The three concrete steps — cracked, patched and splattered with white paint — lead to an old green door. Three years ago, Dr. Walter Smith faced down drug dealers who were setting up shop on these steps, his steps. Now the same steps lead to his legacy, the legacy of a life well-lived.
On Sept. 18, Smith, 69, a much-traveled man who spent eight years as president of Florida A&M University, will open the Dr. Walter Smith Library in a modest white building with a high-pitched roof that calls to mind a one-room schoolhouse. It sits on a lot that includes his own home and that of his 94-year-old mother, Eva Reynolds. "My kids tease me, 'Daddy, you're building your presidential library,'" Smith says with a bemused chuckle. "I tell them, 'Once a president, always a president.'"
The Smith library is not a monument designed to usher hushed onlookers through a pristine hall of fame. No, the Smith Library is meant to be used — mostly as a place for schoolchildren to congregate, study, read, interact and be mentored. The walls have stains, the carpets are remnants, the tables and chairs are a mishmash. The bookshelves are hand-me-downs; many of the books are worn paperbacks. The walls are covered with plaques, framed posters and such, a paean to Smith's passions: education, African and African-American history, and sports.
The library stands in West Tampa, just off the Howard/Armenia exit on I-275. The neighborhood is mostly working-class African-American, with plenty of the at-risk kids Smith is trying to reach.
"One day, about two years ago, I saw two girls getting off the school bus, and they were fooling around, playing," he says, pointing to the corner of Cypress and Albany next to his house. "And I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice to hear them say, "See you back at the library in an hour. Let's study together."'"
Ever since, Smith has doggedly pursued the project, which was slowed when he hurt his back and when his stepfather died in December. Instead of raising outside funds, he's poured about $100,000 of his own money into upgrading the structure and paving the driveway, and has logged countless hours building, fixing, installing.
In 2000, when he retired as head of admissions for the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy and Foundation at University of Florida, "I had to decide what I wanted to spend my money on, which is not an easy decision to make. Taking my retirement check and putting it into this project, yes, that's the most altruistic part."
Smith laughs, which he does often. One day last week, as he and two other men worked on the gazebo near the library, he was dressed in work pants, Velcro-fastened sneakers and a FAMU T-shirt. His brown, plastic-rimmed glasses were flecked with sawdust, his full hair and mustache spotted with gray. Smith loves to tell stories, peppering his discourse with dramatic pauses and down-home rhetorical flourishes that are never pompous. He carries himself as if he's in on a lot of life's secrets, and if you tag along he just might hip you to some of them.
In the first grade, he played hooky and swam in the Hillsborough River almost every day. The following year, he was sent to live with his grandparents in Cairo, Ga. At 16, he attended high school and worked at a Campbell Soup processing plant. After returning from a 4H getaway, he was given his job back as an inspector of okra and tomatoes. He replaced a white man. "We were sittin' on a railroad spur eating lunch," Smith recounts. "And he said, 'Goddamn, you really think you're something, don't you nigger?' I said, 'You don't mean that.' He said, 'I damn sure do.' Things escalated and I hit him with a barrel hoop, cut him and he needed a few stitches."
Smith remembers the ladies on the line yelling, "Run, Walter, run!" He hopped in a cab driven by a black man, who took him 35 miles to Tallahassee. "It was not unusual for an African-American man to be lynched at that time, no matter how popular they were," he explains. "My grandma worked for the mayor, so I thought maybe I didn't need to run, but then, why take the chance?"
Walter hustled to Harlem to live with his Aunt Alberta, the beginning of a whirlwind odyssey. He got a job pushing clothing carts through the clogged garment district. After a three-year stint in the military, where he mostly played baseball in the Caribbean, he returned to New York, took classes to become a medical lab technician and landed a job at St. John's Episcopal Hospital.
In 1957, he visited Tampa and had a fateful talk with his mother. "She said, 'I want you to come back and be somebody,'" Smith says. "She told me about Gibbs Junior College in St. Pete. I said, 'Mama, that's no college.' She said, 'Son, don't you 'spute my word.' She took me over there and I signed up."
Gibbs, which was a high school during the day and held college classes at night, was part of a network of black junior colleges that existed in Florida from 1949 to 1967. In the '90s, Smith wrote a book titled The Magnificent 12: Florida's Black Junior Colleges.
Smith rode the Silver Meteor train into Tampa with his pregnant wife. (He has three sons and a daughter, all successful professionals, and two ex-wives.) While attending classes, he worked as a tech at Hillsborough Community Home and Hospital on 30th Street, waited tables at Leo's Steakhouse on Gandy and even did a stint washing dishes at MacDill Air Force Base from 4 to 7 a.m. One night at Leo's, Smith handled a party of 15 and impressed one of the customers, the regional director of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Shortly after, Smith was named manager of the outlet at Progress Village on 78th Street. It was 1960, and he was the company's first black manager in the region.
Smith worked his way up to $7,000 a year, good money at the time, but the job wasn't fulfilling. He decided to attend FAMU and study biology and chemistry. His regional manager granted him a $500 scholarship. After graduating in '63, Smith's whirlwind Iife became something of a tornado, spinning him through a lifetime of increasingly prominent jobs as an educator, from high school science department head to stints with IBM and the U.S. Department of Education to the presidency of Roxbury Community College in Boston.
In '77, his alma mater came calling. Smith beat out 90 other candidates to head FAMU in Tallahassee, just 11 years after he earned his master's there (his doctorate is from Florida State). During his tenure, the university expanded from seven to 11 colleges, added graduate programs and started $40 million worth of capital construction. One of his favorite accomplishments, though, came after the NCAA rejected the university's application for Division 1-AA. Smith and some cohorts went to Texas, petitioned the NCAA and got the decision overturned. In 1978, FAMU won the first 1-AA football championship, 35-28 over UMass Amherst.
Smith left FAMU in '85, and went on to a variety of other activities, among them acting as a U.S. monitor for the 1994 democratic election in South Africa, where he previously helped establish the country's first community college system. He considered returning to South Africa after retiring, but chose his hometown instead, specifically the depressed area where he grew up. He could've moved to Carrollwood or Clearwater Beach, but returned to the 'hood. Smith wanted to be near his parents, he says, and close to lifelong friends, too. Did he also want to make a difference in his old stomping grounds? "There was more than a little of that," he says.
"I knew he wouldn't end up in a rocking chair," says Dr. Hazel Harvey, an old school classmate of Smith's who's a retired elementary school curriculum supervisor for Hillsborough County Schools. "I figured it would be something people-oriented, that would involve children, and mentoring."
Harvey was one of several people who stopped by the worksite last week. One of them was Ambria Conley, a talkative fifth grader at Dale Mabry Elementary who lives with her grandmother across the street. She's excited for the library to open. "Grandma likes me to study," she says with a big, bright smile. "I'm a good student. My brother isn't doing so good. He's in the second grade. I want to teach him to come to the library and have fun, try to teach him to have fun while he studies. He'll have some peace and quiet in the library; maybe he won't get frustrated."
Ambria used to get occasional rides to the public library downtown or the one on Howard Avenue and Union Street. "The public libraries are pretty inconvenient for that little girl," Smith says. "She'd have to go under that [I-275] bridge with all those crackheads."
Inside the library, Phyllis Bridges, a 40-year-old student at HCC, catalogued some of the 3,200 books. Smith pays her, but the work has also become a labor of love. "He's so into it, it's infectious," she said, and then surveyed the stacks. "There's a lot of knowledge in this room."
The Walter Smith Library is at 905 N. Albany Ave., Tampa, 813-254-0605. A ribbon-cutting ceremony will take place Saturday, Sept. 18, at noon. Its initial hours of operation will be from 2 to 4 p.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Children 15 and under must be registered by a parent or guardian.eric.snider@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Sep 8-14, 2004.