Cornish
Ten years ago at their father’s wake, a firetruck from the Cambridge, Mass., fire department pulled up to the funeral home and a half dozen officers piled out in dress uniforms. Michael and James Smith’s father, a career firefighter with the Cambridge department, had died at age 70 and his colleagues had come to pay their last respects.
The firefighters began politely chatting with the brothers when Michael Smith mentioned how he once challenged his father in retirement over “how he could just sit on the couch all day in front of the TV, smoking, drinking coffee and do nothing,” James Smith said.
To which, James said, Michael quoted his father as replying: “I was a Cambridge fireman for 40 years. I’m good at it.”
“They all looked at each other and exited in about a minute,” James recalled about the firefighters in dress uniforms. “They never saw it coming. It was ‘Oh, God, Mike, did you really say that?’
“I think that was the result he was looking for,” James laughed. “It was a beautiful moment.”
An ability to easily converse with all who crossed his path, whether they were tradesman or surgeons, mechanics or Hollywood movie stars, while also disdaining the affectations of protocol, was a defining trait of Smith, according to family and friends. Smith, a 30-year Upper Valley resident and plasterer who specialized in historic preservation, died at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center on May 10 due to complications stemming from a six-year battle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He was 61.
“He could talk with anyone,” said his longtime partner Jane Hamlin, of Cornish, an equestrian trainer and event judge. “He had a great smile and wicked sense of humor.”
Indeed, snapshots of Michael Smith invariably show him flashing a toothy grin, raising a glass in a toast or standing with a dog enfolded in his arms, or hamming it up at a work site. Early pictures reveal dark Irish eyes with a hint of the devil, changing to a cherubic countenance in middle age before maturing into a studied craftsman with salt-and-pepper beard.
Tunbridge glass artist Robin Mix, who Smith befriended when they both attended Hampshire College in Massachusetts in the 1970s, remembers he got his first glimpse at Smith’s ability to disarm with the unexpected wisecrack when the two went to check out a Dobro antique guitar offered for sale their freshman year. When the seller mentioned he worked in “construction management,” Smith remarked, “Yeah, my dad always says that’s a great way not to work.”
“I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this is not going to go well, Michael’s really put his foot in it,’ Mix said. “But it would work out great and he could get along with anyone. He had universal appeal.”
The fruits of Smith’s artistic labors at historical plaster restoration can be seen across the Upper Valley, including the Tille Parker Tavern building on the The Green in Woodstock, Enfield Shaker Museum, St. Paul’s Church in Windsor, Claremont Opera House and Church of Christ at Dartmouth College. He also worked on private residences and institutions across New England and the mid-Atlantic states, including at the Chimney Point State Historic Site in Addison, Vt., and at Monmouth University in New Jersey.
Often Smith would work as a subcontract plasterer for such area contractors as Doug Gest Restorations, of Hartland; G.R. Porter, of Norwich; and Clow Construction, of Etna. Smith invariable showed up at a job site with his longtime right-hand man, Dave Spalding, of Windsor, whose work ethic earned Smith’s unstinting admiration and loyalty, friends said.
“He did all our plastering for 25 years,” said contractor Doug Gest, who specialized in historic restorations and historical reproductions of homes before retiring last year. “I can’t tell you how many homes, one or two each year,” said Gest, who remembers the laborious preparation that Smith took in mixing his plaster from lime and mortar while sometimes adding in compounds for coloring.
“Mike could have a very dry sense of humor,” Gest explained. “A lot of times he’d show up at a job site and say ‘OK, I’m going to mess with him,’ ” and lightly make a dry comment as he walked past his target. “Mike had a way of making the job site active and fun with a very good sense of humor.”
Smith, a city kid, seemed an unlikely person to make the Upper Valley his home.
Raised in Cambridge, the oldest son of working class parents — his siblings include a younger sister, Karen McCall, and brother, James — Smith was the captain of his high school football team at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.
Although Rindge and Latin’s roots go back to the 17th century and the school sends a fair portion of graduates to Ivy League schools, Smith’s cohort tended to be “street toughs from East Cambridge” rather than the striving academics, according to James Smith.
Nonetheless, through working in the kitchen at one of Harvard’s undergraduate clubs, Smith found a mentor who saw a creative spark in the sport-loving youth and helped to steer him to Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. At the time, Hampshire was still a new liberal arts college but a popular destination for aspiring artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and actors. One of the first fellow freshman he met at Hampshire was Robin Mix, from South Strafford, who was already showing an interest in the craft and art of glassblowing.
College wasn’t to last long for either: Smith and Mix both withdrew after the second semester of their sophomore year — Mix to Europe to study glassmaking and Smith to New York City to pursue theater.
“We felt the institution no longer had anything to offer us,” said Mix, quoting a line from the movie Raising Arizona when a character explains why she and a compatriot decided to bust out of prison.
Smith won parts in a few plays, typically “typecast as an IRA guy,” said Mix. “I’m not sure he was going to set the world on fire with his acting.”
Yet Smith had the natural storyteller’s ability to inhabit characters, his brother James remembers, and once sent his younger brother a cassette tape he had recorded of himself reciting passages from various plays, including the famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow … full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing” soliloquy in the fifth act of Macbeth when the Scottish general is told that Lady Macbeth has died.
“I can still recite portions of the speech because of that,” said James Smith, a contractor in Hawaii.
Gregarious, outgoing and partial to a good party, Smith embraced the New York demimonde of the young artist’s life, friends and family said, and not without consequences.
“Things got rough in New York,” Mix said, recalling that Smith suffered a broken jaw in an “altercation,” the details of which have been lost to time. “It wasn’t going any place good.”
But New York was also where Smith had his first exposure to the building trades by putting up sheet rock in odd-job construction work he picked up to earn money. Mix said there was a period when Smith was so broke that he was sleeping on a mattress at a mattress factory in Tribeca.
Returning to the Boston area, Smith got hired on a building work crew at a Veteran’s Administration hospital, where he plastered walls and ceilings. Again, however, “feeling he didn’t like the direction things were going,” Mix said, Smith took up an opportunity to move to the rural Upper Valley and to work on property Mix’s mother owned in Vershire.
The property, which the Mix family called “The Kingdom,” had a cabin on it but no running water. Smith’s job was to keep the fields mowed, clear brush, paint, and perform building maintenance and repair. As a sideline, he hired himself out for plastering jobs whenever he could, drawing upon his experience in Boston when he worked in the building trades.
A plastering job at Huntington Farm in South Strafford led the 30-year old Smith to meet a woman who was going to become the biggest influence upon his adult life: Jane Hamlin, 29, was working as a trainer and instructor at the farm, a renowned breeder of Oldenburg sport horses. Smith took an instant liking to the athletic woman from Kennebunk, Maine.
As the daughter of a naval architect and descendent of Hannibal Hamlin, vice president during Abraham Lincoln’s first term, Hamlin had patrician Yankee roots that were a stark contrast to the hard-partying, working-class kid from the rougher side of Cambridge.
“He had a more wild group of friends,” Hamlin said. “He was a partier. I was not.”
Briefly married previously, Hamlin acknowledged the irony of how life does not always follow a plan. “I vowed (the next time) I was going to be with a serious professional person, and here I ended up with a wild person,” she said with a laugh.
In fact, Hamlin helped motivate Smith to mend his ways.
“Jane was the saving of Michael,” Mix said. “He just made the decision to change when he decided to court her.”
And change Michael Smith did. Soon the former New York bargoer was taking ballroom dancing lessons with Hamlin, playing racquetball and getting on skis for the first time to trek in the woods — which they continued to do through the years.
“He was naturally athletic, even though he didn’t have to work at it,” said Hamlin.
As Smith began to build his plastering business, he became increasingly interested in restoration work of historical homes and buildings and learning the specialized techniques required for preservation. He enrolled in workshops offered through Historic Windsor’s Preservation Education Institute to learn about ornamental plaster repair and molding medallions and cornices.
“He had a real knack for it, an artistic gift,” said Judy Hayward, executive director of Historic Windsor.
She remembers a library called Smith for ornamental plaster restoration work immediately after he finished the preservation workshop and he confidently told them he could do the job — even though, unbeknown to the client, he did not yet own the special tools required for the work.
“So he ordered the tools and made his tuition back and then some on his first job,” Hayward said. “I always said he was the poster child of our students.”
Hayward also tells how Smith’s wisecracks could erupt a room into peals of laughter. The Preservation Institute had arranged a gilding workshop with esteemed arts conservationist Deborah Bigelow at the Justin Morrill House in South Strafford.
The British-trained Bigelow can be intimidating, Hayward said, and the class was studiously hushed and concentrating on learning how to apply gold leaf on plaster, when Smith broke the silence by announcing aloud “I can’t wait until I get home and update my resume that I’ve been studying with Deborah Bigelow!”
“That sure cracked everyone up,” Hayward said, who added she thinks Smith’s perfectly-timed joke helped the class, too, because it put students in a relaxed frame of mind and more receptive to learning.
“Mike could tell a joke in just the right way,” she said.
Or with anyone. Despite his humble roots, Smith could socialize with people others might be intimidated to approach, such as the late Hollywood action actor Charles Bronson, who had a home in West Windsor and who he met through Hamlin’s equestrian circles. Another close friend from college, Hollywood movie producer Casey Silver, once invited Smith and Mix to Los Angeles for a movie premiere when Silver was chairman of Universal Pictures, where “we rented a convertible and got really sunburned,” Mix said.
Smith and Hamlin bought an 1830s house in Cornish 20 years ago and, of course, Smith meticulously restored it and built a workshop in the space that had an attached garage. Hamlin said Smith demanded the plastering details always be what he called “HC” — his abbreviation for “historically correct.” The abbreviation became a tease between the couple, as in, “you’re not being HC!”
“Michael was a real perfectionist,” Hamlin said.
In 2010, Smith began to experience night sweats and chills, and a biopsy revealed that he had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. That began a long round of grueling treatments — chemo and then radiation therapy followed by a stem cell transplant and then a bone marrow transplant. Although the treatments were successful in ridding Smith’s body of the cancer cells, the treatments nonetheless led to complications that ultimately left him too weak to overcome, Hamlin said.
When he could, Smith continued to work, even though he would tire easily. Smith could even turn his growing infirmity into humor. Judy Witters, a longtime Norwich resident, was having an old farmhouse restored in Lincoln, Vt., and Smith enthusiastically took on the plaster restoration job, even though he would tire easily.
Witters said her house is situated on land that both area Buddhists and Native Americans consider holds special spiritual properties, specifically “great lines of power” that “all meet in the dining room.” One day she peaked into the dinning room and saw Smith resting on an overturned bucket, looking exhausted. She asked if he was OK.
“Judy, I can’t move,” Witters said Smith replied in exaggerated despair, “The vortex lines have got ahold of my ankles.”
One of Smith’s great joys in his last months was Mia, a floppy and gentle black Labrador/boxer/Rhodesian ridgeback rescue dog that became Smith’s constant companion, crawling up on his lap and tagging along on his treatments at Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital. Mia joined Owen, Hamlin’s longtime chocolate Labrador, and the two dogs became fast pals.
“He wanted a cuddle puppy,” Hamlin said, and together they called Mia Smith’s “therapy dog.”
Yet there was one four-legger that Smith didn’t quite take to as much as Hamlin.
Although Smith often enjoyed traveling with Hamlin around the U.S. and overseas as she judged horse competitions, Smith himself didn’t ride horses.
“He never sat on a horse,” Hamlin said. “That wasn’t him.”
John Lippman can be reached at 603-727-3219 or jlippman@vnews.com.
