Mr. Smith engaged in the practice of law in Charlottesville for thirty-five years until his retirement in 1995. He was a founding partner of this very firm where he primarily worked in business planning and commercial litigation.
He was a founder, chairman and president of Virginia Broadcasting Corporation, operator of Channel 29 TV, and a founder and the first Chairman of Guaranty Bank which merged with Union Bank in 2004. In 1980, he was president of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Bar Association.
Mr. Smith was instrumental in acquiring, and renovating the former post office and federal court building in what would become the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library. He served on the Charlottesville Planning Commission, the Board of Architectural Review, and the Board of Zoning Appeals. Mr. Smith served for many years as a director of the Albemarle County Historical Society and was president in 1982. He organized the Minor-Preston Educational Fund and served as its president for roughly twenty years. He was a director and vice-president of the Associates of the University of Virginia Library, and would be happy at the slightest opportunity to expound upon the appropriateness of its mission for the University over that of the Virginia Athletics Foundation.
He helped organize the North Downtown Residents Association, and founded the Park Lane Poker Club and the Park Lane Swim Club and Friday Evening Philosophical Society. They have all been active neighborhood institutions for decades.
After his retirement Mr. Smith bought a house on the Chesapeake Bay near Kilmarnock where he spent much of his time enjoying lengthy boating cruises. He served for eight years as a member of the Board of Directors of The Foundation for Historic Christ Church in Irvington, Va., doing historic research on 18th Century documents, and published two books and a number of monographs concerned with the estate of Robert Carter of Corotoman and related issues. At the time of his death he was an emeritus director.
He and his wife and children spent over fifty years restoring their house at 620 Park St. in Charlottesville which they placed on the National Register in 1998. He loved to travel the world, especially by canal boat. He had inexhaustible curiosity. His children and grandchildren learned amazing things from his endless knowledge of the world. Highlights were training his children to love the poetry of T.S. Eliot, showing them how to strip paint and restore an old house by hand, and engaging his grandchildren’s growing minds with fanciful stories when they were young. He adored golden retrievers. Perhaps his greatest joy in life was a conversation on the porch with family members, whether it was his parents, wife, cousins, children or grandchildren. And an evening talk on the deck of a boat, or beside the pool on a summer Friday with neighbors took a close second.