Soft-spoken by nature, Martin Smith mixed bite with occasional humor in columns for The Sacramento Bee and McClatchy Newspapers, where he served as political editor for 15 years.
His ability to jab politicians without losing their respect, sometimes in a lighthearted way, is being recalled this week following Mr. Smith's death Thursday at age 82.
"It's been a great month for Assemblyman Stan Statham," Mr. Smith wrote in 1992. "He saw his proposal to split California into several states gain voter approval in 27 of 31 counties, most of them by overwhelming majorities. And Jay Leno even joked about the idea during his 'Tonight Show' monologues."
That same year, 1992, Mr. Smith wrote about politicians' penchant for publicity-seeking. "Like many other politicians, Jerry Brown headed for Los Angeles after the riots erupted this month. His political instincts were sound. After all, that's where the television cameras were."
Smith died of complications from Parkinson's disease in Washington state, where he had lived after retiring from McClatchy Newspapers in late 1992.
"Marty Smith reminded me of Clint Eastwood - he was laconic, polite, but he was a very good BS detector," said Patrick Johnston, a state legislator from 1980 to 2000. "He had people's respect."
Rick Rodriguez, former executive editor of The Sacramento Bee, described Mr. Smith as a "consummate gentleman" who rarely lost his cool.
"In many ways, he saw what was going on in California, in terms of demographic changes and political maneuvering, before many of his generation did," Rodriguez said.
Mr. Smith's daughter, Karen, said her father "believed the best about everyone."
"If somebody was mean and nasty, he would always say, 'Maybe he's just shy,' " she recalled.
Mr. Smith enjoyed a good laugh - even at his own expense.
Once while attempting to change the pilot light in his water heater, he visited a hardware store and was reassured that "any damn fool could do the job," Karen recalled.
After failing at the task, Mr. Smith poked fun at himself in a letter to his other daughter, Catherine: "You'll be happy to know that your father is not any damn fool," he wrote.
Mr. Smith was born on April 20, 1930, in San Francisco, the only child of shoemaker John Edgar Smith and his wife, Anna, a homemaker. He graduated from Balboa High School and later obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees, the latter in journalism, from UC Berkeley.
He loved newspapers and read at least one every day until shortly before his death.
"He probably went to his grave with ink-stained hands," Karen Smith recalled.
Mr. Smith began his journalism career as a copy boy for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin as a teenager. His professional career included stints at the Yakima Morning Herald and Modesto Bee before he joined The Sacramento Bee as a political reporter in 1965.
In Sacramento, Mr. Smith rose through the ranks to become Capitol bureau chief, then managing editor - he quipped that his qualifications for the latter were simple: "He had two teenage daughters who squabbled a lot," Karen said.
Mr. Smith became political editor in 1977 for McClatchy Newspapers, The Bee's owner. He was a Sacramento reporter or editor from the governorship of Edmund G. "Pat" Brown to that of Pete Wilson.
Jim Richardson, a former Bee reporter, wrote a biography of former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown that cited a column by Mr. Smith as a cog in a chain of events that helped the San Francisco Democrat secure pivotal GOP support needed to win the speakership in 1980.
In retirement, Mr. Smith enjoyed gardening, swimming, hiking and cross-country skiing.


Eulogy for Martin Smith
by Karen Smith
April 29, 2012


I want to share some of the things I loved about my father.

He was a dignified and very ethical man who believed in doing the right things. And that's what got him up on a ladder one December evening after work, hanging Christmas lights on a friend's house. We weren't exactly a lights-on-the-house-at-Christmastime kind of family, and if I ever wondered why, I probably thought that was because my father, a man of letters and not ladders, didn't know how to hang Christmas lights. But a friend was sick at Christmastime, and one of the things upsetting the distraught wife was that their Christmas lights weren't going to be put up. So Dad did it. Somehow. I shudder to think how.

He also took responsibility for bigger things, like breaking the color barrier at Park Terrace, the private swimming and tennis club we belonged to in Sacramento. In the late 1960's, Dad sponsored the membership of the Woods family, who were friends from church. After a dramatic Park Terrace Board meeting, the family became the first African American members of the club.

His inclination to give everyone the benefit of the doubt seems related to his ethical approach. When Catherine or I would complain about a friend or classmate doing something mean, his default response was "maybe she's just shy." There seemed to be few offenses that couldn't be explained away by a severe case of shyness.

As he became more curmudgeonly, however, it became apparent that there was one sin that couldn't be explained away or forgiven. Even shyness wasn't an excuse for bad grammar or spelling errors. Pity the shopkeeper who posted a chalkboard on the sidewalk with a misplaced apostrophe. If Dad walked by it, the chalkboard would be edited.


That brings me to another thing I loved about my dad. I loved his love of the written word. And I especially loved his writing. Catherine saved the letters he wrote to her in college, and they're delightful. How lucky we were to have a father who would write this:

Having the intention of sitting down to offer more useful advice to a young woman beginning her life away from the home in which she was raised and where she always had access to wise and loving counsel, I thought it proper to refer to that which for two centuries has endured as a model in the art of giving guidance to the young. I am speaking, of course, of the letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to his illegitimate but beloved namesake.

In another letter to Catherine, he poked fun at his engineer-daughter's at-that-time rather casual style of writing:

I do note occasional run-on sentences. That problem is easily corrected through more liberal use of the punctuation mark for the end of a sentence -- a good old fashioned period. It is sometimes forgotten that an adequate sentence requires not only a subject and predicate but also a period. Sometimes you can get by without the predicate, although not as a rule, but never without a period, question mark or exclamation point. Commas are virtually nothing. Even James Joyce finally got to the period in the last chapter of "Ulysses." To be sure it took him 45 pages (in the Modern Library edition), but he did do it. The only reason he took that long was that he was trying to hide the dirty words with the more mundane ones.

Our dad was funny. He was too dignified to be silly-funny, but boy, was he was funny. And he loved to laugh. It's been so long since I've heard his bellowing laugh, but I can still picture him holding his stomach, throwing his head back, and laughing hard and loud.

He loved being a newspaperman, and he loved covering politics. Early in their marriage, he told Mom that he had always wanted to cover politics for the Sacramento Bee. He lived his dream. He just hadn't counted on all the air travel, which he never liked. He wrote this to Catherine in 1975:

I flew to Chicago without benefit of Dramamine ... I asked the cabin attendant for one of her Dramamine pills since they were all out at the Sacramento airport gift shop ... Imagine my surprise when I learned that airliners are no longer are equipped with Dramamine. I got my revenge by clutching my stomach whenever a cabin attendant went by. I made them nervous all the way to Chicago.

and this, written about covering the Jimmy Carter campaign:

[the trip] was fun, despite the jokers in the television crew who, as we were landing in Las Vegas, suddenly blew a police whistle in the rear of the jet, screamed and shouted, "Get the nose up, get the nose up." There was nothing really wrong with the nose of the airplane but I believe I aged a bit rather suddenly, probably having five or six birthdays within the space of 1.32 seconds.

I also loved his unfailing devotion to Mom. I love the picture of them on their wedding day, 59 years and 8 days ago. Each one looks happier and more pleased with their marriage than the other. And that never changed. I think each one usually thought they got the better end of the deal. Dad loved Mom's spirit and zest for life. He bragged about her swimming, admired her career in the classroom, loved that she walked all over Bainbridge Island with the Striders, and never ceased to be amused by her trumpet "career." They were so pleased with each other.

He really did live his dream. And time flies when you're having fun. Here's what he wrote to Catherine 32 years ago tomorrow - shortly after his 45th birthday:

Something else staggered me a few days before my birthday. A radio commercial for one of those retirement villages. Buyers had to be at least 45 years old and no children living at home younger than 18. With tears in my eyes, I realized I, me, who graduated only a few months ago from Miss Barbara Beebe's 8th grade class at Fairmount Elementary School, was about to qualify for a retirement village.

I demand a recount.

Dad was a model of dignity. He used to tell Catherine and me to "remember who you are and what you represent." He kind of pretended to be joking, and I think he liked playing Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. But we always knew he was serious about the "who you are and what you represent" stuff.

Parkinson's Disease is hell on the dignity, but Dad's final weeks were marked by successes that we think pleased him. He had worked really hard in the rehab hospital, and he had made remarkable progress. As a result of his Herculean efforts, he was walking upright for the first time in many, many months and with steady, more confident steps. One might even say that he walked with dignity.

I think he would be proud of the obituary that ran is his beloved Sacramento Bee yesterday. It noted how influential and well-respected he was in California political circles, and it called one of his columns a cog in the chain of events that helped Willie Brown, then an obscure member of the State Assembly, secure the speakership in 1980. A former state legislator was quoted in the obituary as saying, "Marty Smith reminded me of Clint Eastwood -- he was laconic, polite, but he was a very good BS detector. He had people's respect." And a former colleague said of him, "In many ways, he saw what was going on in California, in terms of demographic changes and political maneuvering, before many of his generation did."

I think he would have liked that. And I think we can all agree that it's a good thing that the obituary-writer didn't have access to Catherine's stash of letters. In 1975, he wrote to her:

I had a great interview with Hubert Humphrey ... I think there's a good chance he'll be president yet.