American Stories: Mr. Smith Goes Snowshoeing

GREENFIELD - Jim Smith is sitting at the dining room table of his Greenfield home on a frigid January afternoon.

His niece, Mary Ann Lynch, is seated to his right, wife Rose is sitting on a wooden rocking chair to his left. Outside, there is a wind-chill factor of 10 below zero.
‘When I get done here, I’m going to go snowshoeing,’ the 82-year-old Smith announces. His comment barely raises an eyebrow from those around the table.

‘Ten below zero is just a little sample,’ he elaborates. ‘I think about the days when it was 35 or 40 below and going out for a walk in the woods. When it’s cold and the wind is blowing, it brings me back. I feel, ‘Wow, this is like the old days,’ you know?’

In his lifetime, Smith has been a woodsman and a mink rancher, a musician, a family man,
and a U.S. Marine who saw action in the South Pacific in the 1940s. Now he is a first-time author. His debut book, ‘Jim Smith’s American Stories,’ is the story of his life.

Smith’s intention was to document his life as a matter of family record. ‘I wrote the book to let people know what we went through in those years,’ he says. Smith’s niece sees the book as more than a family memoir.

‘This is the true story of an American son. One that is not a celebrity, who is not famous,’
says niece Mary Ann Lynch, who co-authored the book.
‘Uncle Jim has a vivid imagination for specific little details and he tells them in a way a storyteller tells a good story,’ says Lynch, an internationally published writer and photographer. She sees the book as an important link to a colorful past.

‘People in my generation were fortunate enough to grow up in the presence of our grandparents,’ says Lynch, pointing out an authentic Slovak bonnet given to her by her Grandma Bruhac. ‘We have been influenced by our ancestry. They were that direct link to another kind of experience, one very foreign to us.’

Smith penned the tale over several years and then handed it over to Lynch for revision.
‘I just sat down and started to write,’ says Smith of the process. ‘The more I wrote, the more all these things came to mind. I just kept adding the things that I thought would be enjoyable, or something that people who were living at the time could relate to.’

Smith was born in Passaic, N.J., approximately 10 miles from the Hudson River at a time when the George Washington Bridge was being built. At the age of 10, the family visited his aunt’s summer home in Greenfield, an area where the Smiths would eventually put down roots.
As Rose, his wife of 57 years looks on, Smith pulls a picture of his mother and father out of his wallet. It is the same picture he carried with him during battles on land and sea in the 1940s.
‘My father was a World War I veteran and after he was injured, he used to get a veteran’s compensation check,’ Smith remembers.

When the family found a home in Greenfield, Smith’s father purchased it for $500.
‘He used to get $32 or $34 a month from his veteran’s compensation check and you paid so much a month on the house, until it was paid in full. The house was a real Godsend
to have during the Depression,’ he says.
‘Not too many years later, my father got sick but we had a place to come to. We didn’t owe anything to anyone and we had a place to live.’

Smith’s love of music has also been a lifelong companion. ‘My mind goes back 60 years when I used to play and sing for the guys in Guam,’ Smith recalls. His guitar went everywhere with him.

‘When I was in Guadalcanal, I made a cover to protect the guitar and then when we went
ashore in Guam I tied it to the front of the tank,’ he laughs.
‘It probably should have been tied to the back where it wouldn’t get hit, but it came through all right - didn’t have a scratch on it.’

In 1950, Smith was part of the musical group The Frontiermen, who performed, among other places, on the Arthur Godfrey Talent Show on the then-new medium of television. Recently,
he has appeared at the annual Western Music Festival in Arizona, one of the hand-picked musicians on an international bill attended by music fans from around the world.

There are more than 500 pages and 40 illustrations woven into Smith’s ‘American Stories.’
The book traces some extraordinary lives of the ordinary people from what has been called the Greatest Generation. Some of the more intense moments come from the life-and-death battles in the Pacific during the 1940s.
Smith was a young man then, one of many who were thousands of miles away from home, who suddenly found themselves in harm’s way. ‘Condition Black! Japanese invasion imminent!’ shouted a commander.

‘The feeling amongst everybody at that time was: ‘Nothing is going to happen to me. I’m going to be all right. I’m not going to get killed.’
And you carried that with you,’ Smith says. ‘I was a mechanic. Our tanks would go in first to mark out any pillboxes. Then the infantry would come behind and I would move in with them. That’s when you realize: Hey, these guys mean business. They’re trying to kill me. That’s when you wake up; when you’re walking in the water and see all the people laying face down and there’s shrapnel flying all around you,’ says Smith, his eyes are fixed on a distant point far away.

‘I can still hear that shrapnel and steel flying in the air that would cut off your legs if it hit you, or worse. Your mind is in shock. You can’t really understand what’s happening around you. Well, you know what’s happening, but it does not sink in that you could be dead in a minute, or maimed, or shot up really bad. And when you see people that are hit you remember what you’ve been told: just get yourself ashore. Get a-shore,’ Smith says.

‘When I close my eyes I can still see that man standing on a barrel, holding a megaphone and hollering at the top of his lungs: Don’t bunch up on the beach! Because people would unconsciously bunch up together. They figured if they were in a group, somebody else might
get hit but not them. See, that’s what they thought. And I thought the same thing.
You couldn’t help but think it,’ Smith says.

‘And as I’m walking ashore, I still had that feeling - Ah, nothing’s going to happen to me - and it never did. It came close, very close. And I saw things that you don’t really want to know about, but my attitude is: I’m going to survive this,’ Smith recalls.

‘You know, I often imagine what my last day on earth is going to be like. Because that’s still my attitude, that I’m going to survive this,’ laughs Smith before excusing himself from the table.
The weather, he says, is perfect and he’s going snowshoeing.

by Thomas Dimopoulos
published in The Saratogian Jan. 27, 2004.