Cliff in his Navy uniform at the age of 17.
By Zelpha Williams-Smith
There has never been anything ordinary about Cliff Smith. When he was born on January 18, 1927, he weighed in at fifteen pounds, three ounces, and to this day continues to do everything in his own unusual and unique way.
“I was so large I could have come out and started walking to school right away,” Cliff says now with his usual easy sense of humor. “Maybe babies were just bigger back then.”
During those days, doctors still made house calls in Schenectady, New York, so Cliff squirmed into the world directly in his parent’s bedroom. His mother, Pauline VanBumble-Smith, and his father, Clifford “Senior” Smith, had little time to celebrate the birth of their second son. The couple had already decided to pack up all of their belongings and make a dramatic move to Wala Wala, Washington. Within six weeks, they set off on the road, but they never made it beyond the border of New York City. Although unemployment was not clearly on the rise yet, when Senior was offered a job as a journeyman electrician he couldn’t very well say no. While others were not fairing as well, his sought-after skills earned him the first of many high-paying positions.
His initial place of employment in New York City was at the site of the construction of the Empire State Building. In later years, Cliff, Jr., would remember climbing the scaffolding where his father worked like “a monkey and with no fear at all of the ground at least a thousand feet below.”
When Senior won the coveted Governor’s Craftsman Award for developing a “hot hoist” designed to carry materials and men more than 100 floors to the top of the building, it was his young son Cliff who would proudly carry his award with him into an electrical career of his own. Always an innovator, Senior would also instill creativity in Cliff that would last throughout the remainder of each of their lives.
During the 1930s, Manhattan was a very large city, but Cliff remembers it as fun, friendly, and clean. He lived with his family on the 23rd floor of an apartment building that looked out over Thirty-Third Street and Third Avenue.
From the onset of his attendance in elementary school in 1933, Cliff walked six blocks to and from school each day alone. The elementary school building, PS115, encompassed a full city block and had four sets of doors opening out onto the city streets. Each side of the building was identical. On his very first day of school, Cliff was admitted to the school on the west side, but let out through the door on the east side for his lunch break. At six years old, he reasoned that if he continued to walk straight ahead long enough he would eventually come to the apartment he had left just that morning. Finally, after walking through block after block of unfamiliar neighborhoods, he boldly confided to a passerby that he couldn’t find his way back home. The Good Samaritan generously guided Cliff in the opposite direction to where his worried mother waited.
The school was many stories high and housed at least 1,500 students. Since New York City was considered to be at the forefront of early education, unlike many other schools during that time the classes were separated into grades first through sixth. Huge high windows marked each story of the steam-heated building. Bars lined the windows on the outside so that no one could accidentally fall through one of the thick glass panes. This was a comfortable time in Cliff’s life. Walks through the city everyday were punctuated by glances into shops boasting candy and cream sodas, and meat markets with large slabs of beef and bacon hanging at the end of heavy chains.
During the mid-1930s, Cliff’s father became concerned that the ever-deepening Depression would become worse and food and creature comforts even more scarce, so he decided to move his family to Sharon, Connecticut, and started commuting to his job in New York City. In Sharon, the family raised their own animals and vegetables and was able to have food during the Depression when many others did not.
At eight years old, Cliff and his brother were responsible for rising well before dawn to milk cows, slop hogs, feed chickens and then walk many miles to school. Before the sun began to brighten the early morning sky, he and his brother dressed and ate a “first breakfast” consisting of sourdough muffins and fruit juice. After their chores, they then ate a “second breakfast” consisting of ham or bacon, eggs, home fries, biscuits and gravy.
They ate with gusto and good reason. To reach their one-room schoolhouse meant walking three miles, often in inclement weather. The small wooden structure was built around a pot-bellied stove that sat directly in the center of the room. The stove provided the only heat on cold winter mornings when up to three feet of snow covered the hard frozen ground. During the day, the children took turns going out and getting wood from the shed to place on the fire. Recess was a welcome relief but only during those months when the sun shone brightly enough to chase away the chill. Connecticut’s harsh winters usually meant that students would be expected to spend recess time with their heads down on their desks while taking a long nap.
The farmhouse in which they lived encompassed what Cliff fondly refers to as, “four bedrooms and a path” to the outhouse. By then, the youngest of the three boys was born and the siblings all shared one bedroom. This enabled the family to maintain a guest room and an extra room for all of the sewing necessitated by their mother to mend and create their clothing. In addition, there was a main kitchen built directly in the house and a summer kitchen set off to the side.
A huge black iron oven sat directly in the middle of the main kitchen and provided heat for the house. It was vitally important that the fire in the oven never go out over the stormy winter months, so every family member took extra care to be certain there was enough wood on the flickering flames. In the evenings, it was especially crucial to “bank the fire” before everyone went to bed. Banking was achieved by piling wood up and around the sides of the oven to insure the optimum amount of warmth while the family slept. Still, early mornings would find Cliff and his brothers chipping away at the ice that formed overnight in the water basins and bowls. The worst thing though, was having to run through the snow to the outhouse where Cliff notes, “the Sears catalog was there but it wasn’t for reading and you didn’t linger.”
“In fact,” he adds when remembering those icy mornings, “you ran like heck going out there and sometimes you ran so fast you’d pass yourself still going out on the way back in.”
In addition to heat, the round black oven also contained two fireboxes—one for baking in the middle of the oven and one for cooking on the stovetop. The family members would slide a handle into a notch on one of the round covers on the top of the stove in order to lift off the covers to fuel the fire. Once the covers were replaced, one could cook on the entire surface of the stovetop.
The summer kitchen was then used for food preparation and preservation. During the months when cows, lambs, chickens and hogs were slaughtered, the kitchen would be full of meat being readied to smoke or soak in brine. The boys helped their mother can vegetables, fruits, and even beef by placing the food into mason jars and then inserting the jars into a rack that could be lowered into a huge pot of boiling water. After the contents were cooked and then allowed to cool, a vacuum was created that would suck the lids of the jars down tight and they would subsequently be sealed.
With no electricity and no refrigerator, canning insured that food was always readily available. Although an icebox did serve as a source of food storage, the ice blocks cut in thick chunks from the local lake in winter months were not suitable for anything other than helping to keep food items cold. Drinks did not have ice added to them, but were instead served at room temperature. The ice chunks were stored in an icehouse built specifically for that purpose. The large blocks of ice were placed on sawdust and then covered with another layer of sawdust. When readied for use, excess sawdust would then be washed off prior to placing the ice in the box.
It was in this setting that Cliff’s passion for all art forms grew. During school one day, he saw that another child had drawn something particularly well and, in Cliff’s usual steadfast and logical fashion, he thought, “If he can draw the best, then I can do it even better.” He started with pencil drawings and soon fellow students and everyone else were clamoring for their own personal portraits. A self-taught artist, Cliff created his first pastel and oil paintings when he was only thirteen.
“I want more than anything else to go to art school,” he told his father every chance he got throughout his teenage years.
But having successfully insured that his family survived during the Depression, Senior insisted that Cliff follow in his older brother’s footsteps and attend college in order to obtain a business degree. Senior’s reasoning was based on his own observations of just how unstable the world could quickly become.
Crushed and knowing that art would forever remain his first love, Cliff enrolled in the Navy as soon as he graduated from high school. His innate intuition regarding medical matters earned him much respect in the military; however, he continued his artwork even during WWII when he spent much of his time out at sea.
After the war, he came home to follow in his father’s footsteps. Cliff and Senior worked side by side on some of the most prestigious construction projects in the world. But their story doesn’t stop there. Senior, for all of his practical money making ideas, was also an artist at heart. It was Senior’s talent for oil paintings and pastels that young Cliff had inherited in the first place. As the knowledge of an exacting construction craft had been handed down from father to son, so had the burning desire to pick up the palette and paint.
During Cliff’s lifetime, his original oil paintings have graced the halls of many public places. Perhaps his most impressive piece was his depiction of the beautiful Triple Crown-winning horse, Secretariat. The oil painting, which many people said was the most detailed piece of artwork they had ever seen, hung in the halls at Saratoga until purchased for a private collection in the 1970s.
So it was that Clifford Smith, Jr., finally followed his heart and put the colors of his own dreams on canvas for the rest of the world to see. And, as any artisan knows, it is the continued giving of the gift of the craft that opens others to their own individual talents. At 76 years of age, Cliff now spends his days teaching others not just about art but what he has practiced all along: be unique, be unusual, but most of all, always be yourself.
Published U.S. Legacies April 2003
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