Al Smith

Al Smith, journalist, commentator and originating host of KET's Comment on Kentucky for the past 33 years, hangs up his microphone and ends an era in a special one-hour edition of the Friday-night public affairs institution. It airs live Friday, Nov. 16 at 8/7 p.m. CT and encores Sunday, Nov. 18 at 12:30 p.m./11:30 a.m. CT on KET1.

Comment on Kentucky debuted in November 1974, and Smith, 80, has been a continual moderator longer than any other public affairs program host in the PBS system.

"The Comment show was a wonderful third life for me," said Smith, a Tennessee native who began his career in New Orleans daily journalism, then moved to Kentucky where he headed a publishing company that eventually owned a chain of seven weeklies in Kentucky and Tennessee. "I was able to be a journalist on a larger stage. It was similar in scope to New Orleans, where I was working at the largest paper in the South in my early 20s. KET turned on the lights and the cameras, and we were talking to the whole state of Kentucky."

Once called "the devil and the darling of Russellville" by The Courier-Journal, Smith was a small-town newspaper editor when KET founding executive director O. Leonard Press selected him to host the new program. Throughout all those years, Smith, who also gave Comment on Kentucky its title , served as co-producer, apart from his stint as head of the Appalachian Regional Commission for Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from 1979 to 1982.

"Iconic is not an exaggeration when speaking of Al Smith and Comment on Kentucky," said Malcolm Wall, KET executive director. "Those who follow simply stand on his shoulders."

As they have every Friday night, on Smith's final broadcast he and a panel of fellow journalists will provide perspective on politics, education and business. The panelists are Mark Hebert, WHAS-TV; John David Dyche, Courier-Journal; Jaime Lucke, Lexington Herald-Leader; and Al Cross, University of Kentucky Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues. Following will be a retrospective of Smith's tenure, featuring highlights of past programs with guests Dave Nakdimen, Bob Johnson, Ferrell Wellman and Diana Taylor.

Comment on Kentucky is produced by Smith and Renee Shaw. More information about KET programming and education services, as well as how to support KET, can be found at www.ket.org.

More on Al Smith

• Smith came to Kentucky in 1958 after ten years as a reporter and editor on two daily papers in New Orleans.

• After growing up in Florida and Tennessee and serving in World War II, he attended Vanderbilt University.

• For six years, until September 1996, he also hosted a daily radio talk show, PrimeLine, on a 30-station network. That program was initiated and sponsored by the Association of Older Kentuckians in an effort to create better understanding of public concerns between generations.

• Smith is one of the founders of Leadership Kentucky and has headed several other statewide groups, including the Kentucky Press Association, the state arts and oral history programs, a governor's council on education reform and the Shakertown Roundtable.

• Other civic work has included service on the boards of the Council on Higher Education, the Governor's Scholars, the University Press of Kentucky Foundation, and Shakertown at Pleasant Hill Inc. and membership in two school support groups: the Prichard Committee for Academic Excellence and Forward in the Fifth.

• Al Smith was elected to the first class of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame at the University of Kentucky in 1981 and holds honorary degrees from two state universities and a private college.

• Smith's wife, Martha Helen, the mother of their three grown children, has had her own career as teacher, social worker, business owner and educational consultant.