Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Smith on Wry: Jack Smith, Columnist for Our Times
Exhibitions
1 of 34
Jack Smith, ca. 1925.
Born in Long Beach in 1916, Jack Smith grew up in Whittier, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles. He began working as a sports reporter for the Bakersfield Californian in the late 1930s and moved on to the Honolulu Advertiser. After World War II, he worked for the Los Angeles Daily News, joining the Los Angeles Times as a reporter in 1953 and becoming a columnist five years later.
Whittier YMCA. Boys' Department Wrestling Champs, 1930.
Smith also played on the YMCA's midget basketball team, which, like the wrestlers, had winning seasons. The Whittier YMCA boys beat teams from Long Beach, Los Angeles, Huntington Park, Los Nietos, and Pico (the city later merged with Rivera to become Pico Rivera). Later, at Belmont High School, Smith was the high-point man one season, scoring forty-six for the lightweight basketball team.
Jack Smith's photograph is in the center of the page.
Jack Smith in the newsroom of the Los Angeles Daily News, ca. 1948.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Smith worked as a reporter and rewrite man, whose job is to receive telephone reports from journalists in the field and turn them into a news story. Westways, the magazine of the Automobile Club of Southern California, published this photograph in its December 1974 issue, with the caption "Fastest rewrite man in the West." A reader, Anita Stutley of Los Angeles, wrote to ask Smith if he still had the socks and tie.
Photograph of Jack and Denny Smith, 1945.
U.S. Coast Guard. Photograph of Jack Smith and fellow Marines, March, 1945.
Resting on the beachhead at Iwo Jima, Smith consulted a handy book called Naming Your Baby. In letters to Denny, he suggested such names as Lucky Jordan Smith (after the title character in the 1942 Alan Ladd film) and Caesar Wolfgang Smith. However, in one postscript, he allowed that he liked the name Curt "better every minute."
Jack and Denny Smith, at the Techau Cocktail Lounge, San Francisco, January or February 1945.
Jack Smith married Denise Bresson (called Denny) in 1939. At the time of this photograph, taken before Jack shipped out for Iwo Jima, Denny was expecting their first child.
Denny Smith. Letter to Jack Smith, November 9, 1945.
For months after the end of the war, soldiers impatiently awaited discharge from the military, and so did their families. In this letter, Denny responds to learning that Jack will soon come home. He received his discharge from the marines on February 5, 1946.
U.S. Marine Corps. Certificate of Honorable and Satisfactory Service for Jack Smith, February 5, 1946.
Jack Smith. Notebook, undated.
This is one of many notebooks in which Smith jotted down notes ranging from ideas for columns to favorite quotations to phone numbers and names of contacts for interviews. On this page, he records some random thoughts about driving and freeways – topics that are never far from the minds of Angelenos.
Romulo Gomez and Jack Smith working on the house, ca. 1970.
The Smith house in Santo Tomas, Baja, ca. 1970.
Jack Smith. Baja Logbook, 1970-1977.
Smith's journal of life in Baja is open to the first page, with the entry for May 16, 1970, the first day of occupancy. The entry recounts various glitches in the house, especially the crossed lines that sent hot water through the pipes to the toilet.
In his July 8, 1990, column about the end of the Baja days, "Adios to Gomez and Their Baja Mansion," Jack wrote more about their first stay in the house: "I had always told him that I would not consider the house finished until the toilet was in. He called us from Tijuana one day and told us the house was finished. The toilet was in. We rushed down to La Bocana and threw upon our front door. The toilet was sitting in the living room."
Jack Smith's Greek fisherman's hat.
Courtesy of Curtis B. Smith.
Jack Smith at a book signing "God and Mr. Gomez", 1974.
Portrait of Jack Smith, ca. 1975.
Jack Smith. Floppy disks and a miniature data cartridge.
When Jack Smith replaced his typewriter with a computer, he not only entered a new technological age, but he realized that the computer and related technologies would change life profoundly and permanently. He was especially fascinated and alarmed that the advent of the computer would mean the eventual demise of corrected literary drafts. As authors turn increasingly to writing novels, poetry, and plays at the computer, scholars will be unable to study the development of writers' texts.
Smith himself became an example of his prediction. From the mid-1980s, when he adopted the computer, his writings are chiefly on disks, rather than paper texts showing corrections. As a result, many of his edits and corrections are gone. Moreover, his files, many in obsolete digital form, must be recovered electronically in order to be read and preserved.
Jack and Denny Smith, at the Historical Society of Southern California, ca. 1990.
Jack Smith. Letter to Denny Smith, August 15, 1945.
August 15, 1945, was the official date of victory over Japan, and Smith writes in jubilation about the end of a long and wearying war. The Japanese surrendered on September 2 in a ceremony on board the U.S.S. Missouri.
Jack Smith. Note card, undated.
Smith notes the ease with which a regular columnist manages inadvertently to offend groups he never knew existed.
Map of Iwo Jima, 1945.
Over the years that Jack Smith wrote his newspaper column, many former soldiers, sailors and marines wrote to him, recalling their wartime experiences and sending mementos. In a letter to Smith dated September 5, 1981, John McKinney enclosed this map of the island of Iwo Jima that had been distributed to the marines on board his ship, the Hanford, prior to landing.
Views of Clifton's, promotional booklet, 1956.
A favorite landmark of Los Angeles since 1931, Clifton's Cafeteria featured a South Seas décor and singing waiters and waitresses. The original Clifton's Pacific Seas closed in 1960, but the second restaurant, Clifton's Brookdale, which opened in 1935, is still operating.
International Flat Earth Society of America. Card awarding Jack Smith an honorary membership, undated.
County of Los Angeles, Board of Supervisors. Proclamation recognizing the dedication of the Jack and Denny Smith Library and Community Center, April 16, 2004.
The proclamation is signed by supervisors Gloria Molina, Don Knabe, Yvonne Braithwaite Burke, Zev Yaroslavsky, and Mike Antonovich.
Jack Smith. Notecard, undated.
This item is from Smith's extensive file of cards containing notes on topics of interest. It explores Smith's thoughts about the physical spaces and landmarks of Los Angeles, and how those features exert their influence on the city's inhabitants. He writes that the lack of a recognizable look makes L.A. hard to characterize or photograph, but that the open spaces of the city, make for a freer, more tolerant way of life than might be found in other cities.
Jack Smith. Commencement address for Occidental College, corrected typescript, June 9, 1979.
Smith was a frequent graduation speaker at area schools. For Occidental College, he spoke about Los Angeles, and his typescript includes his markings for emphasis in delivering the address.
Jack Smith. Note card on Fleetwood Pugsley.
Smith created scores of note cards, both typed and handwritten, recording a variety of ideas and quotations, anything that could be used in future writing. Here, he writes a fond, posthumous memory of Pugsley.
Jack Smith. Untitled speech about volunteerism, corrected typescript, undated.
Smith's speech pays humorous tribute to women who volunteer, especially his wife, Denny, and to the men who stand behind them. His typescript is marked for presentation.
The Smith family, ca. 1958.
Doug, Curt, Jack and Denny, with their faithful companion Gene Biscailuz.
Mary Ellen Pereyra. Note cards depicting the California Common Grackle, presented by the Los Angeles Audubon Society, January 12, 1976.
Grackle mementos and art perched throughout the Smith home, as well as in Jack Smith's files. In this example, the Latin genus and species on the card, Quiscalus quiscula smith, honors Jack Smith as the first to sight the grackle in California.
Ethel Averbach. Postcard to Jack Smith, March 19, 1973.
Smith's grackle sighting claim and his resulting columns led to scores of letters from his readers, who were captivated by the controversy. In this postcard, a reader sends him Ogden Nash's poem, "The Grackle."
Jack Smith. Note card, undated.
In this card from his extensive set of notes, Smith listed several of the nicknames that critics gave to Los Angeles over the years.
Smith's abiding affection for his city and its way of life infused his columns with their sense of place and made him the voice of L.A. As he wrote in a column titled "He'll Continue to Be the Best That He Can Be," dated December 23, 1991: "I have often been asked, 'What is your column about?' My answer is that it is about being me and living in Los Angeles. Consequently, I hoped, it would be about everybody who lives in Los Angeles."
Jack Smith. "Spend All Your Kisses," printed with movable type on linen, undated but after 1977.
Courtesy of Alison P. Smith.
Jack Smith created this wall hanging with one of his favorite sayings, using type pieces given to him by Denny.
Jack Smith. Alive in La-La Land, New York: Franklin Watts, 1989.
Courtesy of a private collector.
In this compilation of columns, Smith gathered pieces that focused on life in Los Angeles. The cover design perfectly evokes his wry, humorous view of his city.
Postcard showing the Los Angeles & Mt. Washington Railway Co. station, ca. 1895.
Past eventFri., Feb. 15, 2008, 12 a.m.–Mon., May 12, 2008, 11:59 p.m.
Library, West Hall
Smith on Wry: Jack Smith, Columnist for Our Times, looks at Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith, one of the most popular newspaper columnists in Southern California history.
Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith wrote daily for most of his 42-year career with the paper, producing some 6,000 columns about life in the city. Along the way he became one of the most popular newspaper columnists in Southern California history; reading him was considered a daily "must." He died in January 1996, just a few weeks after the appearance of his last column on Christmas Day, 1995. An exhibition which ran at The Huntington from Feb. 15 to May 12, 2008, looked at Smith the journalist, family man, and social commentator. The Huntington acquired Smith's papers in 2005.
Message from exhibition curator, Sara "Sue" Hodson
A Journalist's Beginnings
Smith was born in Long Beach in 1916 and grew up in Whittier, Bakersfield, and Los Angeles. In his teens, Jack Smith served as editor of the Belmont High Sentinel, later remarking that this was the highest position he ever reached in his career. After leaving Bakersfield Junior College, he began his professional career as a sports editor for the Bakersfield Californian before moving on to the Honolulu Advertiser, where he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. After the war, Smith covered the infamous story of the Black Dahlia murder for the Los Angeles Daily News. Although some dispute the attribution, Smith probably was the first reporter to publish the sensational name, gleaned from a pharmacist who told him that the victim, Elizabeth Short, was called the "Black Dahlia" for the way she wore her hair.
Smith worked in the heyday of newspapers when it was not uncommon for columnists to settle in for decades. Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle, Mike Royko of the Chicago Daily News, and Jimmy Breslin of New York's Daily News and Newsday personified their cities and newspapers while writing about social life or politics. But as Los Angeles Times writer Robert A. Jones observed in an appreciation of the beloved columnist, Smith lived in a city that was known less for its downtown sidewalks than for its backyards and patios. Smith wrote revealingly about his own comings and goings and in the process managed to carry on intimate conversations with thousands of readers. "The wonderful thing about your writing is that it is so conversational and communicative," wrote reader Joan Miller in 1982. "It almost invariably makes a reader want to respond."
