University of Texas

Liz Smith

Harvey Schmidt: At the University of Texas in the late forties, the name Liz Smith was well-known to me long before I’d ever seen or met the individual it belonged to. After having attended several small-town high schools (only one of which had a monthly school paper and it was '“mimeographed”), it was a thrill to enroll at the University in Austin and discover that the Journalism Department actually published an honest-to-God elegantly-printed daily paper of many pages called The Daily Texan, as well as a glossy monthly magazine called The Ranger, and there were constant by-lines in both bearing the name Liz Smith. Reading her regular newspaper column, Forty Acres, was as important on campus as reading Winchell or Hedda or Louella in the other big-city Texas dailies. Read more…