Ron Smith, Baltimore's "Voice of Reason", 70

[Jazz Vulture]

By David Zurawik, The Baltimore Sun
11:39 p.m. EST, December 19, 2011

Ron Smith, who came to Baltimore 38 years ago as a weekend TV
anchorman but found his greatest success on radio as WBAL's
"Voice of Reason," died Monday night of pancreatic cancer at
his home in Shrewsbury, Pa.. He was 70.

Mr. Smith spent more than 26 years on WBAL's airwaves, most of
it in the afternoon drive-time period until a move to mornings
last year, passionately talking politics from a conservative
point of view. But it is not his politics for which he will
likely be remembered as much as the informed conversation he
helped create on Baltimore radio - and the way he publicly
shared his final days with listeners of WBAL and readers of The
Baltimore Sun.

On Nov. 28, after continuing on-air for more than two months
despite having been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer
that had metastasized throughout his body, Mr. Smith signed off
at the 50,000-watt news-talk station for the last time in his
signature straightforward, no-nonsense, radio style.

"I'm retiring," the former Marine said in a live broadcast. "I
basically can no longer do it. I'm getting weaker every day,
and it's time to pull the plug. I'm just not up to it. So, you
have to face that kind of thing. Basically, the curtain is
coming down right now. I'm bidding everyone a very fond
farewell."

Clarence Mitchell IV, a colleague at WBAL, says that while he
always admired Mr. Smith as a talk-show host, he was in awe of
the public and powerful way that Mr. Smith handled his final
days.

"The dignity and the manner with which Ron Smith has dealt with
his illness, sharing it with his audience and the world, has
really gained the respect of everyone who has followed his
travail," Mr. Mitchell said. "Since the understanding of his
illness in the last few weeks and months of his life, he has
gone out more gloriously as a man than he even was a talk-show
host."

Mr. Smith was a very good radio host, according to Towson
University Professor Richard Vatz.

"Ron Smith, simply put, was the best radio talk-show host I
have ever known," said Mr. Vatz. "I can sum up even as
brilliant and well-informed a talk-show host as Ron in a
sentence: He hated insipid conversation. What are the qualities
at which he excelled? Knowledgeability and lack of deception.
He never faked knowing something he didn't know."

While many assessments of Mr. Smith in recent weeks spoke of
his breadth of knowledge and intelligence - with frequent
references to his using the airwaves to "teach" and "educate"
his audience - Mr. Smith's relationship to education was, by
his own admission, a complicated one that shaped his life in
significant ways.

Born 1941 in upstate New York, Mr. Smith, the son of an
assistant school superintendent, dropped out of high school at
age 17 and joined the Marines. He was in the Marines from 1959
to 1962, his last duty serving at a Navy submarine base in New
London, Conn.

When asked in a Sun interview last month if his military
experience was crucial to understanding his life, Mr. Smith
said, "Not so much becoming a Marine, but why I became a
Marine, the necessity to escape school."

"School was like a prison," he said. "I had to get out. I
always read easily since the time I was a little kid. I used to
read the Encyclopedia Britannica Junior since the time I was 7
or 8 years old, so I educated myself. And, of course, educating
yourself is a trap because you go down the wrong road quite a
bit. But, on the other hand, it allows you to investigate what
you really think is interesting and useful. And those
characteristics came in handy in terms of my later career."

After the Marines, Mr. Smith started working in community
theater in Albany, N.Y., near his hometown of Troy, while he
"tried to figure out" what he wanted to do.

"I was always attracted to acting, and the most talented kid
that I knew who was a director, actor and singer had made
$2,600 in 1962," Mr. Smith said. "And that made me think, 'Hmm,
I'd like to take my talents and make a living,' which basically
led me to broadcasting. I always had the ability to sight read
very easily, and I had a good voice - so those things were
assets."

Mr. Smith's first broadcasting job was as a disc jockey in
Haverhill, Mass. He didn't like the station, but he liked being
on the air. He returned to Albany and eventually landed a radio
and TV reporting job at WTEN. He was at that station five years
when the call came in 1973 to join Baltimore's WBAL-TV as a
weekend anchor and reporter.

Three years later, he was co-anchor on Channel 11's first-
string news team, but he was up against the legendary Jerry
Turner on WJZ. By 1980, he was unceremoniously dumped in an
anchor desk shuffle.

"Let me tell you about competing against WJZ-TV anchorman Jerry
Turner," Mr. Smith wrote in a piece for The Baltimore Sun
shortly after Mr. Turner's death. "I would have had more of a
chance in the squared circle against Ali or Tyson."

Mr. Smith went to work full time as a stockbroker, but he never
lost the desire to be on air. And while he claimed to enjoy
working in the financial world, it was all prelude for the
passion he found as a talk-show host starting part-time in 1984
and full time a year later on WBAL radio.

In describing what being a radio talk-show host meant to him,
Mr. Smith said, "It's what I do. It's who I am. It's my
creative expression." He was only half kidding when he took to
referring to himself as "Talk Show Man" after a Sun columnist
called him that in the paper.

The "Voice of Reason" title, meanwhile, came from a listener,
according to Mr. Smith's wife, June. "A caller responding to
one of Ron's rants on the constant struggle between various
theories and the hard, cold, facts of reality, said, 'You are
The Voice of Reason.' Thus, it became so," she explained.

"You know, Emerson said long ago, if you find something that
you love to do, something that comes easy to you that other
people find impossible, you've found your niche," Mr. Smith
said. "That's a paraphrase, but it's an exact meaning. Well, I
found that."

"It's his highest calling," June Smith said. "It's where his
heart is. He loves his family and his friends, but he truly
loves his microphone and his audience."

An estimated 120,000 listeners a week tuned in to Mr. Smith -
an audience that put WBAL among the top five stations in the
market during his weekday show right up to his sign-off.

"Radio was a great transition for Ron," said WBAL-TV anchor
Stan Stovall, who was Mr. Smith's on-air TV partner in 1980 and
has been a self-described close friend since. "Ron got to be
himself on the radio. He got to put his opinions out there and
show what an intellect he really was."

Mr. Smith said WBAL management understood something about the
boy who hated school and what he saw as arbitrary rules imposed
from above. His bosses were wise enough to let him do the show
his way.

"I can't imagine what would have happened if I'd have been in
places where they tried to manage me day to day, topic to
topic," he said. "It would have strangled me. It would have
suffocated me. So, I knew enough to be content with what I had
here, because they let me do my show without interference."

Mr. Smith did have ups and downs in recent years. When he
denounced the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, large
parts of his audience howled in protest - and then some tuned
him out altogether.

"I lost somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of my audience just
like that," he said, snapping his fingers in the air.

"They were angry with me, because my audience is basically
conservative," he explained. "I mean, here I am for years and
years expressing the viewpoints of the people who are
conservative, so they're grateful. And then, their president
says it's necessary to go to war with Iraq, and I say, 'No, no,
it's not, it's the dumbest thing I ever heard of.' And they're
very angry with me, because it's the president I'm disagreeing
with - and who am I? But presidents don't necessarily know more
than we do."

That anti-authoritarian strain surfaced often as Mr. Smith
reflected on his life and work in last his interview with the
Sun.

When asked if religion had become more important to him since
his cancer diagnosis in October, he said, "I'm not a religious
person.

"I'm a spiritual person, but not religious. I couldn't accept
dogma for the same reason I couldn't go to school, OK?" he
added, sounding more like the animated on-air "Talk Show Man"
than he had at any other time during the conversation.

"Dogma means you have to accept all sorts of different things
as being equally true, and they're not. I'm anti-dogmatic by my
nature - anti-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian. So, the only thing
I was suited for was what I did at WBAL for all these years."

Anti-authoritarian or not, Mr. Smith was as good an employee as
any news-talk radio station could ever hope to have, according
Ed Kiernan, longtime general manager of WBAL.

"A voracious reader, Ron Smith arrived at his opinions after
careful thought and research. He arrived early to work always
prepared and excited to get behind the microphone," Mr. Kiernan
said.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the Smith family and his
incredibly supportive wife, June. She loaned us Ron every day.
Ron invested 26 years of his enormously successful career with
WBAL radio. It wasn't long enough. Thank you, Ron. Godspeed.
Semper Fi."

The way the Baltimore community reached out to Mr. Smith since
he announced his diagnosis of cancer on-air made him feel "very
lucky," his wife said.

"Ron thought it was just great that he got to read and hear his
eulogies in recent weeks," she said Monday night. "Ron's
comment on all the recognition: 'My life has been completely
ratified by affirmation. If there were a referendum on it, it
would have won resoundingly.'"

In addition to his wife of 23 years, Mr. Smith is survived by
three sons, a daughter and five grandchildren. The sons are
Christopher Smith, Ward Smith and Andrew Smith of Lancaster,
Pa., Eldersburg and Baltimore, respectively. Daughter Amy
Zappardino Lichtenwalner lives in Glen Rock, Pa. Two previous
marriages ended in divorce.

No public service will be held, according to June Smith.