THE DAILY MIRACLE

A memoir provides a special seat at events over the last 50 years, a celebration of print journalism, and a lament for its sad state today.

Fresh out of the Air Force, Smith decided that he would like to be a journalist—in fact, a journalist at the New York Times. The paper gently disabused him of that naïve idea, but he did wind up across the Hudson River with the Jersey Journal in Jersey City. From there, he went to the Providence Journal and finally wound up at the famous Sun paper in Baltimore, learning the ink-stained trade during his years on the job and writing everything from obituaries to feature stories to exposés. He had hardly hung his coat up at the Jersey Journal when news of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination came clacking over the teletype. His new assignment: hitting the streets to get people’s reactions. After all, this was a local paper, not the Times. His career encompassed Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty—the common view being that poverty won—Watergate, and much more, right up through Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. Smith clearly loves what he spent a half-century doing. And he can poke fun at his young self. Asked by the editor of “da Joisey” why he thought he could do newspaper work, he answered: “I’m pretty sure I could string a few sentences together.” Readers will wonder why he wasn’t blackballed then and there. But he hunkered down, and the audience gets poignant stories, such as his interview with the mother of the first young man from Attleboro, Massachusetts, to be killed in the Vietnam War. The author’s years at the Providence Journal give readers a very vivid and often murderous cast of characters, Rhode Island being known for the mob and corrupt politics. The introduction to the book is a heartfelt paean to the idea and importance of the daily paper—a mash note, really. And the final chapters revisit the three papers today, when even the Baltimore Sun is a shadow of its former self. But what a grand ride it was.

A colorfully written tribute to the idea and reality of one of society’s keystones.