Deceased September 30, 2015

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50th Reunion Book 

In Memory

Wilson Smith died on Sept. 30. He indeed was a great guy, a distinguished American historian who was seldom able to get back to Amherst reunions, although he once gave a talk there about American historiography. We were good friends but rarely saw each other and sometimes shared news about our families. He and his delightful wife, Kay, lived his last years in an assisted-living facility, although Kay was still playing tennis in 2014. As I recall, Bill for a couple of years or more served as University of California-wide representative of the academic senate to the UC president (all nine campuses).

Sherry Warrick ’44

50th Reunion

Wilson Smith
Since I missed sophomore year and then participated  in the great war of our generation, mypost-war time at Amherst, graduating in June '47 with a few other: weary but persevering vets from '44, brought me close to many members of the two classes behind ours. But I'm proud to belong to '44.  I imagine that Dean  Porter and some professors, on the basis of my enjoyable but scholastically lackadaisical freshman year, would be dismayed to know that I entered upon an academic career. If so, it was only to get even with them. I took graduate degrees at Cal Berkeley and Columbia, taught at Princeton, Johns Hopkins, and then for 26 years here at U.C. Davis.

Wilson Smith
Along the way I've so far put out five books of history and  the usual accretion of Festschrift  essays, articles, and reviews-all pretty boring to the layman but all aimed  at trying to keep up an appearance of professional respectability. Toward the end I chaired the Academic Senate of the University of California and sat with the Regents. Now in blissful retirement I'm thankful for having moved to the valley of California, for having kept friends from Amherst daze, for having found friends in exceptional, talented, and warm people in American academic, corporate, and philanthropic life, and for having been truly lucky after the war to meet at Amherst my lovely Kay (Reed, Smith '49). She constantly brightens my life and that of our daughter and grandchildren.