Student Interview

      He says he will become 81 in October, his thinning hair has some gray on the sides with brown on the top, and he moves and talks like a person somewhat younger. His eyes are brown, he favors black jeans, and he says he is green-brown colorblind. He starts the day on the co-op’s huge well-appointed roof, pruning rose bushes, reading the newspapers, and watching the Queen Elizabeth 2 and other ships head up the Hudson while planes fly overhead on their way to LaGuardia and ferry boats that he said “resemble water bugs” carry commuters to and from New Jersey to Manhattan.

       On the day I met him, wasm (the name students and faculty called him, for it used to be his Connecticut license plate—he even uses it as his Email address.) was sporting what he calls “the Greenwich Village uniform: all black.” His apartment was not what I expected. It was contemporary in style, a Mondrian-like rug on the floor, signed works on the walls (Picasso, Cocteau, Dali, Leger, including a strikingly representational and nude oil painting of him and a Costa Rican recording studio companion he had for four decades), and a portrait in oil that he said was painted by Al Knaus of New Canaan. He also has Crime and Punishment, an oil painting by Karen Santry, now a professor at the Fashion Institute - instead of having her write an evaluation of the book for his class at New Canaan High, he said she could paint her thoughts. She gave him the painting and now lives and teaches a few blocks away.

          In the center of the small studio apartment is a huge 65-gallon aquarium with blue gouramis, a pleko, and a shark. In one corner is a four-poster-like bed with a mirror above. I asked about the mirror, and he said only that he’d bought the bed decades ago when the unique mattress had gel on one side and water on the other.

          In a prominent place is an L-shaped desk that looked ideal for an author and atop which is Gawd. Gawd is the name of his Macintosh G-4 computer. When he asks, “Gawd, what time is it?” a female voice seemingly comes out of nowhere and tells the time or the date or moves the monitor screen up or down whenever he asks. His second G-4 is called HeyZeus, and an older Mac he uses to keep business records he calls HolySpook. It was my first indication that he has a unique sense of humor about religion, for he has written two books - Who’s Who in Hell and Celebrities in Hell - that describe Hell as “a silly theological invention,” one if it did exist would contain the ten thousand eminent individuals whose brief biographies he lists.

          When I asked if he is an atheist, he smiled, said no, and added that he had been a Unitarian humanist from back in the 1940s before as a first sergeant he had led his company onto Omaha Beach in Normandy. He had, therefore, been a non-theist (his term) in a foxhole, had been a member of the Unitarian societies in Westport and Stamford during his teaching in New Canaan from 1954 to 1986, and is still a Unitarian, a pragmatist, and a member of the New York Ethical Culture Society. The latter, he explained, is where family members had assembled for the funerals or memorials of Isaac Asimov and New Canaan’s Norman Cousins.

          To my surprise, he went to his telephone answering device, clicked a button, and the recorded message was “Hi, Warren, Arthur Clarke calling form Sri Lanka, nothing important, but I suggest . . . .”

          When I inquired how he was contacted by Contemporary Authors (Vol. 195), in which he has just been listed, he said he didn’t really remember. He was sent a questionnaire, and he responded, then forgot about it until he accidentally checked his local library in the Sanford White court building known now as the Jefferson Market Library, just across the street from where the Unitarian minister-poet e. e. cummings lived. I inquired how he got listed in the various Who’s Who books. In 1961, he said, while still teaching at New Canaan High, he and his Costa Rican partner—the two met the first week that he had hitchhiked here from Iowa in 1948—founded Variety Recording Studio, that Standard & Poor’s listed them, and apparently this led to their entry in Who’s Who in Business and Finance, then in The East, in Entertainment, in America, and finally in The World. When not in school for the 180-day-year, he ran the recording studio, one of the first customers being Liza Minnelli, then a senior at Scarsdale High School who was brought in for her first demo by her pianist, Marvin Hamlisch. Smith’s partner died in 1988, he sold the studio they had had for 30 years, and the new owner went bankrupt in one year. Contemporary Authors lists the partner and a Broadway actor as having been intimate companions. It also lists the Liberal Party as his political choice. He registered with that party because he liked it for having run Franklin Delano Roosevelt when the Democratic Party had chosen not to run him—he has almost never missed voting in any election, and he says he has seldom voted for anyone who actually won. Although he claims he has no political heroes, he did mention Robert LaFollette, Adlai Stevenson, and Roosevelt (which he pronounced ROHZuhvelt to differentiate it from Theodore’s family, the ROOZuhvelts. The Roosevelts in the New Canaan Cemetery, he said, were related to Theodore.)

          When wasm’s two kittens (Tico, slang for Costa Rican; and Nano, short for Fernando) became overly active, we escaped for lunch. At the popular Village Den restaurant, Tashi, the Nepalese-Tibetan waiter, brought Mr. Smith a zinfandel without his asking, so it became evident he is a regular. As we ate and conversed, a historian who writes about Allen Ginsberg and about the Stonewall riots came by to say hello—I learned that Mr. Smith had been one of the rioters, that school had just let out in June 1969, and that he had not talked about his participation when in Connecticut because he was a closeted gay then. In fact, he thought no one even suspected. But when interviewed by a New York Times reporter-friend of one of his ex-students, Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ed Keating, interviewed him (“Help, I’ve been shot by a Pulitzer Prize winner!” he joked upon being photographed), he learned that students and possibly teachers knew more than he thought they did. The Times story brought many letters from ex-students. He was chased, he smiled, but was entirely chaste during his entire career with students as well as faculty members, absolutely no exceptions.

          Smith took me on a walking tour, showing me where e. e. cummings and Djuna Barnes lived in Patchin Place, where Thomas Paine died in Grove Street, where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death at the White Horse Tavern, where Alexander Hamilton died in Jane Street (but not where the plaque says he did), where Edgar Allan Poe’s dispensary is, where Edna St. Vincent Millay and later John Barrymore lived, and the large auditorium where at New School University he has twice been asked by the editor of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Dr. Paul Edwards, to m.c. his public lectures on Wilhelm Reich and existentialism. Reich’s wife, Ilse Ollendorf, taught German at New Canaan High School, Smith said.

          Because of my interest in journalism, I inquired when he had started his West Indian column and why. It was to help the Premier of Dominica, Edward LeBlanc, who was fighting the established paper at the time the island was obtaining its independence from England. He had worked with Editor Royston Ellis (famous because as a Liverpool poet he had worked with The Beatles) to establish a pro-government journal. The column that appeared in The Educator was soon accepted in 21 other English-speaking West Indian islands. The only other New Canaan member in the World Press Institute, he said, was CBS’s Richard Salant. Smith’s first published book review was of Everyday Religion. But readers of Walt Whitman’s former paper, the Brooklyn Eagle, objected to the negative review (“How everyday can you get!”) of the book that was by a leading Episcopal official in Brooklyn. He later became book review editor of The Humanist and has since written for a dozen different journals including years of writing for Library Journal.

          As we walked along the Hudson riverfront, he pointed out the just completed Meier building in which Calvin Klein has an entire floor. Also, Martha Stewart paid $6,000,000 for an entire floor, then flipped it for $15,000,000 without moving in. In Smith’s building, Victor Garber, an actor seen in “Alias,” just paid $1,400,000 for a penthouse, and James Gandolfini following a divorce moved from 61 to 99 Jane Street, paying $1,050,000 for his new place. Smith’s interest in economics, he explained, commenced in 10th grade when he won an economics essay at Iowa State University, never having studied the subject. At the high school, he taught an Adam Smith macroeconomics class, some students of which still keep in touch with him, he reported.

          Smith, when I remarked at how quickly he walks and talks, says he is hoping arthritis in a left knee doesn’t slow him down in the next few years. He spends almost no time with “old people,” saying he finds almost all of them boring. He says he assumes the age of anyone he speaks with, and I had to agree that he shoots the bull the same way my classmates and friends do. As to what his secret is, he joked “mucho zinfandel,” then credited his parents’ genes.

          I asked what disappointments he had had in life. He claimed to have had none of major importance—he is disappointed that more of his colleagues do not write in Emeritus. Only a few have bought his books or commented upon them. He blames a Puritanical society that made it impossible for him ever to have held hands or embraced in public with lovers. He regrets having been born thirty years too soon, for he would like to have utilized computers in his teaching. Computers are obviously an important part of his life, for he showed me how he is scanning several hundred letters that Harvard’s Houghton Library has requested, and he has his two G-4 Macs hooked up together so that, while he is scanning the letters on one machine, on the other he is sending out invitations to women’s studies departments to host Bangladesh dissident Taslima Nasrin when she arrives from Sweden in November - he calls her “the most dangerous woman in the world” because of her fight against patriarchy. “If she wins the fight,” he says, “monotheistic religions with their male God/Jehovah/Allah/Pope, etc., will lose their tax exempt status and will be replaced by organizations of humanistic societies.” I asked if it is dangerous to be so close to someone who sounds like a female Salman Rushdie. He said it is, that even though she travels incognito she has been confronted by potential assassins. He edits her speeches, including a recent one to the French Assembly, as well as her latest book. He also has helped hide Ibn Warraq, a leading critic of Islam, and in October he will meet Salman Rushdie at a time both will be speaking in Rochester.

          As for mistakes he made in life, he failed to make a success out of Taursa, a mutual fund he started in the early 1970s with two other Mensans—he coined the name from Taurus and Ursa—although he and it passed the requirements of the SEC and a securities dealers organization. He maybe should have left teaching when his department members chose not to retain him as chairman after many years during what he calls “the golden age at New Canaan High,” for the department changed quickly. He said he was offered the Darien English Department’s chairmanship but turned it down. Maybe he should have moved back to Manhattan and been a full-timer at his recording studio. He should have written about his escapades in Morocco and elsewhere, using a pseudonym much as his friend Royston Ellis in Dominica and Sri Lanka had used Richard Tressilian. He definitely should have traveled more, he said.

          As for the high points, he said one high point was hearing recently from a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences that his book had been extremely helpful in his research there. Another was getting listed in the Who’s Who books and Contemporary Authors. He takes special pride in having been feted by an AIDS support group he helped found in Costa Rica, meeting people who otherwise would likely have died without the medications they received and being taken to lunch by the Costa Rican cultural attaché. A high point, he said, was getting interviewed on CNN by Jeanne Moos and maintaining an Email friendship with Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Sir Ian McKellen. A high point was working with faculty members Ilse Ollendorf, Joe Sikorski, Dick Kepes, Matt Coyle, Anna Warm, Art Lane, Bob Mosley, Jerry Renjilian, and Harold Kenney. Another was tutoring a high school dropout from Dominica, who recently received his B.A. at Sacred Heart and is starting on his M.A. Another was footing the bill to rent Waveny for the wedding of the son of one of the three siblings he brought here from the West Indies, a person who now networks the computers in Stamford for the World Wrestling Entertainment. Smith recently has advised a frightened Pakistani-Afghan student as to how to transfer to SUNY at Albany and also as to how to deal with his questioning Islamism. He particularly enjoys responding to Emails from ex-students. The high point of all high points, he summarized, is opening any publication and finding his work has been published.

          “What would you do if you won $1,000,000 in the lottery?” he was asked. He said he never buys lottery tickets and therefore has saved a million dollars, which is better than winning. If he did win a lot of money, he said he would cancel all outstanding loans he has made to friends (and he already has written off “six figures of bad debts over the years,” he claims, including recording studio bills); pay off a neighbor’s $90,000 credit card debt and help her get back into interior design; pay off his policeman friend’s mortgage and set up an education fund for the cop’s 6-year-old daughter; buy an apartment for his cybergeek Peter and pay Peter’s maintenance for five years; and make sure Jimmy the ex-Marine who now subsists on $800/month has sufficient funds for the next five years. He also would spend $15,000 to recondition the piano at the 4th Unitarian Universalist Society that Henry Steinway personally designed. Buy an iMac for the Nepalese student, his waiter at a restaurant, and one for the Pakistanti-Afghan he Emails in Albany, also helping with their tuition. Buy ads for his two books in The New York Review of Books and The New York Times, neither of which has reviewed the books. Send 500 copies of his books to libraries around the world. What for himself? If any is left, the rest could go into his stock portfolio “to short issues until the Bush dynasty leaves Washington.” “Oh,” he said with a smile, “and some catnip for my kittens.”

          He seemed so effervescent I hesitated to tell him I had another appointment, for he looked ready to take me at midnight to an East Village disco where he says he wears a Harley Davidson vest. I promised to look for his article, a book review about Greenwich Village, in a forthcoming Villager, then bade goodbye.

          At a nearby park, I sat on a bench for a while, going over in my mind what had transpired. This interview had been like a whirlwind in a hurricane. He jumps from idea to idea, so it was good to have taped everything, When I arose, I vowed, yes, to be a journalist, particularly when Smith mentioned that The New York Times’ Red Smith (no relation), ex-student Don Souden, and Mike Lupica in New Canaan are or had been his favorites, too.