Yvonne Ba­boolal

Vet­er­an jour­nal­ist Kei­th Smith died yes­ter­day morn­ing at 3 am at his home on Old St Joseph Road, Laven­tille.He had been ail­ing for some time. He was 65.Smith, who was un­mar­ried and had no chil­dren, leaves to mourn two broth­ers, a sis­ter and his moth­er.De­spite his long ill­ness, the rel­a­tive said they were shocked at his death."He was a good man. He helped a lot of youths in Laven­tille. He took a lot of them off the streets."Smith, a foun­da­tion mem­ber of the Laven­tille Rhythm Sec­tion, was the re­cip­i­ent of the Hum­ming Bird (Sil­ver) Medal award.

His fu­ner­al will be held on Sat­ur­day at 10 am at the Cathe­dral of the Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion on In­de­pen­dence Square, Port-of-Spain.The fam­i­ly mem­ber said they were still work­ing out the de­tails of where he would be buried.Short­ly af­ter re­ceiv­ing the Hum­ming Bird medal in 2009 for his con­tri­bu­tion to jour­nal­ism, Smith said jour­nal­ists should know more about the coun­try's po­lit­i­cal, so­cial, eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al his­to­ry.

Smith had been an em­ploy­ee of the Ex­press news­pa­per from its es­tab­lish­ment in 1967.Giv­ing a list of re­quire­ments for be­ing a suc­cess­ful jour­nal­ist, he said "you need to have a pas­sion for jus­tice, a hunger to see every­body gets as fair a deal as pos­si­ble and you have to be on the side of peo­ple who do not have a voice."Colum­nist Judy Ray­mond, de­scrib­ing Smith's writ­ing, said: "At their best, Kei­th's columns were like the most bril­liant ex­tem­po ca­lyp­soes.

"They were dashed off with great speed but they had their own po­et­ry and they con­tained nuggets of great wis­dom," she said."No­body could hope to im­i­tate them but they were an in­flu­ence and in­spi­ra­tion for oth­er writ­ers, nev­er­the­less, be­cause of their depth and sharp­ness and the easy way they showed Kei­th's huge un­der­stand­ing of the time and place he lived in."mColum­nist BC Pires, writ­ing about Smith in Oc­to­ber 2010, de­scribed him this way: "If Kei­th wasn't in a hos­pi­tal bed, he was at his desk, chew­ing his way to in­spi­ra­tion via his knuck­les, the whole news­room, watch­ing, un­der­stood his con­cen­tra­tion was deep­est when his fist dis­ap­peared in­to his mouth.

A re­lease from the Ex­press yes­ter­day said: "Over his decades at the Ex­press, Mr Smith worked as a re­porter, a fea­ture writer, ed­i­tor, ed­i­tor-at-large and, with great­est dis­tinc­tion, as a colum­nist."It is in that last ca­pac­i­ty that the Kei­th Smith name be­came a house­hold word, iden­ti­fied with flair, in­sight, and pop­u­lar ap­peal."