Jack Clifford Smith (August 27, 1916 – January 9, 1996) was a Los Angeles journalist, author, and newspaper columnist.

[2] Following high school, Smith spent some time in the Civilian Conservation Corps before joining the United States Merchant Marine at age 21.

[3] On the morning of the attack, he and his wife had just left an all-night party with some friends when they noticed airplanes streaking over the shoreline.

"[4] Smith enlisted in the United States Marine Corps as a combat correspondent and would take part in the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.

In the amphibious landing on February 19, 1945, Smith went ashore in the third wave of soldiers[5] with his rifle but without his typewriter, which had been lost at sea.

"[6] During his service on Iwo Jima, Smith was the subject of an Associated Press photograph that appeared on the front page of hundreds of newspapers across the United States.

[7] It was as a rewrite man for the Daily News in 1947 that Smith had what he later called "perhaps my finest hour as a newspaperman": his stories on the infamous Elizabeth Short murder case.

"[8][9] Later in his career, Smith wrote that he always believed himself to be the first person to get the name "Black Dahlia" into print, though he admitted he didn't come up with the nickname.

In his book, Jack Smith's L.A., he described the discovery of the nickname as "a rewrite man's dream" and said he "couldn't wait to get it into type.

At the Times, besides his duties as a rewrite man, in which he would quickly assemble stories based largely on information from reporters who phoned in from the field, Smith began writing humor pieces for the op-ed page.

[13] At the height of his popularity, Smith's columns were distributed to almost 600 newspapers worldwide by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service.

His daily column was widely read at breakfast tables across Southern California, from the working class suburbs of Los Angeles to the mansions of Beverly Hills.

Among his readers were Fred MacMurray, Bing Crosby, Henry Miller, Groucho Marx, and Charlton Heston.

[18] Smith and his wife, Denny, lived in the same house in the Mount Washington, Los Angeles neighborhood near Downtown L.A.[19] from 1950 until his death in 1996.

[22][23] In May 2004, Mount Washington Elementary School broke ground on the Jack and Denny Smith Library on their campus.

[26] Smith's family was often the subject of his columns, and readers came to know his wife Denny, their two sons, Curtis and Douglas, their two daughters-in-law, Gail and Jacqueline, and their five grandchildren, Chris, Adriana, Alison, Casey, and Trevor.

[27] Jack Smith won the Greater Los Angeles Press Club's highest honor, the Joseph M. Quinn Memorial Award, in 1991.