| Name |
Smith, Walter Wellesley "Red" |
| Nickname |
Red |
| Birth |
25 Sep 1905 |
Green Bay, Brown, Wisconsin, USA  |
| Gender |
Male |
 Birth - Church Record |
25 Sep 1905 |
- Births and Christenings Index, 1826-1908
about Walter Wellesley Smith Name: Walter Wellesley Smith
Birth Date: 25 Sep 1905
Birth Place: Green Bay,,
Gender: Male
Race: White
Father's Name: Walter Philip Smith
Father's Birth Place: Green Bay, Wisconsin
Mother's Name: Ida E Richardson
Mother's Birth Place: NY, , NY
FHL Film Number: 1299480
|
| 1910 Census |
1910 |
Green Bay, Brown, Wisconsin, USA |
- Walter Philip Smith 32
Ida Smith 33
Arthur Smith 5
Walter W Smith 4
Catherine Smith 2
|
| Occupation |
Aft 1927 |
| Journalist - Sports Writer |
- Journalist - Sports Writer
|
| 1940 Census |
1940 |
Merion Park, Montgomery, Pennsylvania, USA |
- Walter W Smith34
Catherine Smith31
Catherine Smith6
Tearence Smith1
Jane Mc Keever40
|
| Death |
15 Jan 1982 |
Stamford, Fairfield, Connecticut, USA |
| Biography |
Aft 15 Jan 1982 |
| by his son, Terrance Smith |
- In my memory, Pop was always writing a column, in a press box at the ballpark or racetrack, in his basement office at home, in a plane or train, or in the family car on summer vacation trips to Wisconsin. He would balance his Olivetti portable on his knees in the passenger seat, typing as my mother drove, shushing my sister, Kit, and me in the back seat. Once, when we moved into our house in Connecticut, he had the movers set up a table and chair beneath a tree and wrote a column there. It was moving day, but his deadline was looming, as always....
He loved his life, had two kids and two good marriages, and lived long enough to know his six grandchildren and two of his great-grandchildren and to take my son, Chris, fishing for the first time in his life. They laughed together and Chris caught a fish. That sunny day on Martha's Vineyard became grist for a column, of course, his plinth for the day.
When his health was failing near the end, he struggled to overcome the congestive heart failure and kidney disease that would take his life. He wanted to get better, he said; the Super Bowl was coming up and he wanted to cover it, to write another column, a good column, and then another after that, and make that one better. Spring training was not that far away.
But if he didn't get better, he told me, he had no complaints.
"I've had a great run," he said.
And he did.
Terence Smith has been a correspondent, editor, and broadcaster for The New York Times, CBS News, and PBS over the course of a four-decade career.
http://www.cjr.org/critical_eye/the_natural.php?page=all
About the author;
Terence Smith spent 20 years at The New York Times including eight years in the Middle East and Far East, covering four wars, peace negotiations and events in more than 40 countries. Smith also served as Assistant Foreign Editor and Deputy Metropolitan Editor in New York. In the Times' Washington bureau, he served as diplomatic correspondent and chief White House correspondent. In 1985, Smith joined CBS News in Washington, covering the Reagan White House and, for nine years, reporting the cover stories for CBS Sunday Morning. In 1998, Smith turned to public television and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. As senior producer and media correspondent, Smith broadcast hundreds of reports and studio discussions on media, national and international issues. Smith is now a special correspondent for The NewsHour.
|
| Biography |
Aft 15 Jan 1982 |
| Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: Sports Figures |
- Smith, Walter Wellesley ("Red")
Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Thematic Series: Sports Figures | 2002 | 700+ words | COPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group, Inc. (Hide copyright information) Copyright
SMITH, Walter Wellesley ("Red")
(b. 25 September1905 in Green Bay, Wisconsin; d. 15 January 1982 in Stamford, Connecticut), sports journalist esteemed for his unique blend of incisive commentary, technique, vitality, and humor.
Smith was the second of three children born to Walter Philip Smith, a third-generation wholesale produce and retail groceries salesman, and Ida Richardson, a homemaker. Both Smith and his brother Arthur Richardson were named after the Duke of Wellesley, whose Christian name was Arthur Wellesley. Smith's father gave him the nickname "Brick" because of his hair color. Later in life, "Brick" became "Red," a moniker that endured even after his hair receded and turned white. Smith graduated from East High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, in 1922 with a "B" average and his first writing award, a free copy of the $3 yearbook, which he earned with a humorous essay about the school's debating team. After graduation, he was accepted to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He worked for a year as a clerk for a hardware company to save money for school.
Smith enrolled as a journalism major at Notre Dame in autumn 1923. During his freshman year, he worked for the school newspaper and by his junior year he was editing the university's annual, The Dome. When asked later …
Read the rest of this article, courtesy of your local library
http://www.encyclopedia.com/article-1G2-3436500535/smith-walter-wellesley-red.html
|
| Obituary |
16 Jan 1982 |
| New York Times |
- Journalist, sports writer; "Red Smith" was born in Green Bay on September 25, 1905, attended high school there, and graduated from Notre Dame in 1927 with a degree in journalism. He worked briefly for the Milwaukee Sentinel before moving on to the St. Louis Journal where he started as a copy editor. He became a sports writer when the editor fired the entire sports staff. After a stay in Philadelphia, he moved to the New York Herald Tribune, and after that paper's demise, to the New York Times in 1971. As early as the 1950s, Red Smith wrote sympathetically about the discrimination experienced by black athletes, although he criticized Muhammad Ali for avoiding military service in Vietnam. Smith's writing was notable for its literacy, humor, iconoclastic approach, craftsmanship, and freedom from standard sports jargon. Of his writing he said, "Writing is easy. I just open a vein and bleed." He became the most widely syndicated sports writer in the country and in 1970 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. He was the first Winner of the Associated Press' sports editors Red Smith Award. Since 1983, Notre Dame University has sponsored the Red Smith Lecture in Journalism. He died on January 15, 1982.
[Source: Obituary, New York Times, January 16, 1982 ]
|
| Other Info or Events |
Aft 15 Jan 1982 |
- Later Life and Family[edit]Smith died at the age 76 of heart failure. Red Smith School (4K through 8th grades) in Green Bay, Wisconsin is named in his honor. Also named in his honor is the Red Smith Handicap, a race for Thoroughbred horses run at Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, New York.
Smith is buried in Stamford's Long Ridge Union Cemetery.
Red's son, Terence Smith, went on to be a journalist at The New York Times, CBS News, PBS, and NPR.[6]
|
| News Mention |
25 Sep 2005 |
| New York Times |
- September 25, 2005
What Would Red Have Thought, and Written?
By TERENCE SMITH
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of my father, Red Smith, the former sports columnist for The New York Times. He was born in Green Bay, Wis., in 1905 and died in 1982 at the age of 76. He spent 55 of those years as a newspaperman, mostly in sports, writing for papers in Milwaukee, St. Louis, Philadelphia and finally, in what he always considered to be the big time, New York. At the age of 70, writing for The Times, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976. To mark his centennial, my sister, Kit O'Meara, and I decided we would do something he would have enjoyed: go to a ballgame. The National League was his favorite, so the choice was obvious. At 1:05 this afternoon, Kit and I, together with our spouses and my daughter, Elizabeth Smith, plan to be in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium, watching the Washington Nationals wrap up their series with the Mets. "Remember," Kit said, "how bereft he was when the Giants and Dodgers quit New York, leaving only the Yankees for him to cover?" ("Rooting for the Yankees," he used to say, "makes about as much sense as rooting for United States Steel.") "And remember," Kit went on, "how tickled he was when the Mets came to town and made such good copy?" In fact, the Amazin' Mets, with Casey Stengel as the resident poet and philosopher, gave him scores of wonderful columns. The National League was back in New York and life was good. Kit and I mused about what he would have thought about the sports world today. He was always a fan as well as a professional observer. I am certain he would be astonished by the money in sports today. The idea that television contracts for Major League Baseball and the National Football League would be worth billions, that individual franchises like the Yankees or the Washington Redskins could be valued at more than a billion dollars, that individual players could have multiyear contracts equivalent to the budget of a small city - all this would seem Orwellian to him. Yet I don't think he would dispute that the real stars are worth whatever the market will bear. In column after column, he took the side of the players in their disputes with the owners. In 1969, he wrote supportively of Curt Flood, when Flood chose to hold out against baseball's reserve clause after he was traded against his will from St. Louis, where he had played for a dozen years, to Philadelphia. "Curtis Charles Flood is a man of character and self-respect," Red wrote. "Being black, he is more sensitive than most white players about the institution of slavery as it exists in professional baseball." He described baseball's initial response to Flood's request to be eligible to play for any team as "Run along, sonny, you bother me." Would he have extended underdog status to today's baseball stars, with their huge salaries and aggressive agents and free-agency options? To be consistent, I think he would have had to swallow hard and say yes, the stars bring in the fans and the money, so they are worth whatever they can negotiate. Kit, who was not so sure, said, "Whatever he thought of the players, he would have had a hard time viewing today's sports owners as underprivileged or undercompensated." And what would he have thought of the steroid scandals that have dominated the baseball headlines this year? Kit and I are convinced that he would have hated steroids as a threat to the integrity of the sport he loved. Another frightful development, in his likely view, would have been the emergence of sports-talk radio and the shouting that dominates sports broadcasting these days. But here is his dirty little secret: He would have listened and watched anyway, no doubt talking back to the television just as he did whenever Howard Cosell was pontificating. And shamelessly, he would have used it as material for his column. But there is much about sports today that he would have applauded. He would have rejoiced in some of the spectacular individual performers - a Tiger Woods, for example, or a Roger Clemens, or a Peyton Manning or the Williams sisters. Are they better than the stars of his day? We doubt he would have cared one way or the other. Two sports he relished (partly because they made such great copy) were thoroughbred racing and boxing. Doubtless he would be dismayed by the disintegration of the fight game and the fact that racing survives more on slot machines and simulcasts than on what happens on the track. He loved this time of the year because it brought football. His preference was always the college game over the pros - he had more fun watching Harvard battle Yale in The Game than enduring the hype surrounding the Stuporbowl, as he would say. And so he would probably have applauded the Bowl Championship Series, for all its flaws, because it puts the football spotlight back where he thought it belonged. Kit and I think he would have appreciated much of what appears in the sports pages today. The best columnists are as good as any in the so-called Golden Age, and he would have taken pleasure in the way they go about what he always described as "the best job in the world." But mainly he would have enjoyed the chance to come along today to R.F.K., to watch the Nationals and the Mets play, to feel the pulse of the pennant races quicken and the momentum build toward the World Series. That's the way he would have wanted to spend the day.
Terence Smith is correspondent for "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
|
| Name |
Red Smith |
| Burial |
Long Ridge Union Cemetery, Stamford, Fairfield, Connecticut |
| Person ID |
I168126 |
1FamilyTree |
| Last Modified |
26 Mar 2016 |
1905 - 1982 (76 years)
