HENRY H. SMITH

BAR HARBOR – Henry H. Smith, 86, a former newspaper man and federal information officer died Dec. 28, 2003, at MDI Hospital. Mr. Smith and his wife, Priscilla, lived in Bar Harbor where they moved for health reasons in September 2000. Previously they had lived in retirement for 19 years in the town of Mount Desert. Mr. Smith enjoyed a wide circle of friends among the Footloose Friends, a group that hikes weekly the mountains and woodland trails of Mount Desert Island. He often described the Friends as a totally unofficial organization – no dues, no membership requirements, no fuss. All you do is show up each Tuesday morning at 9:30 ready for a healthful walk. The group was founded by the late Maurice “Gus” Crews of Southwest Harbor in the late 1970’s and Mr. Smith agreed to lead the group after Gus’ death in March 1982. Mr. Smith retired to MDI in December 1981 after 17 years with the U.S. Bureau of the Census, first as assistant Chief and then Chief of the Bureau’s Information Office. In the latter role, he was responsible for public release of statistical results of all the Bureau’s census – population and housing, agriculture, state and local governments, and retail and wholesale trade, industry and mining activities; as well as the Bureau’s many special surveys. The population census is required by the U.S. Constitution as a basis for distributing U.S. House seats among the states. He was born Dec. 16, 1917, in Springfield, Mass., the second of four sons of Leonard F. and Isabelle G. (Hogan) Smith. Educated in the Springfield public schools, Mr. Smith went on to Brown University in Providence, R.I., where he earned an A.B. in English Literature in 1940. Following graduation into the last gasp of the Great Depression, he landed a job, after a six-month search, as a cub reporter with the Waterbury, Conn. Republican-American. He moved up to the police beat; one murder, many fires, many more car accidents and a weather story when the weather called for one. Later, he served as a magazine supplement writer in the paper. In the fall of 1943, he went to New York to work for the Associated Press as a photo editor. While he did learn the art of Associated Press news caption writing and the surroundings in the A.P. Rockefeller Center headquarters were attractive, he found that news caption writing, (an amateur statistician, he was averaging 55 captions daily cut on stencils) lacked a scope for which he was searching. So, in the fall of 1944, he took a job as a writer in the public relations department of the General Motors Corporation’s Eastern Aircraft Division in Linden, N.J. Here, he and a colleague turned out a history of the company. The colleague did the text and Mr. Smith did the captions and copy editing. Being classed 4-F in the draft he was sought after by employers who didn’t have to be concerned about a draft exemption for him. But, this was not newspapering, and when in early 1945, when Mr. Smith was offered a job as Sunday writer and makeup artist at the Providence Journal, he took it. Then he spent 12 productive years turning out a satisfying body of writing and getting a thorough grounding in many aspects of newspapering with a first-rate daily paper. He went to Washington in the summer of 1957 as an information specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service, much of his Providence Journal writing was in scientific fields, where he obtained a good overview of U.S. agriculture. Then in early 1964, he embraced an opportunity for advancement at the Census Bureau. Mr. Smith is survived by his wife of the home; a son, Parker F. Smith of Toronto, Canada; a daughter, Betsy Y. Smith of Bar Harbor; a daughter, Lucy A. Tracy, of the town of Mount Desert; two grandsons, Christopher H. Tracy of Houston, Texas, and Daniel P. Tracy of Maui, Hawaii; a brother, Robert P. Smith and his wife, Jean, of Apex, N.C.; and several nephews and nieces. Services of remembrance will be held 11 a.m. Friday, Jan. 2, 2004, at the Somesville Union Meeting House, U.C.C. with the Rev. Victor Stanley officiating. Interment will be at Brookside Cemetery, Mount Desert. Following the interment, friends are invited to the Somesville Parish House for refreshments. In lieu of flowers, contributions in Henry’s memory may be made to the Southwest Harbor Public Library, P.O. Box 157, Southwest Harbor, ME 04679. Arrangements by Fernald Funeral Chapel, Mount Desert.