H. Allen Smith

Harry Allen Wolfgang Smith (December 19, 1907 — February 24, 1976) was an American journalist, humorist, and writer whose books were popular in the 1940s and 1950s.

Family and early career Smith was born in McLeansboro, Illinois, where he lived until the age of six. His family moved to Decatur in 1913 and then to Defiance, Ohio, finally arriving in Huntington, Indiana. It was at this point Smith dropped out of high school and began working odd jobs, eventually finding work as a journalist.

He began in 1922 at the Huntington Press, relocating to Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky. In Florida, editing the Sebring American in 1925, he met society editor Nelle Mae Simpson, and they married in 1927. The couple lived in Oklahoma, where Smith worked at the Tulsa Tribune, followed by a position at the Denver Post. In 1929, he became a United Press rewrite man, also handling feature stories and celebrity interviews. He continued as a feature writer with the New York World-Telegram from 1934 to 1939.

World War II bestsellers He found fame when his humor book Low Man on a Totem Pole (1941) became a bestseller during World War II. It was not only popular on the home front but also read on troop trains and at military camps. Featuring an introduction by his friend Fred Allen, it eventually sold over a million copies. Damon Runyon called it, "Rich funny stuff, loaded with laughs." As noted by Eric Partridge in A Dictionary of Catch Phrases, the book's title became a catchphrase for the least successful individual in a group.

With his newfound financial freedom, he left the daily newspaper grind for life as a freelance author scripting for radio and also wrote (for six months) The Totem Pole, a daily column for United Features Syndicate; was published posthumously in 1977. His papers are in special collections at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas, and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois. The SIU photograph collection contains pictures of Smith, his family, friends and celebrities.

Chili champ Allen competed with Wick Fowler in the first chili cookoff in history, held in Terlingua, Texas, in October 1967. The competition ended in a tie. According to his book, The Great Chili Confrontation, three judges sampled the chili. Smith and Fowler received one vote each with a third judge uttering a decision that was undiscernable to either competitors or attendees. Smith competed with the following recipe:

Smith claimed to have downed the first legal drink in the United States once prohibition was repealed with the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution, and he wrote about the incident in Chapter VI of Life in a Putty Knife Factory. However, others also claimed to have taken the first Repeal drink; in New York City, Joe Weber of the comedy team Weber and Fields took the first legal drink with several reporters as his witnesses.