Willard Smith
Sex: M
Individual Information
Birth: 12 May 1912 - philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Christening:
Death: 20 Jun 1969 - Upper Darby, Delaware, Pennsylvania
Burial:
Cause of Death: Heart attack
AFN #:
Parents
Father: William Henry Smith Jr. (1879-1942)
Mother: Bessie Mae Moore (1884-1946)
Spouses and Children
1. *Elizabeth Schlice ( - 20 Jun 1969)
Marriage:
Status:
Children:
1. Stephen Smith (1939-1986)
2. Mary Jane ( - )
Marriage:
Status:
Notes
General:
He had an intense and volatile personality, and died at age 57 of a heart attack. He was a physically heavy, though not obese, man, with a waistline that suggested metabolic syndrome, which came down to all of my father's children, and which causes 40% of all cardiovascular disease. My father avoided it by eating only the right oils and little refined sugar, watching his weight, and excercising. It is not hard to avoid dying of a genetic tendency to metabolic syndrome, but noone in their time understood it. I have heard multiple suggestions that he had a drinking problem. For one thing, his mother thought it was responsible for his "pot belly", which is actually a sign of metabolic syndrome aggravated by any high carbohydrate diet.
I don’t actually know much about Willard; only a couple of negative things that have been repeatedly told to me by a number of people with a high degree of consistency, that were probably symptoms of mental illness that was shared by his father and brother, and that his family was very unfair to him. The fact that his parents and my father scapegoated him for being more normal than they were damaged the relationship between the brothers, and caused my father to have nothing specific good to say about his brother. The few things he did say come across as very distorted. Thus, what I have to say about Willard must necessarily be more about the state of things in that family. It is important that Willard’s descendants should know the history of this situation, though its logical consequence is that they want little to do with us. I do know, however, that the problems came on down in Willard’s descendants as well as my father’s, and that it sounded like Stephen’s granddaughter Lisa knows about Willard pretty much what I do.
His granddaughter says he had an intense temperament and drank alot, and his mother said he drank alot. Though both of their parents and most of their relatives on both sides died in middle age of strokes and heart disease, Willard was the only one who my father believed was killed by his temperament. As tellingly, both their father, and my father, had Willard's temperament, and my father repeatedly held his father's rigidity and violent temper up as an example of parental normalcy.
My father tells one telling story about his brother's temperament; he beat the spirit out of my brother for throwing tantrums when he was two years old, because he thought he was taking after his brother! Obviously my father thought that that gene skipped over him on its way to from his brother, who he must have thought slept with my mother, since even though Willard's destructive temperament was genetic, both my father and his father were completely normal and didn't have the destructive gene.
One of my father's examples to me of his father's normalcy was that his father once hit him, because my father, who was 16 when the family left Philadelphia, had decided to explore the "dirty old" Philadelphia trolley car system. "When my father heard about it, he just about had a heart attack. Why would anyone want to ride around on those dirty old trolley cars?" I thought my father, a violent man who threw me around the room if he thought I thought the same thing, seemed normal by comparison. My father’s friends, Marshall and Helen Greason, told me other stories my father had also told me. However, my father thought he was describing a normal man, and everyone else thought they were describing a violent, scary man.
My father said that at one point Willard got involved with a gang, and his father beat the daylights out of him with his belt. Cousin Dorothy knew Willard well and saw a lot of him during that time and does not share my father’s perception that Willard was headed for serious trouble. She thought he was a perfectly normal, outgoing boy, who stood out in a family of recluses, and she thought my father, who spent all his time holed up with books, wouldn’t play with others, and wouldn’t join the family for dinner, was the one with something wrong with him. It is not unlikely that Willard got into perfectly ordinary teenaged trouble, and we do not know that it was serious gang activity. His father overreacted so badly that Willard ended up graduating from military school. The story continued; my father always claimed that Willard blamed his family for sending my father to college and not Willard, and my father’s explanations of how that set of choices really happened never added up. It looks more like Willard was scapegoated by his family
My father's second cousin Dorothy often visited teh family, and hung out with Willard. She was midway in age between Willard and my father. She told me that teh family was rigid, formal, and authoritarian, but she herself had been raised to expect for instance, that children would sit through the formal Smith household dinner in silence, never daring to speak, and didn't find that in itself greatly amiss. However, she immediately realized something was wrong with the family's social habits.
It is important to fully understand what this family found normal, and what it expected of its children, and what Willard's and my father's parents would have been thinking. My father’s best friends when he was in college remained close, and became my godparents. They said to me, his Aunt Irma tried to encourage him to have "more of a social life", "but you know, Dora, how it is when your parents don't back you up." This was a serious understatement. My godparents knew that until I was 16 I was allowed off our own property only for school, church, and girlscout meetings (not any other scout events); I wasn't allowed to visit other kids, nor to take walks, and I wasn't allowed out of the house at night to date or visit kids my own age even when I was 18 and in college. I was required to live at home and attend the community college. My father was my high school prom date. Violations of the rules and any backtalk were punished with beatings.
The reasons provide insight into the underlying mental illness in this family. I wasn't allowed to go for walks, according to my father, because people in our tiny village of 800 people where we had lived since I was two years old, where my father was pastor of the Episcopal church, and where I was widely recognized to be a good and well behaved and rather passive child, would think I was a prostitute. I wasn't allowed out of the house at night when in college, except for evening classes, because "I'm responsible, and something might happen". I actually began seriously planning to move out, after consulting with a counsellor at the college, after one night my mother beat me hard for going to bed with wet hair because she was convinced I'd die of pneumonia. My father threw me around the room for having liberal ideas because my wrong thinking could unglue the entire social order. I was always spanked for such infractions as spilling the milk, partly because my parents flew off the handle at everything, especially my mother with one of her bouts of depression, and partly because if I wasn't severely punished for even minor infractions I would grow up to be bad, and my parents would have failed in their duty. It was constantly stressed to me that the other kids at school, even the quiet, well behaved granddaughter of the Baptist minister whose mother quite properly called my mother to invite me to their house, were a bad influence. In addition, my parents found the sheer logistics of driving me the two or three miles to her house too overwhelming to handle.
My sister, who had much more normal parents and a much more normal childhood, had the same problem. She was not allowed to walk the half mile between our home and school after dark, in upstate New York in the winter it gets dark at 4 PM, and my parents found the task of going to get her from a half mile away just too difficult to manage, so to participate in her sports activities, she had to continually beg rides from parents of her teammates who really found it impossible to understand. Equally hard to understand was that my parents seldom went to watch my sister's basketball and whatever games, which my sister clearly understood was some combination of not important enough and too difficult, to drive a half mile to watch my sister's highschool basketball game - and then drive my sister home. She was hurt by it. By this time I had made my escape, and my parents and I were having as little to do with each other as possible. My sister, a quiet, highly intelligent, well behaved and extremely responsible teenager even more determined to have a future than I was, said our parents drove her so bonkers she tried drugs, and nearly ran away, and they were actually letting her have friends and a life! Another thing that drove her particularly crazy was that while she did not receive the physical abuse I had, she was subjected to the same constant heavy barrage of criticism. As children, my siblings and I often were told we had grievously messed up, for instance by spilling the milk, and seldom seemed to be able to get it right, and never for very long, and our entire worth as people was measured from one minute to the next by whether we had most recently gotten it right. This left my sister as an adult with an ego made of swiss cheese; soft, and full of holes, on top of a full scale bipolar temperament. My sister is never wrong, and she always perceives any suggestion that she might be wrong about anything at all or even not know something, as a direct attack, and her porcupine quills start flying. Some things about Willard leave me wondering if his ego was also made of swiss cheese.
Once my father finally got it through his skull that I'd left home and didn't still belong to him, which came close to taking a court fight when I was 22, he barely spoke to me again. He described me to my brother and sister, and to me when I was around to hear it, as just another dangerous member of the dangerous world. My father thought the world was a dangerous place, and he was terrified of it, and carefully isolated his family from it. The boundaries between our family and the rest of the world were thick, and rigid. All of his life, my father looked forward to leaving it to rejoin God in Heaven. Most of the things that went on in my parents' minds make exactly the same sort of sense as my obsessive fears that my food was poisoned and that I'd go to hell for thinking the Lord's name backwards, if I didn't do a long difficult ritual to undo the bad thought. My parents had mental illness, and weren't thinking with all their marbles. My mother outright had bouts of depression, that may have been far more serious than she let on.
My therapist, years ago, thought that my father was probably emotionally damaged by the violent and troubled atmosphere it was becoming apparent from the things he'd said to me and the things I was learning from asking people who knew him as a child, existed in his parents' home. My father was sensitive, anxious and quiet by nature, and he withdrew.
My father also said that Willard never forgave the rest of the family for his parents' decision to send my father to college but not him. He said that at the point when Willard reached college age, the Great Depression had hit and the family had no money. This always frankly sounded to me like an excuse for slighting Willard, and even before I knew more of the family history, and there is real reason to doubt that the reason why Willard was not sent to college was that the family could not afford to send him.
In fairness it must be pointed out that my father had spent his first year of highschool learning an industrial trade before his father got a job and he was switched to the college prep track and repeated 10th grade, despite the fact that my grandfather was a bank executive, and the head of Philadelphia's entire charity network was his minister and his close personal friend. My own parents were anxious, pessimistic people by nature, who wouldn't commit me to college without knowing in advance where the money would come from, and also that my father claims that he was only able to go to college because there was a college in the city where the family lived at the time, and he was able to live at home.
However, I question whether their father had lost his job yet when Willard was of age to go to college, and to what degree the family's finances were affected to that degree at that time. Willard actually graduated from high school atleast six months before the stock market crashed, so the state of the economy and job situation did not figure into plans for his education. My grandfather's bank failed, but not until atleast several years later, and he used his contacts to get a job with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. Since they did not move out of their nice expensive house at that time, it cannot be true that they had fallen on hard times at that point. The period when the family's circumstances required the move from Philadelphia to cheaper though still nice quarters in Upper Darby did not occur until 1934, which is when Willard married, and it lasted for less than a year. It was during this year that my father, in tenth grade at the time, was put into the industrial training program because his parents didn't think they would be able to send him to college. It is very consistent with the timeline of family economic circumstances that they doubted at this time that they could send my father to college. It makes sense in a way that the earlier claim that they couldn't afford to send Willard to college does not. When they told my father they didn't think they could send him to college, they were also doing other things consistent with the notion that they didn't have much money, like moving to a cheaper neighborhood. When my grandfather got a new job as a vice president of a bank a year later, my father repeated tenth grade in the college prep program. Since my father's father was making good money as a bank executive when he atleast started college, I do not believe that his being able to live at home played a role in the decision to send my father to college; further, as my father points out, there were plenty of colleges in Philadelphia where the family lived when Willard was in his last year of high school, and when he would have been in his first year of college. It is conceivable and not unlikely that my father's parents were as reluctant to let him out of their sight when he was 18 years old as mine were; however, Willard could also have lived at home and attended college nearby. What is more, Willard's parents could have paid Willard's college tuition in order for him to attend classes at a later date, if they had wanted to do so. The family did not devalue education; my father's grandfather had put his two older boys through college and moved to Philadelphia after selling his share of the family farm, so that his middle son could pursue medical studies. My father's oldest uncle had been an attorney, a Delaware state representative, and a member of the Delaware Board of Education, and his aunt's husband was a successful attorney in Philadelphia. What is more, my father wrote his parents' home was full of shelves full of books that he was encouraged to read. There was no such selling the family's nice house and moving to someplace cheaper to get the money to send Willard to college if indeed that had been the only way to raise the money. In fact, tehre was no tightening of the family monetary belt at all when they allegedly couldn't afford to send Willard to college. The picture is consistently one of failure to value Willard.
My father writes a slightly different account of Willard's college decisions than he told me years before he wrote this.
"He attended Staunton Military acadamy for one year. (One can see my grandfather thinking that would straighten out his outgoing teenaged ways.) He wanted to go to college. But the Depression changed alot of plans. He was interested in dentistry. And at some point he wanted to study to be an architect. There were colleges in Philadelphia, but he kept working at a job. He may have been helping out the family. His further education was a series of night school courses. He became a CPA. After working with an insurance firm in the city, he joined a partner in a real estate company and later he had his own real estate business on State Road, near Edmunds Avenue, a few blocks form where we had lived. His marriage to Betty Schless took place at teh bride's home shortly before we moved to Carlisle."
That Willard was sent to military school tells us that his home life was extremely abusive and outright hell, and pretty much clears up any doubts about why Willard’s parents did not send him to college. That my father mentions this in passing only in a different discussion about Willard's career plans supports thinking he didn't tell the whole story. I also imagine that Willard got as far away as possible from that family as he could as soon as he could, if my father saw him act less than interested in pursuing the matter with his parents.
In other words, Willard found his niche, and got himself further education appropriate to that career path; and the resentment about the failure of his parents to send him to college was not about college, it was about his parents' rejection of him and favoritism toward my father.
It also isn't the case that Willard's failure to have decided what he wanted to do with his life when it was time to send him to college, accounts for the failure to send him to college. My father has always admitted that he himself drifted through college, taking whatever classes happened to interest him from one semester to the next - which led to enough classes in Philosophy that when my father and his advisers sat down and added up his courses, he ended up declaring a major in Philosophy. Philosophy?! My father no more had a specific career path in mind at the time for starting college, then Willard did. My father hadn't even put as much thought into it as Willard had. If he hadn't happened while he was in college to get very involved in a church and develop a serious interest in religious life, he'd have drifted after graduation exactly the way my brother and I have. Actually, while he was attending college, and very involved in his best friends' church, my father worked in his best friend's cobbler shop. He worked there consistently, year after year, he completely learned the shoemaking trade, he proved to be good at it, and he enjoyed it greatly. During a period when his friend was very ill, he actually ran the shoemaking shop, which at that time had a good number of employees. He proved to be capable at that, as well. If my father had not decided to go into religious life, it is very likely that he would have quite happily spent the rest of his life as a cobbler. In time, the friend was forced, probably by the economics of shoemaking, to give up the cobbler shop, adn went into carpentry - but my father has always shown real talent and skill at carpentry and picked up enough training to make fine furniture for his home, and to build his own house with his wife and children holding up the boards and painting. The house, built 30 years ago and kept up, is simple but attractive, in good shape, and assessed at more than $100,000. Not there would have been shame in my father becoming a shoemaker or a carpenter, but there was no justifiable reason to send him to college and not Willard. While my father was drifting toward a career making shoes as a college degree in philosophy was handed to him, Willard, who had found a niche in the business world, was, while working full time and supporting a family, working his own way through school to be a CPA.
Actually, when I was in community college, I questioned whether I belonged in college, and was advised by everyone around me that few college students know what they want to do, that my specific choice of a major would probably actually make little difference in my employability, but if I didn't go ahead and get my college degree I probably never would, because it is hard to return to school, and hard to attend school while working for a living and raising a family, and few people ever do (if Willard's family just supposed he should be an exception to that). Now n middle age, I see many people around me sending their kids to college and hardly any saying their kids have a clue what they want to do when they finish, or even next month. It is not unusual that their parents have to decide for them what they are going to do tomorrow. Decisons to send a child to college are not usually based on the child having a clear career path in mind.
Like a great many things my father wrote and said, this statement communicates the most by what it leaves out, and by the fact the he mentions it at all without any reason that is apparent in the story he tells ot have explained this. There is a glaring logical inconsistency. When Willard's parents decided whether to send him to college, not only were they not poor, but Willard was in highschool, or rather in military school in an attempt to convert him into a timid withdrawn mouse like my father the favored son; not working, not a CPA, and not married.
My father does wrote that Willard became "a fine businessman and a person of integrity". "My father said to me on the day that I was graduated from Dickinson that he was glad both of his boys turned out well. I mention that for WIllard. ... I believe that our parents thought the world of him. But I am very touched that the family had a tender spot for me also."
That is pure bull excrement; my father was his parents' favorite, and Willard was the family scapegoat. It is not, however, unlikely that it was genuinely new news to my father that his father had a tender spot for him and thought well of him. His father maintained a great deal of distance from "the boy", and was the original parent not involved in his son's life. He was rigid and authoritarian, and cared that my father behaved well, didn't ride on dirty subway trains, and that sort of thing, but he did not care to know his friends nor the members of the new church that my father joined in college. My father's best friend from age 15 until he died, was ever in my father's house only once or twice.
Besides that, my father had a tender spot for me, too, but little use for me, and less respect, and his tender feelings basically revolved around him, and had little to do with me.
The only real strike I've seen or heard against Willard is his photographs. He does not look like someone I'd trust very far. He smiles wrong, he always too smug, and he is always wearing a popular working class hairstyle, and in casual photographs he was always either clearly trying to be the life of a party, or showing off "his" woman or his nice car, with a showing off my nice possessions attitude. My mother used to have other photos, that she got rid of because she didn't care for Willard and saved relatively few Smith family photos, that portray Willard between childhood and middle age; at one point he had heavy dark brown hair and glasses with thick dark rims; he came across as too nerdish and intense to be someone I would trust. All of the pictures are consistent with my mother's view that Willard liked to be the life of a party. My mother never met Willard when he was not visiting other people or attending a party. Contributing to my discomfort is the fact that when I was eight years old, my parents had a pair of good friends whose children had serious problems at home, and the guy looked pretty much like Willard. I wonder what the basis of my father's attraction to him was. Dead in his coffin, Willard looked like possibly a nice man, and that is the only time I ever met him.
It is also clear that Willard picked up a bit too much of popular culture; a working class hairstyle out of place in an upper middle class man, a smug expression that looks like it belongs on a mafiaso, and an apparent prediliction to show off "his" woman, and his nice car. Maybe he picked up too much from his companions and the popular culture because his parental role models were not people he trusted and found reliable, and he distrusted their views or outright misunderstood them. A child's entire world is shaped by how he sees his parents act. My parents tried to teach me well and in many ways they did, but there is considerable amount I could have learned from them if they'd been more stable and less abusive. I knew by the time I was four that most people little resembled my parents and I wanted to be like those other people. I was a teenager during the Vietnam War, and anything at all that had to do with conservatism or tradition, and community life, I thought was about my father's, Republicans' and the National Guard's common love of controlling people, and kicking butt, and our small village's love of being extremely vicious to a few select people, namely my entire family, which I thought, because I read all kinds of socially rebellious literature, was a typical tendency of human communities, and a life all Republican patriots like my father aspire to. It is very likely that most of the people Willard really knew were his street pals, and his parents, and he otherwise knew what he read, or saw in the movies. He evidently wanted to be a good man, but who taught him how, and how did he understand the lessons?
While I generally like Willard’s father because in general he was so much like me, Willard’s development was probably affected by the fact that his father had a not nice streak about him, that seemed to emerge in social settings with other people. My grandfather was ever seen by mortal man in the company of others only with family members and in connection with his career, but the latter required him to participate in Rotary Club activities. A photo of him at a Rotary Convention betrays a Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde like transformation. He did not look like a nice man at all. If Willard took up with gang members and sometimes came across like a Mafiosi, one has to wonder how much of that sort of behavior his father led him to think was normal and good.
Also, I picked up hook line and sinker both my parents' misshapen patterns of caring what went on around them and of handling life's problems, and their pronounced tendency to push people around in order to make sure the right thing happens, that being basically far more important than the people themselves. It's even critical to make sure people think the right thing, because only an irresponsible person with a character defect would fail to accomplish that, which requires winning every argument, if necessary by beating the other side into submission. From what I have heard, it is very likely that Willard learned exactly the same lessons.
It is clear that though he was probably troubled and probably learned too much of how to be from the wrong friends and too little at home, the wild, out of control, disastrously troubled young man his family characterized him as would not have put himself through "night school" to become a CPA. Willard demonstrated that he was a basically responsible kid, and he had ambition and strength of character. In fact, it can't have been easy for a working man with a family to attend college at night, and to do his studying. He worked very hard, and kept it up until he reached his goal. His parents sold him short. They kept on selling him short, both his parents and my father, my father saying consistently that he never troubled himself to put himself through college, just drifted from one job to another, attended a little night school, and groused that his parents wouldn't send him to college.
Actually, a four year college degree is required to take the exam for the CPA license, and a high grade point average is required to gain actual employment in the field. Today it's a four year degree, it may once have required only a two year degree, and it was a degree of some sort in that time or Willard would not have been attending school. A two year or technical degree is still a college degree. What is more, I think the greater effort Willard put into obtaining that degree tips the college balance toward Willard.
The withdrawn and socially anxious streak in my family is strongly genetic, and Willard might have overcompensated for it. Some of what comes across at me in his photos is consistent with my mother's view that he liked to be the life of a party, and if that were fundamentally inconsistent with how he really felt, it would not have come across well. It does not help that he may have tried to help his efforts by drinking too much. Their father, who people in Carlisle strongly and consistently told me was ever seen in human company only in the context of work, came across in photos of him with his business fraternal order brothers as a completely different, and very nasty, person, than he did when photographed in any other context. My father involved with other people was also capaple of morphing into Dr. Hyde. Experience in life as well as alot of reading about child abuse, has taught me that when an overanxious man fails to even face and makes that kind of an effort to conceal that side of his character, that alone is a good logical reason to distrust him. A man like that is a coward, usually possessed of a swiss cheese ego, capable of being very nasty when he can get away with it, and he will mistreat people he has power over. I have never known this to not be true, and I've seen it repeatedly. It doesn't necessarily stop people from being very ambitious and accomplishing something in life; in fact, often people who don't know them very well have alot of respect for them. Lisa let on that her own father was traumatized by his father, and I don't know a single further detail, except that it sound like people around him were afraid of him.
I'd like to have liked Willard, since we have so much in common, and I have alot of sympathy for him, but I have real doubts whether I would have cared for him, and I wonder how long my sympathy would have lasted if I had known him. My father clearly also was the product of a very abusive family, and I am too turned off by his cowardice to have much sympathy for him. My father would never face nor admit to a personal fault or shortcoming, nor to his own role in his many conflicts with other people. It was always someone else's fault. He never had any interest in mending his relationship with me. I always felt he'd have gotten much further if he'd had the basic courage to be honest with himself. I know that dogs can be beaten into becoming cowards, and I've also often had alot of sympathy for child abusers from a distance, but I've always felt more like cowardice is a choice one makes and can unmake. The child abusers I have sympathy for from a distance have usually found enough courage, or else cared enough, to take responsibility for their actions.
It must be said that even though I don't know the full story, it is no more likely that Stephen learned pronounced Smith famly traits that make a good and decent man from his father if he did not have them, than that Stephen's daughter Lisa learned those traits if her father did not have them. It must also be said that my father was both in many ways a good and decent man, and a man who a child alone with and dependent on him could not trust, partly because he had a serious cowardly streak.