Journalist Jim Smith on assignment in heaven

The scribe of La Conner has left the planet.

Jim Smith, once the unofficial Wonder of Woonsocket, South Dakota, and more recently the witty author of “Notes from Pull & Be Damned” is gone.

He would like it if we told you he was abducted by aliens or took off hunting Sasquatch, but the sad truth is Jim died early Friday.

Jim’s weekly columns and news stories delighted people for years. His historical knowledge of the town – he used to get introduced as “one of the original hippies” – gave newcomers a glimpse into La Conner’s soul and conjured up good memories and usually raucous laughter with everyone else.

In a 2009, La Conner Weekly News “Pull & Be Damned” column, he told everyone this newspaper had fired him. Now, for journalists, getting fired for standing firm on principle can be a badge of honor.

But in Jim’s case, he wanted everyone to believe it was for, “having phone sex with telemarketers who call during dinner time. Evidently, even writers can be fired for moral turpitude,” he wrote. “It’s not fair. All I said to the caller – after I paused to slurp my mashed potatoes – was “So, Tiffany, what color is your underwear?”

And after an entertaining tale that meandered through his twin sister Joan’s teen driving habits and his Methodist upbringing in Woonsocket, South Dakota, he got to the punch line. It was “April Fool.”

Of course he wasn’t fired. And two years later, in 2011, Jim Smith was awarded the First Place prize for his “Pull & Be Damned” column in the statewide newspaper contest sponsored by the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association.

When this newspaper first got started ten years ago, the previous paper had gone out of business. La Conner had been home to a weekly newspaper since the 1870s, and we were on a mission to save the town’s voice.

Jim was one of the first people through the door to lend a hand. That was just in his nature, as many people in town knew first-hand.

For years he was the barista working with Joyce and Stuart Welch when they owned the Rexville Grocery. His coffee appreciation and his expertise at preparing it was legendary.

Before Jim arrived in La Conner – back during the hippie era – he had been a high school teacher in an inner-city California school, working with very troubled youth.

When he wrote about that era in his life, Jim said he learned enough at that school to take his first step into his own, belated, juvenile delinquency.

He always readily admitted that his wife, Janet Saunders, gets the credit for keeping him from acting out the lessons his students taught him.

Jim’s wit and words were always a surprise. He’d pull humor out of thin air to deliver a straight-faced joke and something crazy funny would pop up unexpectedly in everything he wrote.

One holiday season, in a column lamenting all the white lights strung on buildings in town and hankering for more festive colored lights, Jim wrote: “I was going to give my personal holiday decorating award to the Gull Station at the entrance to town. Then I realized that all their beautiful colored lights are actually the beer signs in the windows.”

Jim, who turned 76 in February, retired from his weekly writing in 2013.

He left this world on Friday morning, but his voice will be around for a long time. He left us hundreds of incredibly entertaining columns and news stories, and this newspaper will reprint some from time to time.