Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
Pulitzer-winning sportswriter from Green Bay (not the baseball executive or other Red Smiths)
Net worth
$1,000
1976
About
Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith was the sportswriter David Halberstam later called the greatest of two eras—a Green Bay kid who wrote literate columns in a trade that loved jargon and won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Green Bay East High in those years doubled as the Packers’ home field; the city later put his name on a K–8 school, and Aqueduct put it on a horse race.
He was born in Green Bay on September 25, 1905, the red-headed son of produce salesman Walter P. Smith, whose wholesale firm was the third generation of a business that went under in the Depression. He hiked, hunted, and fished, worked a year as a hardware clerk to afford Notre Dame, and graduated in 1927. At East he won his first writing prize: a free copy of the three-dollar yearbook, for a humorous essay on the debating team. He never set out to cover games.
Milwaukee Sentinel general assignment came first; St. Louis made him a sportswriter; then the Philadelphia Record, the New York Herald Tribune’s “Views of Sport,” and from 1971 the Times. He covered last-place Athletics for a decade without self-pity. Asked if a daily column was a chore, he told Walter Winchell in 1949 that you sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed. He died in Stamford, Connecticut, on January 15, 1982.
Notable facts
He won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his New York Times sports columns.
He was born in Green Bay on September 25, 1905, graduated from Green Bay East High in 1922 and Notre Dame in 1927, and has a K–8 school named for him in Green Bay.
His “open your veins and bleed” line about daily columns, told to Walter Winchell in 1949, became a newsroom proverb.
What questions can this profile answer
- What makes Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith notable?
- Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith was the sportswriter David Halberstam later called the greatest of two eras—a Green Bay kid who wrote literate columns in a trade that loved jargon and won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. Green Bay East High in those years doubled as the Packers’ home field; the city later put his…
- What is Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith's estimated net worth?
- Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith's estimated net worth is $1,000 as of 1976.