Al Smith

Honorary Summit Co-Chair

Veteran journalist Al Smith of Lexington, who retired in November as the longtime host/producer of KET’s Comment on Kentucky show, is the newest recipient of Leadership Kentucky’s Flame of Excellence Award for statewide leadership. Smith, a founding director and former chairman of Leadership Kentucky, received the award a few weeks after finishing 33 years as moderator of KET’s signature public affairs program, the longest such tenure in the PBS network.

Every Friday night over those years Smith and a panel of fellow journalists gave a perspective on politics, education, and business that was known for candor, humor and informed background on current events. The program, which is repeated on Sundays, has a loyal audience of viewers who are themselves decision makers or who are interested in how policy is formed in the Commonwealth. It will continue under a new host to be selected early in the new year, KET has announced.

In summer of 2007, at a National Rural Assembly in Washington, DC sponsored by the Ford and Kellogg foundations, Smith was named a National Rural Hero in Media, one of six recipients of special awards for achievement in different fields of rural life.

Meanwhile he continues to work on a memoir of politics and journalism while raising funds for the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at University of Kentucky, which he co-founded, and Source of Restoration, Inc., a Lexington transition program for drug law offenders, of which he is board chair.

Al Smith grew up in Florida and Tennessee. As a high school student living on a Tennessee farm near Nashville, he won the American Legion National High School oratorical contest and a college scholarship. After military service in World War II, he attended Vanderbilt University and then spent his first 10 years in journalism working for daily papers in New Orleans, the Times-Picayune and the New Orleans Item.

He came to Kentucky in 1958 to edit the Russellville News-Democrat which later became part of a chain of weeklies which he organized and headed until selling the company in 1985. In Washington in the Carter and Reagan administrations (1980-82), he was federal co-chair of the Appalachian Regional Commission which invests in economic development in Kentucky and 12 other states.

He has chaired or  been active in several statewide civic and educational groups including a Governor’s Council on Educational Reform (chair); the Kentucky Press Association (chair); the Shakertown Roundtable (chair); Governor's Scholars, Forward in the Fifth, Council on Higher Education, the state Arts Commission (chair); state Oral History Commission (founding chair); the Prichard Committee for Educational Excellence, founding trustee; Berea College, trustee; the UK Hospital Council of Supervisors, trustee; Appalachian Regional HealthCare, trustee;  Leadership Kentucky (chair); committees to revise the state Constitution and, separately,  the canons of the state Judiciary, and, recently, the founding of the  Institute for Rural Journalism and of Source of Restoration.

Honors: the UK Hall of Fame of Kentucky Journalism, state rural electric co-ops’ Distinguished Rural Kentuckian Award, Vic Hellard Award for public service from the Legislative Research Commission's Long Term Policy Center, Ky. Press Association’s Lewis Owen Award for Community Service presented by the Lexington Herald-Leader, UK Library Associates Medallion for Intellectual Achievement, East Kentucky Leadership Conference Media Award, Barren River Area Development District Tim Lee Carter Award for community service. The state's annual Al Smith Arts Fellowships honor his support of community arts programs. Seven Kentucky universities and colleges have awarded him honorary doctoral degrees. O

ther: Born Jan.9, 1927, Sarasota, Fla. Married June17,1967 to Martha Helen Disharoon Hancock, Hopkinsville, Ky. Three children: Catherine Hancock McCarty, Birmingham, Ala.; Carter Hancock; Louisville, Ky; Virginia Smith Major, Manchester, Ct. Five grandchildren.