Peter Schorsch
Nancy Smith, the executive editor of Sunshine State News, and I don’t get along as well as we once did.
Maybe I wrote a blog post that was too snarky. Or she wrote a column about me that hit too close to home. It’s OK. There is an ebb and flow to these things. And right now it’s just more ebb than flow.
Regardless of the current state of our relationship, I was saddened to see that her husband, Mick Smith, passed away on January 7.
I didn’t know Mr. Smith, although I believe (and I could be wrong) I met him once. But I am highlighting his passing because, after reading what Nancy wrote about her beloved, its clear we should all aspire to live the kind of remarkable life Mick Smith did.
His was seemingly a life so very different than the soft, meandering existences too many of us accept as how things must be.
I just love how Nancy describes her husband in the first sentence of the obituary she wrote; that he was an “educator, craftsman, float builder extraordinaire, friend to anyone who ever shook his hand.”
Isn’t that someone you wish you had met while he was alive?
Mick Smith served in the Royal Air Force and also worked for Lady Margaret Thatcher, who appointed him headmaster of a large special education school in London. Just those two points — service to country, service to others — on a man’s CV tell you that he was about something greater than himself.
Before Nancy married him, Mick was already the father of seven children. That was before Nancy and Mick moved “across the pond.”
In Florida, Mr. Smith seemed to give all he had himself, working with rehabilitation centers and adult education schools.
But here’s where he gets even more interesting. I’ll let Nancy’s words tell it:
“Mick was known best for his Martin County Fair booths, Chili Cookoff displays, winning Port St. Lucie Raft Race entries and elaborate Port St. Lucie News floats that on the Fourth of July depicted some massive, inspiring styrofoam-carved American treasure – Mount Rushmore, Iwa Jime, the Vietnam Wall, the Lincoln Monument, for example. His piece de resistance year after year was the Santa sleigh, complete with either reindeer and toys, representing the News in Christmas parades up and down the Treasure Coast. It was a conversation piece, the last parade entry carrying Santa into town.”
Mick Smith sounds like a community treasure. (He also sounds like a man after my own Griswold-y heart.)
They say the one benefit of being a journalist is that when you leave this earth, your colleagues will reward you with a generous obituary. Well, guess what happens when your wife is a talented journalist and you’ve lived the life Mick Smith did? You get testimonies like this…
“This was a larger-than-life man with an enormous gift of register — the ability to talk to everyone in their vernacular and make them feel as if he’s known them all his life. … Nobody could have had a more devoted, more loyal friend than Mick Smith.”
We should all be sent off in such a fashion.
Grandfather to 14, great grandfather to another 15, surely Shakespeare had Mick Smith in mind when he wrote, “Here was a man…”
I did not know you, Mick Smith, but I wish I had. Rest in peace.
