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John Smith, 1923–2004
Photo by Gary Wayne Gilbert
John Smith, who died on September 11 at the age of 81, came to Boston College to be financial vice president in December 1970 with no experience of college except as a student. A working-class kid from Nutley, New Jersey, he had leveraged a bachelor's degree from Rutgers' evening college on the GI Bill, and then, pausing to grab a part-time MBA from New York University, he hauled himself up the corporate ladder as an accountant and financial executive until in mid-journey he found himself in a dark wood. A company on which he'd gambled his work and life savings collapsed in a way that, he believed, tarnished his professional and personal reputations. "It was the absolute nadir of my life," he once recalled. And then Boston College came looking for a CFO who would fix its financial problem, which was an excess of debit over credit.
BC's gamble—pinning its future to a man who was coming off a business failure and who had never worked in higher education—paid off big. John became one of the stalwarts who guided the University from the edge of bankruptcy to prosperity. And along the way, and over the course of 21 years, say financial experts, he promulgated professional accounting innovations—John preferred to call them "crackpot schemes"—that today constitute rules of prudence and order in higher-education finance across the country.
John was blazingly smart, and he knew it. But he was also a Jersey guy from the days when Jersey meant truck farms and deer hunting, and he loved to play the hayseed who finds himself among the eminent doctors of philosophy. Here's what I wrote in 1990, when he retired, about a visit to his More Hall office:
As he riffles the file drawers and the jumble of paper on his desk top, Smith keeps up a continual monologue that those familiar with his ways will recognize. . . a long-practiced theater turn and a spontaneous eruption, a Roman candle pop-pop of canny wit, ribaldry, internal dialogue, self-deprecation (balanced by equal deprecation of the audience), old jokes, non sequiturs, rhetorical questioning, and lecture [that is] unstoppable. Some of it goes like this: "Did I ever tell you my philosophy? I listened to the Harvard B-School baloney—'Look at the ridges of the mountains,' you know? [He gestures the shape of a broad, high horizon.] And meanwhile you don't notice the manhole cover is missing, and you step right in. So when they were looking at the mountains, I was cutting their pants loose. Right here is the finance and audit book. Do you understand depreciation theory? If you understand depreciation theory then even you will be able to understand this. Here, let me show you how stupid this is."
In the mid-1980s, I attended a seminar on financial management that John was offering. This being John, the seminar was laced with quips, extended asides, street-corner zingers. For whatever reason, I was John's favorite target that long morning, as in "I see Ben's eyes are glazing over so I'll have to go through all this again." Finally, I raised my hand. "John, you of all people ought to understand that the actuarial tables predict I'm going to be writing your obit one day." It shut him down, but only for the duration of the seminar.
So here's what I want to say now. John Smith was a financial wizard, honest, memorable as Falstaff, and sometimes a royal pain in the neck. He was loved by his wife Helen and his children and grandchildren. He loved them deeply. I imagine that he loved a great many other people, too, but the public part he had chosen to play didn't allow him access to tender lines. Most importantly for those of us who work or study here, he led the effort to keep Boston College solvent for two years until Fr. Monan and the rest of the posse showed up to help him save the day. And then he told them how it could be done from a financial perspective, and he was right.
Ben Birnbaum
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