Eulogy for Bob Smith
Gardencourt
June 27, 2007
Bob’s Contribution to the Restoration of Old Louisville
Deborah Stewart
The afternoon I learned of Bob’s death, I stood in my dining room while Rick’s voice filled my house. I live in a Bob Smith house on Belgravia Court and I see several of my neighbors in the audience tonight; Ric and Connie Light, Dick Irby, and Jain Hain. They each live in Bob Smith houses and like me consider it a blessing.
Standing there in my dining room, I felt Bob’s presence in the late afternoon light that streamed across my dining room table, caught the stained glass in the southern window and spilled his vision, his insight, and his belief in the essential presence of beauty. For, above all, he recognized, he felt with his very being, the essence of the moment when beauty blooms into your field of vision and you are calmed, relieved and captivated by what you see.
Bob understood space and the resonance, the timeless quality of real beauty, the kind that transcends periods, utility and instead transforms those who dare to venture beyond the status quo, the conventional. He saw what lasts.
That is why he ventured into and helped to save Old Louisville when it was not urbane or chic or any place safe. He recognized the loveliness, the extraordinary form. He hand laid old brick in a circular pattern before the Pink Palace on St James and the opposite corner of St James and Belgravia. The bricks abut the old limestone curbs and they look as if they have been there forever. He took a wounded fountain in the middle of St James Court and sent it off to be repaired and re-bronzed and then surrounded it with a railing salvaged from the demolished Strand Theater’s balcony.
He brought originality to the historic. My own house was rendered Federalist from an undistinguished 1890”s townhouse with a corner entrance and very little natural light. He moved the formal entrance to the side and replaced the inset double doors and large Victorian window with French doors that were heightened by leaded glass fan transoms.
Shortly after moving in, exhausted by the move and lonely for Linden Hill, the 1797 house in Butchertown we had left, I sat in our living room on a rainy October evening and as if instructed by the need for fresh air, I opened our French doors, then sat with my wine, the flickering gas lights and the rain as all of the outside came inside and I knew I was home.
Bob could do that. He did it over and over with the houses he touched and the gardens he created. Rick and Dean said they never thought of Bob as old. Sometimes people would suggest he was a father figure and both Dean and Rick would say, “We had good fathers. Bob was our friend.” His energy informed his presence and you felt nurtured to have him in your life.
That, my friends, is a fitting epitaph for one who died in his sleep at 84 while his own garden, created from hard packed earth, bloomed in the moonlight, settled in the fresh dawn of a new morning and continues to touch all who walk through it.
As my neighbor, Rex Lyons watered his own garden which connects with my courtyard, he said, “This is what we all wished for Bob, a painless and peaceful death. We just wanted it to come 10 or 15 years down the road. The last time I saw Bob, he handed me information to read about our upcoming trip to England.”
Indeed, Rex and Dean and Rick will honor that trip but with a much different mission this time. They will scatter Bob’s ashes near a pond on the land once occupied by Virginia Woolf, her husband Leonard, her sister, Vanessa Bell, and others who formed the Bloomsbury Group. Their house was known as Charleston and it was where, I think, Bob knew he belonged.
Sort of like Old Louisville of which he said, “This is the part of town where I feel most at home. Even as a little boy, I always wanted to live down here.”
Well, he got his wish when he discovered the Madison Cawein house was for sale on St James Court. For those of you who may not know the house, it was the home of Madison Cawein, the first poet laureate of Kentucky. It has a semi-circular front porch and is owned by another author and former poet laureate of Kentucky, the writer, Sena Jeter Naslund who fell in love with the house the minute she saw it upon her arrival in Louisville in the early 1970’s. It would be years before Sena bought the house, but she sits now on the second floor by windows that overlook the fountain and writes her wonderful novels which are read all over the world. The New York Times recently featured Sena and her house in their series featuring artists and where they live.
Malcolm Bird, Bob’s collaborator and dear friend said, “It was a young woman who had inherited the Cawein house and she had no interest in anything so old. Back then it wasn’t de rigueur to restore old properties. Suburbia was the thing…Bob and I didn’t have enough money, so we got Jim Perry involved.”
Once the house was purchased, Malcolm remembered, “We had to do something that was financially feasible, so we divided it into apartments….Bob’s whole life was visual…Perry and I were sort of an addendum to Bob’s efforts and thought."
According to Malcolm, at the time, St James was run by three grand dames: Ethel Du Pont, Marguerite Gifford and Lucinda Brent. St James Court Association dues were fifty cents a year. Malcolm said,” Back then, no one was so grabby with their time. There was no social competition…People could get enthused about things like card parties, bake sales and drama. Once, some drama people from JCC did the “Pirates of Penzance” on Ethel Du Pont’s front porch.”
Needless to say, the ladies of the Court were smitten.
Malcolm recalls, “Here came these three young whippersnappers, three young men with imagination, willingness, and ability. The ladies immediately got us into the association and I became president. The first problem I saw was that fifty cents a year wasn’t doing anything.”
Malcolm would go on to found the St James Court Art Show. The first Art Show featured drawing for a sliver stuffing spoon donated by Miss Ethel Du Pont as an incentive to draw artists.
The ladies had their favorites. Mrs. Gifford chose Bob and they routinely had tea on her front porch. Miss Ethel preferred Malcolm and they had coffee on her front porch. Lucinda Brent liked all three and would give elegant luncheons and dinner parties in her grand home on St. James.
“That was her life, Malcolm observed. “ She had a wonderful cook and a chauffeur. I remember it was the chauffeur who made ice cream on Sundays.”
Bob’s mother bought houses for Bob to have an arena and he and Malcolm restored them. One house surprised them one morning with a big red sign that declared the house condemned by the City when it was actually in mid-renovation.
Again, Malcolm, “Bob started doing a few other houses. Belgravia at that time was quite derelict. The real restoration was pretty much confined to St James. Then a couple of stories came out in the newspaper and suddenly a group of well-to-do movers and shakers formed Restoration, Inc.”
Restoration, Inc., formed in April of 1962, bought nine houses on Belgravia and less that three months later, work was under way. The average price paid per house was $11,000 and they had the good sense to name Bob Smith as the one in charge of the entire project. He had carte blanche and very good taste.
Bob was 39 years old. He would transform Belgravia Court with the houses he renovated.
“Preliminary drawings by decorator Bob Smith call for such touches as new and more
elegant doors, addition of shutters, generous use of paint in colors that harmonize, and in almost every case, replacement windows with specially milled multi-paned windows…Smith declared that authenticity is not the primary goal of the group. He said, ‘We’re not trying to restore them to their original status. We’re just giving them back the appeal they once had.’” The Courier Journal, June 1962
Belgravia Court was just the beginning. Bob would go on to restore four houses in the 1300 block of South First, converting them to condos and combining their collective rear yards into a formal English Garden. It was in this garden early one morning that a new resident to Old Louisville, Nancy Woodcock, ventured and introduced herself to the gardener, Bob Smith. She and her husband, Tom, had recently acquired a house across the street from Victoria Gardens and Nancy wanted Bob’s help restoring the house.
“Our realtor, Buddy Cohen, told me, ‘You have to have Bob Smith.’ But, I’d never actually met him. He was working then as a decorator for Stewart’s and so I sort of hung out down there waiting to see him. Trouble was, I didn’t know what he looked like. When I asked him in the garden if he were Bob Smith, he was very calm in his reply. He said, ‘ I am Bob Smith.’”
Bob would do two houses for the Woodcock’s right next door to one another in the 1300 block of South First. He also helped with the carriage house they built and their gardens for each home. He became a fast and true friend.
As Nancy reminisced recently, she said, “ I think of him early in the morning because it was then you could usually get him, before he was out for the day. I can still hear his hoarse voice over the phone.”
Nancy said he loved cars, cloudy days and his cat, Nigel who slept with him. She said, “ He didn’t live in a place long until it looked just like him. He had such vision. When he suggested a mural in the dining room of our present house, I couldn’t quite see it, but I trusted Bob and it became the prettiest room in the house.”
Among their last times together was a walk through the Jefferson Forest.
Nancy said, “We walked up to the lake and talked about returning soon.”
Toward the end of my visit with Malcolm, he said, “ He would see things other people didn’t see…He opened a whole world to me as is attested to by the number of followers he had… The last time I saw him, we sat on the bench in his garden, the one in front of his pool and we talked for an hour and a half. There was sense of competition. We were past all that. We were old friends and our last conversation was the sort that comes only with time.”
When I think of Bob now, I recall a passage from Virginia Woolf’s luminous novel, “ To The Lighthouse.” Mrs. Ramsey, the fictionalized version of Virginia’s own mother whom she lost all too early, settles herself in the garden of their summer house shortly before her unanticipated death, and I quote, “ She could be herself, by herself..to be silent; to be alone…all the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated…when life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless…there was a freedom, there was a peace, there was most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability…when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity.”
