Stop the presses! Reporter Pam Smith retires

  A name that has appeared in The Sun off and on since the 1950s is about to disappear from these pages.

  She's got one last story in the hopper waiting to run, but her desk has been cleared out, her pen put aside and notepad flipped shut for the last time.

  Someone really should holler "Stop the presses!"

  Veteran reporter Pam Smith has retired.

  Smith began her journalism career as a reporter for her high school in Boise, Idaho, a calling that she followed faithfully to age 83 in Yuma, Ariz.

  "I guess I just finally decided to slow down to a roar," she said. "I've decided to retire."

  After a lifetime of interviews, deadlines and watching all the big events happen with a behind-the-scenes perspective, retirement just may end up being Smith's trickiest assignment yet.

  "Not getting up and going to work is going to be something that's very different for me," said Smith, who was working full time right up to retirement. "I've worked all my life."

 In latter years, Smith earned quite a following with her articles about local events and activity listings. But over the years, Smith's way with words blessed practically every section of The Sun, plus many of its publications that came and went as decades passed.

  Regardless of the story angle, for Smith the challenge was always the same. She was bound and determined to find inspiring stories where others might not think to look, always shrugging off traditional newsmakers and lifting the common man to glory in newsprint.

  "I like to look around and find some different aspect about a person's life. I don't like car wrecks or politics. I don't like violence.

  "I prefer stories about people, talking to families and finding someone that has really accomplished something in their life. And maybe no one else even knows they exist. To me that's fun. Too often the little guy does not get the pats on the back that he should."

  To say that newspaper work amounts to a lifetime ambition for Smith is truly no stretch. She first began dreaming of telling stories on the pages of newspapers back in high school.

  "I always wanted to be a journalist."

  The idea came to her after a sister praised letters Smith had written while in San Francisco, where she had played violin in a novel 5,000-piece orchestra at Treasure Island. So when she got back, she signed up for journalism class, writing the school news for a local paper, the Boise Capital News.

  "And it couldn't be any clubby things, either. It had to have some meat to it," Smith said proudly. "That was my only official training in journalism."

  Her career launched early on with a bang. It happened when she was assigned to interview Eddie Rickenbacker, the American fighter ace from World War I. She was only a junior in high school at the time.

  "I asked him about girls flying and he glared at me and said 'No. No. No. Period,'" Smith said, laughing. "So I used just that for the (beginning) of my story and they put it on the front page of the newspaper the next day."

  Smith graduated from high school in 1943, worked in journalism for a while and then served in the motor pool at a military base during World War II. "I had a two-and-a-half-ton truck checked out to me," she said.

  Smith spent several years in Hawaii, where she proofread for the Honolulu Advertiser and was a reporter for the Star Bulletin. The islands remain a special place that Smith says she keeps close to her heart.

  Before coming to Yuma in 1949, she and her husband ran a filling station and general store in an isolated part of Montana.

  "We were snowed in from Dec. 15 until May 1," Smith said. That experience gave her the idea of heading south.

  Smith and her husband ran a camera and photo developing business in Yuma for awhile. She also got into studio photography after having studied at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif.

  Smith began writing for The Sun in 1959, which would mark a series of comings and goings between the newspaper and Smith. Her first stint lasted 11 years.

  "My job was to be the women's page editor, plus the food and church editor."

  When Smith began working, The Sun was located on Madison Avenue. Before retiring, Smith proudly shared a black-and-white photo of her standing at the groundbreaking of The Sun's current location on Arizona Avenue.

  But Smith didn't stay put for long. She worked off and on at The Sun several times and also worked for many of the newspaper's weekly publications. Those latter jobs included time with the Valley and Foothills News, which was originally headquartered in Somerton, and The Prospector.

  Smith also wrote for a privately owned weekly called the Advantage.

  She even had her own newspaper for a while. Smith left The Sun at one point, frustrated because women weren't paid enough.

  At the time, she was a single mother raising two teens. Smith and a friend ran a weekly called Tiempo for almost a year.

  But Smith always found her way back to The Sun. Her final stint began after The Prospector was moved to The Sun's offices. After that weekly stopped publishing, Smith was once again in the ranks of The Sun.

  Smith says she didn't exactly plan to work full time up into her 80s, a fact that inspired many of her younger co-workers.

  "Some of it has been a necessity. But writing has always been a therapy for me. I don't play bridge. I've forgotten how to play canasta and I'm not one to trot around the neighborhood for a coffee klatch."

  Smith said she plans to collect a book of writings and memorabilia for her daughter, plus venture into freelance writing for publications.

  "I have a couple ideas in the back of my old white head that I'm going to try to work on," she said.

  At her farewell party, Smith surprised co-workers with a request to sing a song for her: "The Old Gray Mare."

  "I told them that it's my theme song. The old gray mare isn't what she used to be, but she isn't dead. She's going to keep on working - as long as I can."

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Darin Fenger can be reached at
dfenger@yumasun.com or 539-6860.