Smiley Anders, champion writer, was a champion reader, too

Smiley Anders, whose column appeared in this newspaper for many years, will be remembered as an artful scribe, leaving behind thousands of columns and several published collections of his work when he died recently at 86.

Smiley, a celebrated writer, was a tireless reader, too, as I was reminded during my visit with him last December. He’d been in poor health and confined to his home for a while, and like many convalescents, Smiley kept necessities close by to avoid the trouble of getting up.

Not surprisingly, those must-haves included books. As I chatted with Smiley that morning, I couldn’t help noticing two volumes near his elbow. One was a fresh edition of “A Mencken Chrestomathy,” a 1949 collection of writings by the Baltimore columnist H.L. Mencken. The other was “Pieces of the Frame,” an assortment of articles by The New Yorker writer John McPhee.

Mencken, a puckish national commentator who died in 1956, took pleasure in reviving “chrestomathy,” an old-fashioned word meaning “a choice collection,” for his book project.

Smiley was a gentler sort than Mencken, but he shared his hero’s sharp eye for oddity — a preference, in Smiley’s case, that inclined him to collect from his loyal readers a steady stream of howler puns, comical misspellings and hysterical malapropisms. I won’t repeat them here; they’re best sampled in Smiley’s own work, still around for his fans to enjoy.

Although of different generations, Smiley and I were both Mencken fans and enjoyed comparing notes about him. In college, Smiley had been assigned to read “Newspaper Days,” Mencken’s rollicking account of his early years as an ink-stained wretch. What Mencken described struck a young Smiley Anders as a job he might like, too.

Years later, I stumbled on Mencken’s “Minority Report” in high school. After growing up in the shadow of Watergate, I’d been drawn to the idea of journalism as something noble and important. Reading Mencken convinced me it could also be fun.

When Smiley began writing his newspaper column in 1979, the pain of Watergate was still fresh. That same year, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took American hostages, prompting a lengthy diplomatic crisis. Then, as now, readers woke up each morning to weather some pretty grim headlines.

But in sharing stories of family ties, kind deeds and good humor, Smiley offered us a forgiving mirror each morning in which we could see our best selves reflected. It was a daily exercise in possibility — a reminder of how we might sustain community, and how community might sustain us.

I was heartened to see Smiley with a book by McPhee, the veteran magazine journalist still writing at 93. It underscored for me the great gift Smiley had also extended by writing as long as he did.

Smiley had placed a bookmark in the middle of McPhee’s book, a little nod to new chapters waiting to be explored. It seemed a poignant gesture of expectation from my brave friend as illness shadowed his days.

What I will treasure about Smiley is that he wrote and read as he lived, always eager to know what happened next.

Email Danny Heitman at danny@dannyheitman.com.