Profile · Green Bay, Wisconsin
Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
Pulitzer-winning sportswriter from Green Bay (not the baseball executive or other Red Smiths)
$1,000
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.