learning I had just come down from Sacramento, where I had worked for the Associated Press. Jack had been on the Sacramento Union staff for a time, and we exchanged stories about that paper and the ratty old bar, the M Street, where the reporters and printers drank.

In those days, Jack wrote his column part time, most of his energy going to the rewrite chore, a skill he had honed at the now-dead Herald-Express and the old Los Angeles Daily News. It was at the Daily News that Jack had what he called “my finest hour as a newspaperman.”

The body of a nude woman, sliced in half, was found in a vacant lot. Working the phones, Jack found a Long Beach drugstore frequented by the woman, Elizabeth Short. Sure, said the pharmacist, he remembered Elizabeth Short. “They called her the Black Dahlia--on account of the way she wore her hair,” he said.

Writing about it years later, Jack said: “The Black Dahlia! It was a rewrite man’s dream. The fates were sparing of such gifts. I couldn’t wait to get it into type.”

Jack treasured his skill as a rewrite man, but his editors, impressed with the style and popularity of his column, wanted him to become a full-time columnist. Times reporter Eric Malnic recalls that Jack was reluctant to make the switch, fearing he couldn’t cut it.

But luckily the editors prevailed, and Jack was soon turning out daily columns.

He was a master of the form.

Jack followed the journalistic formula of short sentences and compressed paragraphs. His writing teachers were not professors but tough veterans such as Hemingway and Aggie Underwood, city editor of the Herald-Express. But with his natural ability, he took the formula and turned it into subtle and witty prose. When I asked him how he did it, he seemed surprised that I considered the work so difficult. Like the great quarterbacks he admired, Jack made the daunting task look easy.

To us pampered columnists of today, who think two or three a week are exhausting, the Smithian pace was astounding.

To sustain it, Jack couldn’t waste a second.

That was obvious when my wife and I were at parties with Jack and Denny.

He was a charming, witty raconteur and was usually surrounded by a large number of women and men intent on catching every word. Two days later, we would find in his column the same delightful story he had related at the party.

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Family, friends, football, vacations, his entire life were the subjects of his columns.

His readers shared this life. They 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.

In the last several months, his readers shared his death. Some of them, nearing death themselves, may have taken a special comfort from his columns.

This was Jack’s toughest story and, in covering it, his greatest gift to his readers.