A large circle of friends lost somebody special this month.

Eddie Smith started out as a punk kid in a tough DC neighborhood and wound up a university professor, a great teacher, a prolific writer and the most colorful man I ever met. In his youth, he was known to local cops for the wrong reasons. His friend Petey Greene was a brash talker and Eddie said they were sometimes “arrested” and taken to the precinct on slow nights just because the cops got a kick out of Greene’s orations. [Greene later had a radio show and a TV show on a local channel. I loved his rants about DC government being staffed entirely by “GS minus ones”].

Eddie decided to leave the street nonsense behind and took a job as a janitor at American University. He told me that he decided back then that if he had to be a janitor he would be the best janitor there was. The floors gleamed, faculty offices were dust-free, anything metal got polished. People noticed. A professor sought him out to compliment him and they became friends. The professor supervised a great books education for Eddie.  Eventually the former janitor became a faculty member, a lecturer in Russian history.

Eddie wrote op-ed’s for the old Evening Star newspaper.  Conservative on social issues, more interested in character than ideology, he was always a good read.  He also regularly taught some classes in the private high school in DC where I went to work shortly after leaving the Army. The faculty lunch room conversations should have been recorded for posterity. I miss those. Eddie was the actual guy that Hollywood screenwriters kept trying to create in roles for Louis Gossett Jr.—a tough, funny black man molding privileged white boys into better men. I know men now in their 50s and 60s who still talk about Eddie’s classes.

Eddie was deeply disappointed by DC black politicians. He said that there had been a hope, an expectation that when DC was finally run by elected black leaders then so much could change and so many visions fulfilled. The corruption and incompetence of Marion Barry and the larger failure in urban America was a blow to many accomplished black men and women who had shared that vision.

Eddie often attended social events in the “Black Gold Coast”, the upscale neighborhood up 16^th street and by Rock Creek with many lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs. He noticed that many had developed subtle verbal cues to signal that they had achieved success before and without affirmative action.  Eddie was a sharp observer and often shared insights about how very different was African-American experience, including the intense concern about how they were perceived even within their own social circles.

He got a kick out of changing the tone when it was needed. The high school once had a fund-raiser social at a suburban country club. Upon arrival, Eddie theatrically looked around in feigned awe at the plush surroundings and said “Damn, white people, you probably have all kinds of fancy sh*t like this tucked way out here, don’t ya. We’re never gonna catch up with y’all.” And then Prof. Smith paused, smiling mischievously, then emitted his patented booming laugh and changed the entire gathering for the better as he did often.

Eddie, you were one of a kind and a gift. Thank you. It was an honor.