Elmer Smith: Writing's been a job, but hardly work

"How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard."

- From the musical "Annie"

I WAS 12 when my mother trapped a local merchant in a fiendishly clever extortion plot.

"How much do you think I spend here each week?" my mother asked Sam Zepper, proprietor of the Girard beef market.

"I don't know exactly, Mrs. Mitchell. Why do you ask?"

"Because my son needs a job."

I started work that day and was never out of work for more than a week or two until January 1973 when the Philadelphia Bulletin hired me as a nightside rewrite man for $5 an hour.

I haven't worked a day since.

I've been steadily employed, first by the Bulletin and then by the Philadelphia Daily News, where I have had a job for nearly 30 years.

But if I called it work, I'd be starting my employment history in an extortion plot and ending it with a lie.

For nearly 39 years, people have been paying me to find out what was going on and to write about what I've learned. You could call that work. But a year before I joined the Bulletin, I was doing the same thing at Temple University and paying them for the privilege.

My employers paid me to spend seven years writing the twisted tales of the City Hall beat. Back then, George X. Schwartz, the Silver Fox, ran City Council with an iron fist until he got Abscammed for peddling Council votes to the highest bidder.

Frank Rizzo became the first mayor to accessorize his formal wear with a blackjack or to excuse himself from a fancy dinner to oversee the strip search of the local chapter of the Black Panther Party.

John Street made history as the first man ever arrested for disrupting City Council to have later been elected to City Council. He is the only man to ever serve as Council president after engaging in a fistfight with another councilman.

Stories like that write themselves. They'd have to. You couldn't make this stuff up.

I would have bought a ticket to City Council back then. Instead, I was a paid witness.

I drew a paycheck (I'm not making this up) to sit at ringside during the golden era of boxing. I spent 20-25 weeks a year in Las Vegas with Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tommy Hearns, Michael Spinks, Larry Holmes, Roberto Duran, Evander Holyfield and a malevolent mauler named Mike Tyson who never wore socks but packed plenty.