Rick Kogan | Chicago Tribune
Wendell Smith was 58 when he died and he was famous then.
It was 1972 and the words of praise in the wake of his death came from such big shots as Mayor Richard J. Daley, who said, “We have lost a very great citizen, who was interested in the city and most of all the city’s children.”
Smith’s funeral was attended by such admirers as Bears owner George Halas, Gale Sayers, Johnny Morris, Billy Williams, other sports figures, politicians and many from the media world. Columnist Irv Kupcinet would write in the Sun-Times, “His death had a numbing effect. He was an able newsman, but more, a respected gentleman in his profession and a dear friend.”
There were quick posthumous honors, a scholarship in his name, various awards. But fame faded and Smith’s name and accomplishments became buried in history dust.
Coming to the rescue, so to speak, was “42,” the 2013 movie about Jackie Robinson, the ballplayer played by the late Chadwick Boseman. Actor André Holland portrayed Smith in the film because of the newspaperman’s essential role in Robinson’s career.
In Florida, a man named Michael Scott Pifer saw the movie. “I wanted to know more and went looking for a biography,” he said. “I was surprised that there was none and started doing some research on my own into the life of Wendell Smith.”
Pifer has been a professional pet sitter for more than two decades. He is an avid reader, his two favorite authors being H.L. Mencken and Christopher Hitchens.
His research led him to a fine nearly 4,000-word essay about Smith written for the Society for American Baseball Research. He contacted the author, Michael Marsh and they decided to work together on what has become “The Wendell Smith Reader: Selected Writings on Sports, Civil Rights and Black History.” It is a splendid and important book.
The introduction, by Marsh, is a masterful, lively and detailed 20,000 words, even though there were no journals or personal papers that might have aided Marsh and Smith’s widow, Wyonella, who died in 2020, was not interested in participating.
“Scott did the heavy lifting, no doubt about that,” says Marsh. “But it was great to work with someone who cared as much as I did.”
Marsh has long worked as a paralegal here but worked in the Sun-Times sports department for a time in the 1990s and later wrote for the Chicago Reader. “And I flipped when I learned that Smith had lived in a house here less than a mile from where I grew up.”
Smith was born in 1914 in Detroit. His father, John, was the personal chef for auto magnate Henry Ford and young Wendell often visited the Ford home and played baseball with his son Edsel and other kids.
He was a talented athlete in high school and while attending West Virginia State College as a physical education major. He was the publicist for the school’s football team but his ambitions to play professional baseball were thwarted by Major League Baseball’s segregationist policies. That disappointment would fuel, as he put it, his desire to “do something on behalf of the Negro ballplayers.”
Directly out of college, he was hired — at $17 a week — by the Pittsburgh Courier, the weekly African American newspaper where he worked from 1937 to 1948.
It was late in 1945 when he and Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey talked about the possibility of signing a Black player. Smith knew Jackie Robinson and told Rickey about him. After extensive scouting and meetings, Rickey signed Robinson and sent him to the Montreal Royals, a Triple-A minor league club. Rickey also hired Smith to travel with Robinson during the 1946 and 1947 seasons to provide support, even as Smith continued to write for the Courier.
On April 15, 1947, Robinson became the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era. The next year, Chicago’s Herald-American hired Smith, who became the first Black sports writer at a white newspaper in the country. (He also became the first Black member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America).
He stood out in the still rough and tumble newspaper business of the time and he was prolific, writing about baseball, boxing and other sports. In the early 1960s, he was at the forefront of the newspaper’s campaign to integrate spring training facilities in Florida. In 1964, lured by a salary double what he was making, Smith went to work for WGN-TV as a sportscaster and appeared on the station’s “People to People” news program.
A print guy at heart, he still wrote for the Courier and worked on books about boxer Joe Louis, who had been a teenage friend, and other sports figures. He also started a column for the Sun-Times. That was where he would memorialize Robinson after his death in October 1972, writing in part, “He never backed down from a fight, never quit agitating for equality. He demanded respect, too. Those who tangled with him always admitted afterward that he was a man’s man, a person who would not compromise his conviction.”
The same could have been said about Smith. This would be his final newspaper story. He had been fighting health problems for some time and shortly after writing this column, he was hospitalized and died a month later.
Pifer has thoughtfully organized 100-some Smith stories into 10 sections, among them, in addition to one on Robinson, “Foreign Affairs,” “Black History,” “Confronting Racism,” “Women!” and “Muhammad Ali.”
Most of this work is culled from the more than 1,700-some articles that Pifer read on microfilm. The majority come from the Courier, with a sprinkling of stories from the Sun-Times and other publications.
The Pifer-Marsh team is gracious in thanking dozens of people who offered them advice and counsel and a few who provided firsthand knowledge.
Smith comes to life in the book, his era colorfully defined in all its delights and its inequities. Perhaps some of you gray hairs remember him. But even those who do not will meet, as the Tribune’s Bob Cromie put it after his death, “One of those rare persons who made the world a little better place, a little happier place, and little more decent place.”
On the Far South Side, there is the Wendell Smith Elementary School, a handsome building near a park where kids still play ball and, just maybe, dream big-league dreams.
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