I think I was 13, poking my eyes along the titles of books lined up on a long folding table at some church basement rummage sale, when a title called out to me – Life in a Putty Knife Factory, by someone named H. Allen Smith. In those days, I often selected books simply because their titles caught my curiosity, as this one surely did. I bought it for a dime or a quarter and began reading it the same night, and my world began to expand.
Smith was a born sucker – that is, born and raised in McLeansboro in southern Illinois, whose residents were known in earlier days as “suckers.” (The pair of explanations for this nickname deserves to be read in the article “Illinois: The Sucker State.” Click here for the link. They differ considerably from Smith’s origin story in Lo, the Former Egyptian!) He dropped out of high school, first found work with local newspapers, later as editor of a Sebring, Florida paper, later as a reporter with The Denver Post, then as a rewrite man and feature writer for the United Press and the New York World-Telegram.
His summary of the Denver portion of his career offers a characteristic sample of his attitude and style:
From stem to stern the [Denver] Post was loaded with silliness
posing as wisdom, broad inconsistencies that wouldn’t fool a
prairie dog and bold statements that a certified idiot wouldn’t
believe – yet the people of Denver either believed these things
or simply enjoyed the colorful manner in which they were
served up. I choose to think that the public believed in the
vaunted integrity of The Big Brother of the West. But then I am
slightly prejudiced – I happen to think that the average citizen
is too stupid to drool.
In 1939 he published a satiric novel called Mr. Klein’s Kampf. While it met with unresounding critical or commercial response, he was encouraged to abandon the newspaper game and try to make it as a full time book author. Two years later, Low Man on a Totem Pole, essentially a collection of expanded feature pieces, sold a million copies, and Smith went on to write more than forty books that sold millions more. From the 1940 through the 60s, he was the best-selling humorist in the country.
Low Man on a Totem Pole was helped by having an introduction supplied by Fred Allen, then one of the country’s most popular radio comedians. Allen summarized what would become Smith’s primary subject matter for the rest of his career:
Mr. Smith hangs many strange portraits in his gallery of fantastic
people. To Mr. Smith the world is a seething psychopathic ward,
his fellow man just a pore-spattered husk that is concealing a
story from Mr. Smith.
But Smith, while he may have viewed “the average citizen” with disdain, neither sought nor found many such. Rather, he searched out the admirably colorful, whatever their station in life might be, and he was never shy about displaying his admiration for those citizens he considered admirable – generally, those who had made their own path through life without regard for what society expected or approved, those who cared more for others than for themselves, and those who devoted themselves wholeheartedly to some fool mission or other. (For example, “I remember that I was particularly entranced by Sam Love’s interview with a Japanese inventor who had built a new kind of parachute, mounted a railing of the Brooklyn Bridge, and leaped into the East River, where he was nearly drowned. When he was fished out of the water with the wreckage of his invention, all he would say was: ‘She achieve haywire.'”) After interviewing many sources for a feature story on James Cagney, Smith approached his subject:
“Listen,” I said, “I’m faced with the prospect of writing a piece that
has nothing but compliments in it for you. It’s not fashionable now-
a days to write an article about a guy and say he is just pure all-
around wonderful. Search back through your experience,” I said,
“and try to remember somebody who called you an ingrate or a
son of a bitch or something like that.”
Because human eccentricity delighted him, and because he stood in awe of no reputation, Smith as an interviewer often brought out the human behind the image. After Of Mice and Men became a best seller, John Steinbeck was forced to come to New York City for publicity purposes. Smith, then still a journalist, was scheduled to interview him in his publisher’s office. At that time Steinbeck was almost pathologically shy, and prepared for the interview by downing most of a fifth of brandy before Smith arrived for the interview. He was rendered most accommodating by the brandy, and gave Smith a long, unrestrained interview which he’d punctuate periodically by taking a drink and crying out, “With lecherous howls/I deflower young owls!”
Perhaps the first eccentric but admirable citizen Smith encountered was his Pop, who stuck around long enough to raise Smith and eight siblings, then took off into America and out of family life, though he always seemed pleased enough when one of his progeny tracked him down. Despite his sudden departure, Smith wrote of him frequently with admiration and great amusement:
He worked hard during the years his nine kids were growing up.
He worked in his father’s brickyard, then as a cigar maker, and
later in various poultry houses. He’d work all day and then come
home and work. He built better furniture than you could buy
at a store. He had a cobbling outfit and always half-soled all the
family shoes. And he was the family barber.
To gain a little time to read his evening paper, Smith’s Pop invented several games to keep the kids out of his hair, creating a new one as necessary:
Again he got down on the floor, this time with a magazine cover
and a straight pin. On the magazine cover was an illustration of
a girl’s head and Pop placed it flat on the rug, face up. Then,
with the pin, he began sticking holes around the outline of the
head. He made the pinholes as close together as possible and
covered almost every line of the illustration – eyes, nose, mouth,
chin, hairline. It took him a long while, and when he had finished
he got up, went to the lamp, and held the sheet up to the light.
To us it was pure beauty – a girl’s head lined with sparkling
points of light.
Thereafter Pop’s evenings were quiet. When the hubbub
started, he’d call us around, hand us each a pin, and say: “Go
stick.” We had collected magazine covers from neighbors or the
trash. We’d lie on the floor and stick for hours.
Pop wasn’t impressed by much, and didn’t waste many words when expressing his views of the brave new world around him:
In his later years Pop was visiting one of his daughters in Mary-
land when he got his first real look at television. He spend a couple
of days looking at the screen, then he got up, flipped the switch,
and delivered his verdict. “That,” he said, “ain’t the way people are.”
Like his father, Smith enjoyed the company of colorful reprobates, and though he wrote in the persona of a two-fisted drinker and devoted lecher, he quit drinking in his early forties and remained married to his first and only wife all his life. He never wrote a dull sentence, and he never lost his reporter’s eye and ear for a good story, wherever his extensive travels took him.
I’m immensely grateful that I picked up that oddly titled book when I did. After I’d devoured it, I bought every one of Smith’s seemingly endless output I could find – and back then, his books were easy to find, most having been best-sellers. (These days, I rarely see them in the few remaining used book stores or in thrift stores, but nearly all his books are readily available through various internet sites.)
I had uncles, but they were all fifty or more years older than me, and mostly suffered from debilitating medical conditions or moderate to severe terminal business executive syndrome. H. Allen Smith took their place for me, becoming my favorite uncle, the one who blows into town full of good humor and great stories, some of them quite improbable but so what? He represented the time in our country when we entertained each other with stories about our daily observations, our own relatives and friends, and his stories were told with a seemingly effortless concision and focus, learned from his long career as a journalist (a word he would have scorned, and immediately crossed out and replaced with “newspaperman”). Over forty years after his death, his writing remains as tight, unpretentious and funny as it seemed to me when I first encountered it.
(A few highlights: Low Man on a Totem Pole, Life in a Putty Knife Factory, Lost in the Horse Latitudes, Lo, the Former Egyptian!, Desert Island Decameron [anthology edited and introduced by Smith], The Compleat Practical Joker, How to Write Without Knowing Nothing, To Hell in a Handbasket, The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler.)
