Les Smith: May 27, 1950-September 17, 2025
I always wanted to see a billboard set up on one of the city’s major thoroughfares with a giant mugshot of TV reporter Les Smith underscored with the legend “Les Is More.” Because he was.
I had the privilege of working with him for some years as one of the original co-panelists on the WKNO-TV show Behind the Headlines and, later on, welcomed him as a fellow columnist on this newspaper, as he was spinning down his career as a TV reporter on local Fox 13. For years Les had graced that station — and this community — with top-notch reportage on political and civic affairs, along with compelling, raconteurish features that were simultaneously home-spun and auteur-like in their originality.
On BTH, if things slowed down in the journalist-roundtable format that prevailed at that time, Les could be counted on to improvise one of his sketches seemingly out of thin air, mounting it securely on whatever topical subject we were fumbling toward. He was a storyteller.
He had also been a sports journalist of satisfying specificity and spark, working in that vein for years at WREG-TV And there was a stint in the ’80s with WMC-TV. He was many things. Les was — more.
As a newsman, working in a trade in which bias of one sort or another is always suspect, he feared nor favored not, telling it like he thought it was — hey, telling it like it was.
And he enjoyed what he was doing — you could tell. Which made it a surprise to some of us when he decided, a few years ago, to hang it up and move with his wife Lisa to Belize. Now, I got the happy-couple/Caribbean Isle of Joy thing, but — retirement? Going down there took Les away from a world of affairs here which he knew so well and had documented so splendidly. And indeed he would stay in touch in various ways, using the internet to forward in our direction queries about various local matters and an occasional proposal to do an analysis of a Memphis-related event. Bottles in the water.
Now and then there would be an online post suggesting a visit back from him and Lisa. A couple of times when he made it aground, I was happily able to catch up with him for a drink or two.
Along the way. Lisa took ill, which I knew about. She passed, and it would devastate him. That he himself was ailing, I hadn’t known about until this week.
Lung cancer was what took him. But for many of us, Les remains, still a secure icon in the historical memory of our time and place.
• Talk about lowering the temperature! Ninth District Congressman Steve Cohen’s turn at interrogating FBI director Kash Patel last Wednesday on the House Judiciary Committee turned into something of a lovefest, though Cohen had been critical of the administration’s plan to send National Guard troops to Memphis.
But Cohen carefully distinguished between the FBI and other federal agencies, on one hand, and the National Guard on the other, regarding their training for crime control. He heaped praise on Patel, who had been instrumental, as the congressman noted, in the “Operation Viper” program, which of late had collated local, state, and federal elements in a strike force that achieved significant results.
“That was good,” said Cohen, and from there, the two of them went on to enumerate positive aspects of the Bluff City — the Blues, Elvis, the National Civil Rights Museum, Beale Street — and ended in a joint expression of love for Memphis and regard for her place in the heart of the nation. May this be an omen.