A Terrific Reporter with an Authentic Voice

A couple of years ago, C. Fraser Smith wrote a book about his love affair with the newspaper business. He called it, “The Daily Miracle: A Memoir of Newspapering” (Otter Bay Books).

Until his death on Apr. 25 at age 83, Fraser was one of the best of the miracle workers.

He spent more than three decades reporting for The Sun, uncovering everything from the Schaefer era’s furtive “Shadow Government” to Len Bias’ overdose death to Maryland’s sorry history of race relations.

Fraser spent another decade doing commentaries on WYPR radio and columns for The Daily Record. And he wrote some terrific books.

Here’s a quick slice from Fraser’s remarkable “William Donald Schaefer: A Political Biography” (Hopkins Press):

“[Schaefer] brought to his office a religious belief in the power of salesmanship and hyperintensive management. You had to sell your city. You had to run it like a corporation, run it like a regiment, rail against the naysayers. You had to attack on every front. You had to rage against the night of decay and welfare dependency, high school dropout rates and trash, until you were seen as slightly mad. Then you made madness your tool.”

Is there a better description anywhere of Schaefer as mayor of Baltimore? Fraser could write such a biography because he’d spent so many years covering government and politics and its various fallouts.

He came off of the University of North Carolina campus, worked his way up through newspapers in Jersey City, New Jersey, and Providence, Rhode Island, and arrived at The Sun in the mid-‘70s.

He was there during American newspapers’ last big hurrah, when they stood there at the beating heart of all civic conversation. It was a time when The Sun had bureaus around the world and hundreds of thousands of readers — including presidents — and each day offered multiple news and feature sections whose pages were bulging with ads.

Now, The Sun’s demoralized newsroom people shudder over the prospect of some cutthroat venture capital outfit, Alden Global Capital, taking complete control and cutting staff that’s already been heartlessly gutted over the past decade.

In a healthier journalism climate than this, Fraser’s the reporter who famously uncovered the “Shadow Government” Schaefer set up to secretly maneuver around laws and regulations that the then-mayor found annoying and wished to brush aside while nobody was watching. But Fraser was watching, and uncovered all of it.

He’s the reporter who gave us the background details about the drug overdose death in 1986 of the University of Maryland basketball great Len Bias, and then turned it into the book “Lenny, Lefty and the Chancellor” (Bancroft Press).

He’s the reporter who took years of studying this state’s painful history of racial unfairness and cruelty, and wrote a book about it titled, “Here Lies Jim Crow: Civil Rights in Maryland” (Hopkins Press.)

You lose an old friend like Fraser, and it brings back snapshots of vanished days. I met him in the mid-‘70s. We’d both been asked, along with several other reporters, to play movie extra roles (as reporters — we said we hated being “typecast”) in the first film Barry Levinson wrote, called “… And Justice For All,” which was shot here.

It starred a young fellow named Al Pacino. Fraser and I had bit parts which ultimately were cut from the film. But that didn’t stop us from telling everyone over the years that we’d once co-starred with Pacino and taught him everything he knew about acting.

But the real fun was covering stories with Fraser — at City Hall, the statehouse or down in some neighborhood where ordinary people would vent about how those in political power were failing to do their jobs.

In recent years, we’d get together with old friends like Fred Rasmussen and Antero Pietila, and Bob Brugger and Charley Mitchell, and tell ourselves how lucky we’d been all those years.

Daily miracle, indeed. For years, The Sun was one of the country’s great newspapers, and C. Fraser Smith was there at the heart of it, a terrific reporter, a terrific guy.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.