Interview with Al Smith

Title: Interview with Al Smith Identifier: 1980oh271 Date: 1980-06-04 Interviewer: William Berge Project: Kentucky Newspaper Editors Project

The following is an unrehearsed taped interview with Mr. Al Smith, director of the Appalachian Regional Commission. The interview was conducted by William Berge, for the Oral History Center at Eastern Kentucky University. The interview was conducted in Mr. Smith's motel room in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on June 4, 1980, at 9 a.m. Mr. Smith is the owner and publisher of a number of newspapers in western Kentucky, and he's also the owner of a newspaper in Brentwood, Tennessee. The towns in which he owns newspapers are Russellville, the Russellville News-Democrat and the Russellville Logan Leader, in addition The Green River Republican, the Leitchfield News-Gazette, the Cadiz Record, and the Harpeth Herald in Tennessee.

Berge: Mr. Smith I want to thank you for letting me come down here and meeting you today in Bowling Green. I know you're busy and just in tow...just in the state for one day. Have to leave in an hour. Let's start out by...uh...talking about your personal background. Your...your full name and your parents' names 1:00and where they were from and when you were born. That type thing.

Smith: Uh...my...my name is Al Smith. Uh...my given name is Albert Perrin Smith...uh...Jr. I'm now 53. I was born January the...uh...ninth, 1927, in Sarasota, Florida. My parents were...uh...Tennesseans who had gone to Florida in the boom...uh...to get rich and...uh...lost...uh...everything in the Depression and who came back to...uh...Tennessee...to cent...middle Tennessee...uh...toward the end of the Depression in 1939 and who bought a farm in Hendersonville. It was a...

Berge: Oh, yeah.

Smith: ...little old...uh...uh...rocky, uh...hill farm, uh...eighteen miles from the capital of Nashville, which had no electricity in 1939. And, uh, which my father bought...

Berge: You can remember that then?

Smith: Oh, sure. I was twelve.

Berge: Yeah. You were twelve.

Smith: And...uh...it was a very romantic thing. My father was a romantic; both of my parents were. My dad was a lawyer. Never had any success. I was thinking about the problems of my father the other day. He died in 1968, and he was...uh... a mountain man and my mountain heritage has come back to me...uh...and I have rethought a lot of it in my current incarnation as a federal co-chairman of the Appalachian Regional Commission. My dad was born in...in Washington...uh...in 1897. His father was...

Berge: Washington, D.C.?

Smith: Yeah, but his father was a mountain newspaper publisher...

Berge: From where?

Smith: ....and promoter and politician. Uh...from Cookeville.

Berge: Oh, yeah.

Smith: Cumberland Plateau. About eighty miles east of Nashville. And...uh...His name was Rutledge Smith. And my grandfather had a big influence in my life. My 3:00grandfather and my grandmother, I suppose, Grandmother Smith, uh...in many ways dominated more of my life than my father did. Grandfather Smith was born in 1870. He...uh...left school when he was...uh...about twelve years old to lay track on the Tennessee Central Railroad between Nashville and Knoxville as a surveyor. And...uh...he had a lifelong involvement with the Tennessee Central Railroad. By the time he was... He went in and out of the railroad business depending on his interest. Grandpa bought a weekly paper, he used to tell me, when he was eighteen for five hundred dollars and a load of hogs. I think he exaggerated a little bit. That was kind of a trait in my family. But, anyway, he had the Cookeville Press from about 1890 to 1911. And, I say exaggerated in the 4:00sense that I just found some records that indicated that his father, Walton Smith, would have been a Confederate army officer and was a lawyer, was the publisher of this Cookeville Press in about 1892, I guess. Nevertheless, my Grandfather Smith...uh...used this newspaper as...as a political vehicle. The railroad was an important part of his life, getting commerce into the upper Cumberland area. My daddy was his first child. My daddy was born in Washington when his father was secretary to a congressman. My Grandmother Smith was...her name was Graeme McGregor. She was from Lebanon, Tennessee. She had gone to Cumberland. Uh... She went up to the mountains in... to Lebanon...to Cookeville to teach school where she met my grandfather. My grandmother wrote the editorials for his newspaper and really edited the paper as my father was growing up and she raised two other children.

Berge: You know Hodding Carter's wife wrote a lot of his editorials.

Smith: Oh, yeah, yeah. And I know the Carter family. Uh...That's part of my Louisiana incarnation. Uh... In fact, and...young...young Hodding Carter worked for me in New Orleans on the New Orleans Item when he was in [unclear].

Berge: The fellow that's in Washington now?

Smith: Yeah.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And, I had not seen him in twenty-five years and now he and I go to the same church together in Alexandria and we visit on Sunday and...and reminisce over...uh...our days in New Orleans when he was working for me when I was assistant city editor at the Item. But, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Berge: The reason I had mentioned that and interrupted you was that when...uh... my...we were in Greenville, Mississippi, my wife was a nurse and Mrs. Carter was in the hospital and...

Smith: Oh really?

Berge: ...she use to see her typing the editorials and talk to her and that lit...that boy just a baby then.

Smith: Right.

Berge: He'd come up there and visit his mother.

Smith: Well, uh...he...um...uh...Hodding Senior was a fine writer. And...

Berge: They sold that paper.

Smith: Yes. When I grew...was growing up, as a young man, Hodding Senior was 6:00writing for Collier's and the Post...the old Post...in the for...early '40s, was considered to be quite a liberal.

Berge: About disappearing southern towns.

Smith: Right.

Berge: Yeah. I remember those.

Smith: And his...his wife was Betty Werlein. And she was...uh...they were from Louisiana originally. Miss...and Mrs. Carter was the daughter, I believe, of a Episcopalian...biship. And...uh...Hodding Carter Sr. was the son of a country doctor in...uh...Hammond ...or [unclear] Tangipahoa Parish...Ponchatoula, in that area. And, I told Hodding the third, who until this month was an assistant secretary of state in charge of...uh...public information, the voice of the State Department, I told Hodding that I probably was the only member of, other member of Christ Episcopal Church in Alexandria, Virginia, who knew that his grandfather Carter was a...uh...country doctor in Tangipahoa because I had read 7:00his father's...uh...book about their family. But, going back to my family, my grandfather who had this paper, he played politics, he worked in Washington and in Cookeville. My grandmother...uh...quit teaching school and raised...uh...three children. And...uh...she raised a foster son, uh...Griffin Smith. OK...my dad was one of the...big experiences for him or anybody...would have...would have been for anyone. He went into the Army and...as a very young man in World War I, and was in the...uh...was overseas, and he saw combat, he came back, he went to Cumberland for a year. Got...uh...uh...another one of those funny Cumberland law degrees.

Berge: Like Estes Kefauver? [Unclear]

Smith: Yeah. Well, Kefauver went to Yale. I think.

Berge: Yeah, but I think he had his law degree from Cumberland.

Smith: Cumberland was a...was a...was a degree...diploma mill...a degree factory. Uh...you...

Berge: John W. Burgess got...went to school there, too. That old political 8:00scientist back in World War I.

Smith: Oh, yeah. They had at one time...they...they really boasted of their graduates and what they...how many were in Congress and so on. Uh... But, the...the system was you'd go there for nine months and get a ...uh...degree and then go read law for a couple of years and then take the bar. And, uh... It worked very well in its day. My father...uh...married...uh...met my mother, whose name was Elvira Mays, in...uh...Lebanon. And, married her...

Berge: Was she...she from Lebanon?

Smith: Hm-hum. In other words, my father Smith and my grandfather Smith, each went to Lebanon to get a wife.

Berge: OK.

Smith: Got a wife in Lebanon. And, uh...they...uh...uh...my dad went to Arkansas after he got his...after World War II...uh...World War I...

Berge: Where?

Smith: To...uh...Paragould, Arkansas...Marianna, Arkansas, that area. He went there because his foster brother, Griffin Smith, owned a newspaper in Paragould and was developing a...a political career that...uh... was to lead Griffin Smith 9:00to election as a...eventually...to...as chief...Griffin was chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court for years. Practiced very little law. I don't think he ever practiced law. He, too, went to Cumberland. Griffin had been adopted...uh...as a foster son...or taken as a foster son by my grandparents. His name was Smith, but he was no relation to us. Uh... And, he was....oh...maybe only ten years younger than my grandmother. He was about fourteen I think when he came to live with our family. He was older than my father...

Berge: So, he was older than your father who was the oldest child?

Smith: Yeah, my father was the oldest child. That's right. And, Griffin Smith was a ...a...a charming, bright, brilliant man. Very handsome man. A slender fellow. Over six feet tall. A lot of grace and style. And...uh...one of the first newspapermen I guess I ever knew. But, he was a judge when I knew him. 10:00And...uh...he was grown and married. He'd married my grandmother's cousin. And...and...was grown and married...ah...when he went to Cumberland and had been in business with this newspaper in...in Arkansas. Went to Cumberland, got this quick law degree, went back and I think he ran for a state office shortly after...like state treasurer, recorder, or secretary of state. Was elected, then in the next race ran for the Supreme Court. Was elected. Somehow along the line became chief justice and kept getting reelected. But, at any rate...uh...uh...my grandfather had two other very interesting children. Uh...a son, McGregor Smith, who was an engineer. Who...uh...grew up in Cookeville with my father.

Berge: That's his mother's maiden name? McGregor.

Smith: Yeah. That's right. McGregor Smith was an engineer, who got his first job out of the University of Tennessee in New...uh...Louisiana. Uh...When he was quite young he had worked at...become president of Louisiana Power and Light Company when Huey Long was...uh...governor. He used to say Huey Long gave him 11:00his first ulcer. He moved eventually to Florida Power and Light Company...uh...Miami. Our whole family played fruit basket turn over about 1939, '40. The Smiths, my father and mother, moved from Florida, they had migrated from Arkansas to Florida in the '20s. They moved back to Tennessee and...and got a farm. Uh... My uncle McGregor Smith took his three children and moved from New Orleans to Miami, to Florida, to become president of...of Florida Power and Light Company. And...uh...soon after he became chairman of the board of Florida Power and Light Company. And he was head of it for... '40 until his death in 1972. Thirty-two years. He was extremely influential in...

Berge: Was he active in politics, too.

Smith: Yeah. I...

Berge: So you came by your interest in both newspapers and politics very honestly, didn't you?

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. I was saying that really these...uh...I guess...I digressed 12:00here...a long digression from the statement I was making that my father had not had many successes. The war...uh...oh...the family used to say that the war was responsible for my father's frustrations and problems...a drinking problem. A...a sense of defeat. Of not being able to complete anything to much satisfaction. My father was smart and he was caring...uh...he was a wonderfully kind person to neighbors. Uh...he had...he...he had the common touch, but he was very...

Berge: Was he sort of philosophical?

Smith: Uh...no. Yes...he was a...he was a political liberal. Uhhh... But, he tended to be very dogmatic and very, I think he was very insecure. I think he was...I used to believe...I began to believe as I got older that he must have been terribly frightened of my father...grandfather when he was younger.

Berge: Is he a very strong man?

Smith: Yeah. My grandfather was a strong, domineering, stern man. And is... And 13:00my aunt, my father's sister, said he was that way extreme...that...that...that my father took the brunt of my grandfather's wrath. My grandfather had a terrible temper.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: My grandfather lived to be 92. I loved my grandfather. He was very good to me.

Berge: As they say in Eastern Kentucky they're long livers. Huh?

Smith: Yeah.

Berge: [Laughing]

Smith: And grandfather was born in 1870. Uh... He grew up in the shadow of the Civil War. He lived to vote for John Kennedy in 1960. And, to have...uh...experienced the Cuban Revolution in Miami where he was living in retirement. That's my grandfather, Rutledge Smith. And, to have seen the Sputnik. Uhhh... He had gone from the Civil War to...to the world of outer space.

Berge: Wow... I mean, in his lifetime we had...uh...we had space shots and we had...uh...the little Big Horn. In his lifetime.

Smith: That's right. That's exactly right. And, uh, my grandfather, incidentally, was fascinated with the West. He...uh...he...was...he promoted a 14:00tour...uh...uh...of the Tennessee Press Association...uh...to Salt Lake in 1902. I used to have a ring embossed, that was given him by the...that said Tennessee...Rutledge Smith, Tennessee Press Association, 1902, Salt Lake City. And, he loved the West. Went out there a lot. But, at any rate, uhhh...grandfather...uh...admired achievement. And...uh...he had a will to get out of the poverty of Cookeville.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: And, he did it every which way he could. He did it with the newspaper. He did it with politics, going to Washington. He did it with the railroad. He promoted that region as best he could. He was interested in economic development of the mountains. [Unclear]

Berge: Is he interested in things like...

Smith: ...that's what I'm doing...

Berge: Is he interested in things like the parks, like Fall Creek Falls, and...

Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Berge: 'Cause it's close there.

Smith: Sure. And...uh...parks...and...but my father was the one, and my grandfather loved agriculture, but it was my father was the one who farmed. My 15:00father who really camped and hunted and fished. My father who really went out and...and spent the night in people's homes and rode his pony up and down those hills. My daddy was a born democrat. Little "d" democrat.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: He loved people. He wanted to be loved and respected. He...uh...

Berge: Had a heart of a poet, probably?

Smith: He did. He drank when...a lot when he was frustrated, and he was frustrated all the time. And...uh...uh...uh...my father was viewed with affection and kindness by his younger sister and brother...younger brother. And, by Griffin, the older foster brother. The sister was Dolly Smith, who...uh. Her name was...uh...really...uh...Eudora. And...uh...we all called her Dolly. And, she's got...apparently got my grandfather's genes because she's nearly 80 now, and going strong, lives in Cookeville in Monterey. She married an engineer...

Berge: I was going to ask you if she married.

Smith: She married an engineer who was my, McGregor Smith's roommate 16:00in....uh...at the University of Tennessee. This engineer was...uh...Malcolm Williams, Ladd Williams, Ladd was a nickname. And...he...uh...and she...uh...have been second parents to me and to this day are. They're both living in Monterey, which is in the Putnam County.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And...uh...when McGregor Smith went to Miami to develop Florida Power and Light Company, which became a fascinating industrial development in Florida. He...uh...McGregor was chairman of the...not only of Florida Power and Light Company but of Florida Industrial Development Commission for about ten years. You asked me about politics. I saw an article in the Miami Herald a few years ago that listed him as one of the ten most influential people in...in Florida and one of the people who picked the...I mean helped decide which candidates would be supported, like many utility magnates. But...

Berge: Like Witt Stephens in Arkansas. People like that.

Smith: Right. But, at any rate, his roommate and...and best friend, I guess, 17:00over the years and like another brother was Malcolm Williams. My uncle, Ladd.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: Who was not any blood kin to me...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: ...but married my father's sister, uh...Dolly Smith. And Ladd went to...uh...from Tennessee to New Orleans in 1940 when...uh...or '39....when McGregor...uh...Smith, his brother-in-law, moved to Miami. Uh...Ladd went down there as a vice president of Louisiana Power and Light Company in charge of sales. In those days there were holding companies that owned most of the utilities in the south. And, in other words...

Berge: The same people owned two.

Smith: Yeah. The brother-in-laws were...were kind of at the same niche following each other. And, uh... My aunt Dolly did not like New Orleans all that much. She missed Tennessee. And, we had...they had had a farm near Nashville when I was growing up in Florida.

Berge: Is that your Louisiana connection? Through them?

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And, so....um...in other words, as they started their lives, my father's life...young life.

Berge: Let me interrupt just a minute. [Tape stopped and restarted] OK. Go on with this now.

Smith: OK. So...we had a...the setting of my life is the setting, as it is with so many people, the setting of the family of the generation before, and even in my case, the generation before that. Uh... So, what you had at the end of World War I in my family were a grandfather who grew up a Smith, and a grandmother, Graeme Smith...

Berge: And, two uncles counting your married uncle...

Smith: Yeah. And, two uncles. Uh...

Berge: They were really in politics.

Smith: They were all in politics...

Berge: On the periphery of it, weren't they?

Smith: Yeah. And in politics and in business. And in public life, really. My grandfather was director of the Tennessee draft effort in the...World War I. He 19:00was a major in charge of Tennessee Selective Service. My grandmother was editor of this paper and very active in the Tennessee League of [unclear] Women. And, interested in strange causes. My grandmother was opposed to...was a prohibitionist. She was opposed to women's suffrage. How she got on the wrong side of those issues, I never knew. But, she did. And, uh...uh...but at any rate, they moved from Cookeville to Nashville right after the end of World War I. And, their children got through college and set out in careers. They had Griffin Smith into the law...in journalism and the law in Arkansas. McGregor Smith in engineering and utility work in Flor...well, first Louisiana and then Florida. My father into the law. He was a title lawyer, an abstract lawyer. 20:00First in Arkansas and then in Florida. And, Dolly Smith marrying Ladd Williams and...who became an engineer with the Tennessee Utilities...uh...Commission...Railroad Commission. No, it's the Railroad Commission/Utilities Commission? In Nashville right after World War I. OK. The utilities are important because they were responsible for my lifelong interest in public power.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: Several puns in that...

Berge: Yeah. Sure.

Smith: ...because as a publisher I tracked down and duplicated some of my grandfather's experiences.

Berge: Sure.

Smith: It was a play on power.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: Electricity, as I saw it, has always been a development means. You know I mentioned at the beginning of this interview a farm that had no electricity in 1940?

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: Uh...I was twelve or thirteen years old, and I really remember going to school for a year and using an Aladdin lamp to read by. It was like camping out. 21:00It was an adventure for us when we first went out there.

Berge: I remember we had one of those Delco plants where we made our own direct current, when I was a kid.

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Berge: Let me digress from this just a minute and then we'll get back to it.

Smith: Hm-hum.

Berge: Now you started your public...did you go to the public schools in Florida?

Smith: Yeah. In...uh...

Berge: Where?

Smith: In...uh... Sarasota. We lived in Sarasota, that's where I was born. We lived in...uh...Sarasota was a small town then, in the early '30s. Circus was there. The Boston Red Sox were there. Uh...There were fishing boats. Uh...people...it was a...there was a winter colony there. Uh... The Depression was there. Uh... I remember my father crying because of...of things...I mean, a conversation, I was very small...he had seen a man who had befriended us...the president of the bank...working on a WPA project. And...

Berge: Oh, dear.

Smith: ...he came home at lunch, and he just started crying. He was telling my mother about seeing him there. I have recollections of hearing Roosevelt on the radio in...I believe '32. I was trying to remember how early that...of course, in later years Roosevelt was...was...I was 18 when he died.

Berge: My teachers use to play him when...when he talked during the day. When I was in grammar school and our teachers use to play the radio when he...during his afternoon talks.

Smith: Yeah. We did that, too. Uh, I went to a public high...public grammar school for four or five...

Berge: You must have...you must have started in sixth grade when you came to Tennessee or seventh.

Smith: No. I was in the eighth grade.

Berge: Eighth grade? Uh-huh.

Smith: I had a...I've had a...an extraordinary problem with school. Uh...I think that a lot of acting out must have been really involved. And, uh, a very, very fragmented...uh...kind of educational life. In the first...first grade was one of the great grades for me in school. I really loved it. I really just 23:00charged away in school. And, I remember the...uh...the thrill of learning to read. And, I quickly came to [unclear] because of grandmother's reading to me. At any rate, I skipped the second grade. Third grade was pretty good. And, I remember bad times in the fourth, the fifth grades, sixth grade, and finally in the seventh grade...

Berge: Sometimes those early skipping grades cause social problems. Doesn't it?

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And I think I was reflecting tensions in our family that were related to our own lives. But, we were living in a...you talk about acting out...I...I own an enormous home in Russellville. The nearest thing I can find to explain my attraction for it, is a mansion we lived in in some good years in the Depression. It was in Sarasota. And, it was...had been owned by General Grant's granddaughter. Uh...she...uh, Grant Cantacuzene. She'd married a Russian 24:00prince as I recall. And, the damn thing was so big...beautiful old house on Sarasota Bay. And, they couldn't rent it. And, my father's...uh...abstract title company was in charge of the property. So dad just moved into it. And, we lived in it two or three years. It was about fourteen acres of land. An orange grove. An Indian mound. And...uh...great big...uh...uh...three stories high, and a great big front porch overlooking the bay. I can remember porpoises swimming in Sarasota Bay and this big sea wall in front. And, it was a very romantic place to...to live...

Berge: I think I know what you're talking about. It seems like that my father's...uh...ups and downs...and...uh...what you assume, what I assume were your...your father's ups and downs were very similar or...

Smith: Hm-hum.

Berge: Gives you a kind of...I have some years that I don't even remember when they were bad when I was a kid.

Smith: Hm-hum.

Berge: And other years I remember very vividly, you know.

Smith: Yeah.

Berge: I remember the good years, and I don't remember the bad ones.

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Well, in the seventh grade, school got so bad for me...uh...and...

Berge: This is still in Sarasota? The last year?

Smith: In Sarasota. And, I think my father's career was collapsing down there, and he was drinking a lot. My mother was unhappy. And...uh...I had a ...finally...

Berge: Did you have any brothers or sisters?

Smith: I have a sister five years younger than I. And, uh...finally I moved, but I...I was almost raised an only child. Uh...

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: ...the distance between us...uh...continued all of our lives. We're...we're close, but we've never been really together much. Uh...but...I...my parents took me out of school in the seventh grade, and I spent a year with a marvelous French woman who had a little private school in Sarasota. And, I was really emotionally disturbed. And, she...all she did with me was to give me a lot of love and affection and let me write. And, I wrote, wrote, wrote all that year. Essays. Themes. And, the only requirement was 26:00wherever we went I had to write something about it. We went to a movie, I had to write a movie review. I was ten or eleven years old. If I read a book, I had to write a book review. If I went to the beach, I had to write about the beach. And, that was...that really...

Berge: You become a good feature writer that way. Didn't you? [Laughing]

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. So, we did that one year, and then we moved. And, I remember how excited I was. We were going back to Tennessee.

Berge: To the farm.

Smith: And ... all the summers in middle Tennessee on my grandfather's farm...uh...and with my aunt Dolly on her farm in Nashville. And, that was the year we all played fruit basket turnover. My father sold his house, gave up his job, which he'd managed to hold on to during the Depression, and we moved to Nashville to live with my grandfather for a year in the Nashville area on his farm and look for a farm to make a new start.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: My grandfather was going to help my father get a farm.

Berge: Did you go to school in Nashville?

Smith: And, I went to school in Nashville for one year. In the eighth grade. Rode a street car down and after school and acted...again acting out...acted in 27:00the Nashville Children's Theater...uh...in a lot of plays. And, had a great year there in this rural, uh...country...uh...school...grammar school, from which I graduated. Uh... At the end of that year, we bought this farm in...uh...in Hendersonville. Moved out there. My mother was pretty excited about it. It was a rough, wild piece of land. And, my daddy was just ecstatic about what we were going to do. My sister and I liked the idea. And, she was friends with Robin Smith Burrow...B-U-R-R-O-W. She now lives in Abilene, Texas, and is married to James Burrow of Kentucky who has a doctorate in history from the University of Illinois and is a professor of history at Abilene Christian College and has written two books published by Johns Hopkins about medicine...history of medicine. One's a history of the AMA called "The AMA: Voice of American Medicine." And, the other one just came out, it's "Medicine in the Progressive 28:00Era." He's working on a third book. And, the health themes run through my life, too, in many ways. Because, you see, some of these things were interests of my parents, but they were also interests that my grandparents had in their role as...in Cookeville as...uh...owners of the paper and promoters of the community. They cared about hospitals and medicine and roads and schools. Uh...I was in Cookeville recently and visiting at Tennessee Tech...uh, Tech, and my Aunt Dolly's now nearly 80 went with me. And, we talked to them about the crusades that my grandmother ran in the paper to get a school there, and to develop the school there, and to get a higher...an opportunity for higher education for mountain people. And, uh...at any rate, we got to the farm, and I went to Gallatin High School and road a bus...uh...twenty miles up to Gallatin and twenty miles back and really enjoyed it. Uh...I thought about those bus rides...

Berge: How...how many years did you stay at Gallatin?

Smith: One year.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And, we built a...they built a high school at Hendersonville. And, my father decided that I ought to go to Hendersonville because that's where we lived. So, I went to this new high school in Hendersonville, a little crossroads town at that time...now it's just sprawled all over...uh...along the Cumberland... the... uh... lake there, uh...Old Hickory Lake, which had not been built.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: Uh... My parents were rabid New Dealers. Ardent Roosevelt. Ardent TVA. My grandfather felt the same way. My grand...my uncle McGregor Smith was horrified at what was happening in the electrical utility business. My uncle Malcolm Williams despised the TVA. And, this was the beginning of the creation of the Republican branch of my family, which is going on to this day, I suppose, because their...uh...their children tend to be more conservative and are...Republicans. Uh...we...uh...we stayed on that farm. I went to 30:00Hendersonville...uh...two years. When I was fifteen, in 1942, I got into a...a speech contest...a national one. And, I won it. It was the American Legion National High School Oratorical Contest.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: I wrote an article...an essay about the Constitution, that was what the theme was. And...uh...I won the nationals in the spring of...

Berge: Where was that?

Smith: ... '42 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Berge: OK. Let me turn this. [Tape changed]

Berge: That was a good experience. Where were you? Still going to Hendersonville?

Smith: I was a sophomore. Uh... Frank Church won it the year before.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: And, uh...it was a four thousand dollar scholarship...uh...that went with it. I came back and did one more year, my junior year at...a very miserable year in Hendersonville. And, my senior year I persuaded my parents to let me go to Castle Heights, which was a military school.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And, I got a half scholarship to Castle Heights and I took the money 31:00from the four thousand dollars to pay the other half. And, went to Castle Heights for this one year and that's where I got my first real experience in...uh...working on a newspaper...uh... working on a...a school paper.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: They had...

Berge: You didn't do that at Hendersonville?

Smith: No, at Hendersonville I worked for the Nashville Tennessean as a...a county correspondent. Wrote stories...

Berge: Was that your very first...uh...newspaper experience directly when you worked for the Tennessean at Hendersonville?

Smith: Yes, except, that I used to hang around the office of the Gallatin Examiner the year of my freshman year in high school because I was enchanted with a young woman named May Belle. Uh...Mary Belle? May Belle? Mary Belle... Bancroft, who with her husband had bought this weekly paper, the Gallatin Examiner. And, they were soon joined by a young friend named Louis Starr, who 32:00had just graduated from Yale.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, in the middle of this exciting adventure with these three bright young people, the Bancrofts worked on daily papers elsewhere, but these three bright young people putting together this exciting weekly paper in Gallatin...uh...Bancroft...Tom Bancroft, I believe, he had...uh...viral pneumonia and died. And, uh... it was just a...just a catastrophe. Right in the middle of the war. And, uh...or, no, it was before...the beginning of the war...the beginning of the war. At any rate, about a year later, uh...Mary Belle...May Belle...Mary Belle...and Louis Starr married. Uh... Sometime after. And, they finally sold the paper and moved away and went to...back to the city. And, they worked on the Chicago papers. And, they finally moved to New York, and, of course, Louis Starr became a...a major figure...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: ...in...uh...the development of the American Oral History movement.

Berge: And, died in...the spring.

Smith: And died just this spring after coming to Kentucky...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: ...really, ...uh...because I had...uh...pushed him to have him on the program.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: Uh...Died...uh...in Kentucky.

Berge: Yeah, he talked about...when he was in Kentucky he talked about his relationship with you...at that paper.

Smith: Yeah, that's right. And, uh...so, uh...another thread to pick out. You see, I knew what...in later years, although I had...had lost contact with them after they left Gallatin. I followed his career, read his book about covering the Civil War.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And, uh...Read his book reviews in the Columbia Journalism review. And, uh...kind of collected everything I heard about him. And, renewed the friendship through the Kentucky Oral History...uh... Commission and meetings where we would 34:00see them years later.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: Uh...but, at any rate, I kind of hung around their paper. First work I did was for [unclear] at the Tennessean.

Berge: How did you get that?

Smith: I went down and asked for it. I couldn't drive a car, I was too young. But, I...

Berge: You were already too much of a Democrat to ask the Banner. [Laughing]

Smith: Yeah. Exactly. So, uh...we...we...uh...I did the stringing work for them. When I got to...to Castle Heights for this nine months, and I think that's the last good year I had in school, I did...uh...

Berge: Did you like that year?

Smith: Yeah. I wrote editorials. And, I was associate editor of the paper. And worked in the Drama Club. And worked in the...uh...uh...in speech. And...all...I hated it the first semester. But, I kind a, you know, the hazing and so on. I had a roommate, Arthur Shemwell, who has remained a friend. Uh... He's...uh...now a retired Ar...uh...from the Army. Went to West Point. Uh...Has...went to law school after he got out of the service. And is practicing law, a new career, 50, in...uh...Gaffney, South Carolina. Who's a Tennessean. Uh...I...uh...

Berge: What did you do when you left Castle Heights then?

Smith: Well, I enlisted in the Army.

Berge: What year was that?

Smith: '44.

Berge: That's when you graduated.

Smith: I enlisted in the Army. I had...uh...I spent a semester in an Army Reserve program at Vanderbilt.

Berge: Well, you were barely old enough to be in...to get in the Army then.

Smith: Just barely 17. Full of patriotic...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: ...uh...ardor. And...uh...I went to Vanderbilt for...for the first in my many frustrating experiences in college. I went to Vanderbilt in the Army Specialized Training Reserve program. And was exposed to a massive program of physics and chemistry, which just wasn't my bag, and I bombed out, separated from that program at the end of the summer of '44. So, I went down to New Orleans and took a semester at Tulane, which I enjoyed. I lived with my Aunt Dolly.

Berge: What'd you take there?

Smith: Uh...English, what I should have been taking. And history and...uh...avoided...uh...math as much as I could. And, ...uh...I got 36:00into...took a course in economics. On my... A week before my eighteenth birthday, I got a notice from the Army to report for active duty on the eighteenth, on the day of my birthday. See the Battle of the Bulge occurred and...uh...we were in a panic, just at the end of our breakthrough. The Germans had [unclear].

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, I went...I reported for active duty at...uh...Fort Oglethorpe I believe...in March...

Berge: In Georgia, near Atlanta.

Smith: Yeah. And rode in a...a troop train to Fort Sill. Sent to field artillery. And...uh...went in...guys twice my age. It was an interesting winter. They took guys 38, 39 years old.

Berge: And 18.

Smith: And 18. We were all together. And, I went through basic training at Fort Sill, field artillery fire control. And, had a...uh...really...uh....uh...I 37:00liked...I...Ienjoyed it. See, the year at Castle Heights set it up for me. It wasn't...it wasn't nearly as mean and nasty as Castle Heights.

Berge: As Castle Heights.

Smith: Really.

Berge: That's right.

Smith: And...uh...so, I was put on a list to go to...uh...Burma with a...as a surveyor with a field artillery mule pack outfit.

Berge: Because of your mathematical ability you became a surveyor.

Smith: Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: A great mathematic....mathematician. [Laughing] But, you know, funny thing is I...I...I met a guy named David Duncan, he was 38, had been a welder. And, who had about an eighth, ninth grade education and was a wiz at math and knew nothing about...uh... and he was a bright guy. He told me he'd started his welding career as a safe-cracker...teenage safe-cracker...with a gang of Arkansas people, all of whom got caught except him. And, he'd been on the road as a hobo welder. And, been very successful. Was a master welder. He had money in the bank, and a trailer, and a wife, and a thirteen-year-old son. And he was 38:00drafted because he'd quit a defense project. And the draft board took an aggressive...the draft board couldn't care less, and they grabbed him. Well, Duncan and I made a deal. I taught him military basics, and he taught me math. And, we sailed through the basic training together, became good friends, and...who...both going abroad and the war in Europe ended. And, they scratched us off the overseas list and sent us to [unclear] school for instructors. And together we came out. We spent the rest of the war there at Ft. Knox teaching. And, I learned a lot of math. ... And, got out of the service as a tech sergeant. I was offered a couple...

Berge: When was this? About '46?

Smith: Huh? '40...Yeah. '46. I was offered an appointment to West Point a couple of times through the ranks. But, uh...for...still I turned it down. I made tech in the Army by the time I was...still eight...18 years old. I was a 39:00tech sergeant. I may have been one of the youngest in the Army at that time. I loved teaching. I really enjoyed...that's what I was doing...I was teaching all the time.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: We came to...we got out in August of '46. I was discharged. I talked my way into Vanderbilt because my parents thought that's where I should go. My grandparents. Uh...I got in in August I guess. It was a disaster. I just...I was really not adjusted to my home. My mother and father separated about the month...the fall I came in. Their troubles bothered me. And, again, this acting out situation really erupted. And...uh...I began to really drink heavily. And...uh...I [unclear] some courses in the English department. Struck up some good friendships with some writers at Vanderbilt. Some people in the drama department. Fell in love...

Berge: There were some dandy young ones there then.

Smith: Oh, yeah. I knew...uh... My best friend in those days was Walter Sullivan.

Berge: Oh, yeah. Still there.

Smith: Who's now a...He's a English...a professor in the English department.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, uh... In fact, his wife, who was writing a master's thesis on...uh...Robert Penn Warren way back in the '40s...they had their first date to see a show that I was in at the Vanderbilt University Theater. And, I played with the idea of becoming an actor in those days. Uh...but, that year I lost my enthusiasm for it and decided writing was my thing. Well, Jane and Walter...and I picked up the agrarian movement at Vanderbilt.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: The theories of the English department. I read a lot. Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" came out that...

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: ...year, and...uh...made a very big impression on me. And, it reminded me of my Louisiana connections. I had visited Louisiana, not only going to Tulane, but when my relatives were there.

Berge: Sure.

Smith: There was this...this...these connections that were really to spread a network...all through the networks of where...of that [unclear]. Anyway, 41:00there...there was a...a rela...a thread of relationships around the south that have... uh...that...that developed in my life...uh...that were strengthened by experiences in my life that...that really set me up for this current job I'm doing in Washington.

Berge: Oh, sure.

Smith: I feel like that I...uh...that, uh...I really understand Alabama, and Mississippi, and Louisiana, and Tennessee, and Kentucky, and Florida, and Georgia and that area...not so much Georgia, but Alabama, the Delta area, I really know, and...uh...like. But, at any rate, the...Walter Sullivan and Jane married the summer of '47. And, I finished with a disastrous year with not enough credits to really be admitted. So, I spent the summer of '47 on the farm. And, the fall of '47 I was readmitted to Vanderbilt. I went for half a semester and saw that it really wasn't working. I just went to see the dean and told him 42:00I wasn't ready to go to college. And, I resigned. And, I went and got on a bus...went to New Orleans without telling my family where I was going. My Aunt Dolly was down there.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: And, I rented an...uh...room in a flophouse on Dauphine Street, I guess it was. Went down to the Times-Picayune and got a job as a copy boy. I was nineteen. And, uh...they had no jobs for reporters and I didn't have the credentials on paper. But, I got hired as a copy boy in the newsroom...

Berge: This was in...

Smith: ...at eighteen dollars a week.

Berge: This was in '4...'47?

Smith: '47. And, I worked there on the copydesk, I mean the copy room, in the news room, as a copy boy, for twenty dollars...twenty dollars a week. In...let's see...November, December, January and through the election of Earl Long as governor. I remember that vividly. And, damn near starving to death. And, uh...meeting a lot of interesting old time newspaper men and working with them 43:00and getting off at night and drinking with 'em, caging drinks and borrowing money and eating every other day. And, really having a rough time...

Berge: All that printers' ink stuff people tell about.

Smith: Yeah. Yeah. And where I fell in with a friendship with a...with a famous old man named John McClure, who had been a...who was news editor of the Times- Picayune, he'd been a founder of the Double Dealer, a literary publication down there. And, owned a bookshop, I believe, called the Double Dealer. Who lived in the French Quarter with his wife, Joyce, who was from Mamou, his second wife, who was from Mamou. John McClure, was fifty-five, I guess. And, he really had hired me as a news...as a copy boy. Snow white hair. He was an alcoholic. I didn't recognize it at the time. Beautiful...

Berge: Newspapermen and house...house painters.

Smith: Yeah.

Berge: They're...they were the drinking kind.

Smith: Yeah. He was a fine poet...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: I thought. And he read everything. And, he was a kind man with a quixotic sense of humor. Uh... He had been acting managing editor during the war 44:00at the paper. He grew up in Oklahoma. His father was from Kentucky. He had a lot of wonderful Kentucky stories. He used to come up here and vacation. Couldn't drive a car. Been a poet. He was a...had quite a reputation as a poet and...uh...editor and a book critic in the '20s. He knew everybody who'd ever been in New Orleans in...in the literary way.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: He knew Faulkner...uh...uh...Sinclair Lewis...uh...Sherwood Anderson...Dreiser. And, we would get off Picayune at night, about midnight, one o'clock in the morning, walk down to the corner, I was say nineteen, it was '55. He was a surrogate father. And, we'd...I was a copy boy in [unclear] get the final paper out, and we'd walk down to the Old Jim Saloon, corner of Royal and Canal street, and drink whiskey toddies and talk until two or three in the morning. And, then sometimes he'd take me to his house. He owned a four-story 45:00house, which was the tallest house on Pirates Alley. Right next to the cathedral.

Berge: Yeah, I know where it is.

Smith: And, we would go up there, and Joyce would be waiting. And, they'd didn't go to bed until dawn. And, had no children. And, we would go upstairs. And, he'd make some more drinks. And, we'd sit out there on the balcony, drink whiskey, and talk until the sun began to come out.

Berge: You learned a great deal then during that period.

Smith: I did. He told stories about the Indians, about the West. His father had, I believe, been a lawyer in Oklahoma. Uh...Mr. McClure had been a Christian Scientist, he used to say a Buddhist. Uh... He was a practicing Catholic when I knew him. But, his father was a Methodist. His, uh... He had survived a...a bout of typhoid fever when he was a child. He claimed he'd gone to Paris and lived in Paris as a boy. He's a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, had lived in Paris as a boy before World War I. Came back at the beginning...during 46:00the war...got in the calvary. And, he claimed that he was sick and that they diagnosed his illness as...uh...fatal galloping consumption and he came to Louisiana to die because it was...he was discharged from the Army for tuberculosis he said.

Berge: He couldn't have gone to a worse place.

Smith: He couldn't go to...well, he couldn't get back to Paris. The nearest thing to Paris was New Orleans. He said New Orleans was one vast Sicilian slum at the end of World War I. And, he came there and opened this book shop prepared to die. His first wife's name was Grace. I never knew where she was from. I didn't know her. Well, of course, he claims that eventually he had another X-ray and it showed there was nothing wrong with his lungs. The assumption was that someone else had bad...that the X-rays had been switched. But, at any rate, we were also friends...he was a friend to a man named Roark Bradford, who was one time one of the highest...

Berge: What's the first name?

Smith: paid...Roark. R-O-A-R-K. Bradford. Who was a fiction writer. Uh...who at one time was one of the highest paid short story writers in the country. He 47:00wrote popular fiction. His most...best known works were around a Negro church...the members of a Negro church at...on the Little Bee Bend plantation. Uh, and I can remember when I was nine, ten years old reading these Roark Bradford short stories in Collier's, particularly.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And, Brad had worked on the Times-Picayune with...uh...Mr. McClure. Had gone in the service, came out, was sick, had an aneurysm, and was waiting there on Toulouse Street, in a big, beautiful house, a French Quarters style house, to die. They couldn't do operations for aneurysms in those days. And, uh...Brad's biggest achievement was that his book was the basis for Marc Connelly's...uh...play "Green Pastures."

Berge: Sure.

Smith: Which was a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, so, sometimes instead of going home early in the early hours of...uh...the morning, we'd walk around from the Old Jim Saloon to Brad's house 48:00and knock on...push the buzzer and go back there in the patio and sit with him until dawn and talk. And, uh... This was the experience, sort of the ex...and then of course the politics...Earl Long was governor. And, things were happening. And the city was still...you know, this was only...uh...Long was assassinated...Earl...Huey was assassinated in '35, I guess it was. This was '47, '48, it was only a few years after.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, there was still all sorts of wonderful Long stories. And, I absorbed the life and the culture of New Orleans, the stories of New Orleans, through the eyes of John McClure. Nearly killed me, I guess, in a way because I...I...quickly, my drinking habits got worse rather than better. And, uh, but I didn't really recognize the two, too honestly, I suppose. The end of this is...that, uh...about...after about five months of this copy boy routine, 49:00somewhere shortly after Earl Long was elected governor, I remember this because on election night I said something to the managing editor to the effect that my uncle, McGregor Smith, would have enjoyed the election in Louisiana because of his knowledge of the Longs. And, the managing editor, whose name was George Healy, discovered for the first time that I was McGregor Smith's nephew. And, it was shortly after that I was promoted to the copy desk by Mr. McClure...in other words I was elevated to an editing role...

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: ...without any experience at all and no training other than this working around there as a runner and messenger. And, I'm convinced he did it as a kind of...out of...some consideration for my uncle's prominence, I guess, and his many friends in New Orleans, is what I figure. But, at any rate, it came not a minute too soon as I was ready. I went from twenty dollars a week to fifty-seven dollars and fifty cents a week salary, which really improved my resources for 50:00drinking. And, uh...

Berge: Did you get a better place to live?

Smith: Yeah. I moved out of the flophouse and went around to...uh...Chartres Street and got a...a room with a bath down the hall. And the...and the courtyard, 900 block of Chartres. In the same building where a friend of mine is now living who's a retired VA psychiatrist. At any rate, yeah. And by '48 I was a copy editor. I was assistant state editor of the Times-Picayne. And, the state editor was a little man named Fred Cumbus from Alabama who was horrified that I'd been put in this spot. I succeeded a guy who had a master's degree in journalism from Tulane or LSU who had been promoted to picture editor at the paper. And, George Healy, the managing editor, could not stand Mr. Cumbus, the state editor, a little mouse of a fellow, and I sometimes felt that he just put 51:00me over there to let Cumbus to know how much contempt he had for the state desk. Because he forced Cumbus, who was a nitpicker and a stickler for commas and periods and the right headline, to teach me journalism.

Berge: So here's a good experience, too, then.

Smith: Yeah, because Cumbus set...

Berge: A different type from the last one you had, too.

Smith: Yeah. There... First there was John McClure who was benevolent and liked me and regarded me as sort of a surrogate son, I suppose, in a way. He had lots of rapport, really. He was nice to young people. But, Fred Cumbus was embarrassed and mortified, and...and his ulcer was churning I'm sure, with the idea that he had to train me and had lost a trained journalist and had to teach me that desk and I was just a kid who could barely shave. But, I stuck...hung in there and eventually what happened was they moved Cumbus to the copy desk and put a young fellow named Bill Dozier, who was about five years older than I, put him in as state editor. The war in Korea broke out, and Dozier was a reservist 52:00in the Navy and was called up, and by the time I was twenty-two I was state editor at the Times-Picayune. It was a quick...

Berge: How long did you stay there? At the Times-Picayune?

Smith: I was there seven years. I did...uh...three...uh...five years on the state desk and...uh...two years as the crime reporter at city hall. I was a criminal courts reporter. I quit the Times-Picayune and moved across the street to the old New Orleans Item as a crime reporter. And, uh... Soon after became assistant city editor. In the meantime I had married, in 1950, to a girl named Florence Noel Dillard, who was from Birmingham. Who was a graduate of Newcomb. And, uh...I was introduced to her by a kid I knew named Vic Gold, who was a precocious columnist...uh, he was precocious...politically precocious, who wrote 53:00a column on Tulane Hullabaloo. And, uh...whose father...whose mother was a seamstress in a Canal Street store. His father was an inveterate gambler...compulsive gambler...died of a heart attack about the time I got to know Vic. Vic was to have a spectacular career of his own. He...uh...lives in Washington now. He was...uh...he...he is a publicist, uh...a writer for the Washingtonian, he had a...he...he was...uh... press secretary to Spiro Agnew. He...uh...took the dramatic turn, he was a socialist when I knew him in his teens. And, uh... He married a wealthy girl from...uh...delightful woman from Birmingham, Dale Solomon, whose father was a lawyer. And after Vic's father died, Mr. Solomon put Vic...got him transferred out of Tulane and into the University of Alabama Law School and put him through law school. Vic and Dale 54:00married and Vic tried to practice law in Birmingham, had no heart for it. And, uh...they moved to Washington and he turned politically to the right. Sort of. And became kind of a...a cute, humorous...uh...uh...character...uh...in the...on the right side of the political spectrum.

Berge: Sort of an irreverent conservative.

Smith: Yeah. That's right. An irreverent conservative. He worked for Buckley and...uh...wrote for him. He got a job with uh...Ivy Lee...Selvage and Lee public relations firm. Did a lot of PR work. Became a political consultant. Had a lot of disasters. He was the...uh...road man...road press secretary for Barry Goldwater in '60. He tried to rescue...uh...Shirley Temple's doomed campaign for Congress out on the West Coast. He got hitched up with...uh...Agnew. He was the last person apparently in the world who knew that Agnew was a crook. And, I 55:00guess if you were governor...the former governor of Maryland and you had been stealing all these years, uh...the last person on earth you would confide your sins to would be a Jewish, uh...erratic, irascible political activist...uh...named Gold who was handed to you, I guess, by the Nixon people or the Goldwater people as a bright guy and you wish wasn't around.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: You see, Gold became a legend in his...in his own right with these campaigns, books about the campaigns have wonderful Gold stories.

Berge: Uh-huh. I've seen it.

Smith: Uh...you know...about his...well, he introduced me to a girl, Noel Dillard, who was my first wife. We were married in '50, and she was a social worker, became a social worker. Was a Newcomb graduate. And, we lived together for about three years and separated, and...no children, we separated. We lived in...uh...in the Quarter. Uh...on...on...on Esplanade. In a home next to 56:00the...uh...house next to...uh beautiful building had been restored by a man named Clay Shaw.

Berge: Oh, yeah. [Laughing]

Smith: Who was later to be a ...

Berge: [Unclear]

Smith: ...unjustly accused as a conspirator in the Kennedy assassination by a utterly mad, crazy man, Jim Garrison...

Berge: That's right.

Smith: ...whom I first knew when he was assistant district attorney in New Orleans...

Berge: When you were on the crime desk.

Smith: When I was on the crime beat.

Berge: Sure.

Smith: Where the surrogate father I picked up on the crime beat was a great judge and former New Orleans district attorney named Bernard Cocke, Buddy Cocke...C-O-C-K-E, J. Bernard Cocke. Criminal district judge of New Orleans. One of six they had out there.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: And, uh...a man I met in the summer of...uh... '52 I believe, when I went out on the crime job. And, uh...who probably taught me more about the law 57:00and about crime and about police, about the whole problem of criminal behavior and politics than anybody I ever knew.

Berge: What year did you and your wi...first wife separate?

Smith: Summer of...oh I said '73...I meant '53.

Berge: All right, when did you divorce then?

Smith: Uh... We got uh...one of those fan...uh kind, gentle, Louisiana, Napoleonic divorces two years after we...

Berge: '55.

Smith: ...uh divorced we...uh...she filed an affidavit that we lived apart for two years. It was uncontested. And, uh... We divorced in '55.

Berge: Well, how long did you stay in New Orleans, then?

Smith: I stayed in New Orleans until the fall of '57.

Berge: OK. Now look it. I want to get some information for our next interview, and I've only got four or five minutes.

Smith: OK.

Berge: So, I'm going to ask you a lot of questions and then we'll go back over this next time.

Smith: Right.

Berge: All right. You stayed there until '57.

Smith: Hm-hum.

Berge: What was your last job in New Orleans?

Smith: Assistant city editor of the Item.

Berge: All right. Then what'd you do?

Smith: It was an independent paper.

Berge: OK. Then what'd you do?

Smith: Well, I was fired from the Item in a...

Berge: In '57?

Smith: ...dispute. Yeah. In a dispute over assignments and I was drinking really to excess. That's what I was really fired over. Uh...and I was in a state of absolute...uh...despondency...

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: ...by that time. And hysteria. And I came back to...to mid...to Tennessee, to my father's farm, in the fall of '57.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: And went into the VA hospital in Nashville. Dried out for about a month.

Berge: Uh-huh.

Smith: Came back still unwell...I had been in...in a couple of...uh...hospitals in New Orleans with drinking bouts. And, had spent a year in...a not a year...I had a couple of adventures with [unclear].

Berge: That's a...That's... Those...those are good diseases for New Orleans and Las Vegas.

Smith: Oh, they are. That's right. So...uh...I...I went to the...I got out of VA about Thanksgiving of '57 in Nash...in...uh...Nashville. Went down to the 59:00Tennessean to see about a job. I was...I was thirty years old and just absolutely cracked up. And, uh...had a promise of a job on the Tennessean I believed from a...a man named Olan Harlan, was editor of the paper. And, whose...

Berge: I was in Nashville then.

Smith: Yeah.

Berge: That's when I was going to Vanderbilt.

Smith: Really?

Berge: In graduate school.

Smith: Well, I came back say ten years after I left, same time of year, November.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: Absolutely a wreck in a decade.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: But you know, as I look back on those ten years, it's funny, how would you trade them?

Berge: Those were good experiences on the job.

Smith: Those were tremendous experiences. I got an honorary doctorate from Morehead where I did their commencement sermon...uh...sermon is right. They said it was the shortest one they'd ever had, 15 minutes, I really clocked it, last month. And, I thought...Vanderbilt once did an article on me about my 56 cuts, I claimed that's the all-time cut record there. I screwed up. I walked out on that 60:00college, on that four thousand dollar scholarship.

Berge: Yeah.

Smith: On the GI bill. I never got the scholarship money back. I tried a couple of times to get the Legion to turn it loose for something, and they wouldn't. And, I...and yet I have spent years in...of involvement in university work...uh...in Kentucky. I've lectured on journalism in practically every school in the state. I've worked on...on funds for higher education. I was talking to Jim Davis on a plane coming down from Washington yesterday. He's a vice president at Western. About a letter I wrote to George Adkins on behalf of, you'll be interested in this, public salaries.

Berge: Hm-hum.

Smith: And protesting the...the...and presenting the need to really boost them up. Uh... Last...last...uh...this winter after I came up...went to Washington, and...uh...I've...uh...I...I...I really feel like we turned Western around. I've got a suit filed against Western...uh...ten or twelve or fifteen years ago over 61:00the expulsion of a bunch of student editors from Western.

Berge: I remember that.

Smith: We have to kind of create a new climate for journalism there. And...uh...my brother-in-law is a college teacher. My wife is...uh...my sister