Jeff Smith at his Patagonia home

Author Chuck Bowden shares some memories of journalist Jeff Smith, who passed away over the weekend:

It’s September as I recall and I am in the newsroom of the Tucson Citizen when a sudden stillness smothers everything. There’s been a call—Jeff Smith on vacation has gone off his bike in New Mexico at a reported hundred miles an hour. It is like watching a reputation for mischief bleed into tragedy.

He’d had a long run as a bad boy. He’d been a columnist and raised hell and bounced around from paper to paper because while he might be fine for a newspaper, he was a little too frisky for people who say the word journalism with a straight face. After all, he once covered the Rodeo Parade without attending, filed long and fulsome coverage and only got tripped up by his description of the Budweiser Clydesdales—some mishap had delayed them and they’d not made the event. Well, shit happens.

Just as he had a habit of sneaking double entendre into his copy to the rage of desk and the publisher and I suspect to the delight of a lot of readers.

After the crash when the head-on plopped him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, there was a kind of circling of the wagons in the newsroom and the management looked out at a surly herd and decided they’d have to find a place for Jeff Smith and his battered body. They gave him the television beat. And this worked for a while.

But it was a hard go for Jeff. He put the bravest possible face on being a paraplegic. I never heard him complain, not once. There was a moment, I was in the men’s room, he was maneuvering with his wheelchair and I helped a bit with the door.

I asked him how it was going.

He said okay except that with the kind of impact he’d survived the pain never really ended.

He said this calmly, as if mentioning the weather.

Then he went on with his life.

I think there’s a lesson in all this.

He was always willing to ride.

And he didn’t complain about the road.

This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2013.

Getting hassled by The Man Mild-mannered reporter

5 replies on “Chuck Bowden Remembers Jeff Smith”

  2. I had the honor of working w/Jeff while at The Weekly in the mid 90s. He was a cantakerous old bastard and also one of the sweetest guys I ever knew. You’re right. Jeff never complained about being a “gimp” as he referred to himself even when it was clear he was having a bad day and in much pain.
    When I was going through my divorce he was there as a friend. He even took me out for a lovely dinner when the divorce was final.
    My greatest memories of Jeff were sitting on the front porch of his house in Patagonia drinking beers and shooting the potato gun! So much laughter. That wheelchair never kept Jeff from doing anything. The man knew how to LIVE! We could all take a lesson from him.
    Liz…I am so sorry you lost your father. He was special. Don’t ever forget that. Godspeed <3

  3. Jeff was 1 of my favorite Weekly columnists ever. The guy who writes in his old space on page 4 of Weekly these days has nothing on him. Really missed him contributing to Weekly, well weekly…he wrote a column on my rattlesnake bight experience back in 1992 and the $18,000 hospital bill I was given for the experience, and how my partner at the time put together a book of poetry to sell to help pay for my bill…
    RIP Jeff

    Matt Lauten

  4. I always looked forward to his columns. Whether I agreed with that particular opinion or not was not an issue. He brought passion to whatever he wrote.

    He was hard for people to pigeonhole, which I loved.

  5. Loved and learned from his attitude.
    As a fellow gimp, I shared and reinforced, through his writing, a healthy irreverence for conventional wisdom, observed from an unconventional perspective.
    Rest painlessly and barrier-free. It’s always downhill forever.

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