E William (Bill) Smethurst April 15, 1930-November 17, 2024 E. William (Bill) Smethurst died Sunday morning, November 17th at his home in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Bill died as he lived, with a smile. Bill was born in Newark, New Jersey and spent most of his early years growing up in Montclair, New Jersey with his parents, Helen and Bill Sr., and his younger brother Dick. Bill attended Montclair High School, where, as an hundred and fifty pound offensive lineman, he played for legendary Montclair coaches Clary Anderson and Butch Fortunato on undefeated state champion teams and earned the sobriquet “Tiger” for his tenacity, a nickname that would follow him over his life. Amherst College followed high school. There he continued to play football, received a degree in English, and importantly met his future wife of seventy-one years, Ludlow Bixby. Following college, Bill attended Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island and subsequently served on the USS Turner (DDR 834). He left the Navy as a lieutenant and matriculated at Harvard Business School because “it was only two years, and the law school was three.” He helped support his family during school as a Fuller Brush salesman. After business school followed a long career in finance and portfolio management. Work included stints at the Chase Manhattan Bank, Irwin Management Co., Wertheim & Co., C.J. Lawrence Asset Management, and Byram Capital Management. Public service was varied and, as elsewhere in his life, pursued energetically. He put his Eagle Scout rank to good use as a troop Scoutmaster in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He was a Warden, Vestryman, and Treasurer at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Ho-Ho-Kus, NJ, a member of Ridgewood civic boards, a college class secretary, and served as Chairman of the Finance Committee and trustee of Mount Holyoke College, the alma mater of his wife, daughter, and granddaughter. Three of his interests and his typical all-in devotion to them deserve particular attention. A life-long lover of wine, he was a member and president of the New York Wine & Food Society for which he helped organize some of the first and notable large scale BYOB of fine wine dinners. In his middle age, inspired by his younger brother, Bill took up long distance running, a passion that included ten-mile lunch time runs along the East River and weekend multiple circuits (it’s Bill again) of Beaver Lake, the family’s summer residence in northern New Jersey. Bill competed in both the New York and Boston marathons and finished his third out of four Boston Marathons in 3:05:20 in 1979. After his back gave out, Bill became an inveterate walker tracing many of the same paths he had run at a slower pace. He also turned to his third great pastime, fly fishing. He chased trout, salmon, bonefish, and tarpon across the United States and the Caribbean. He floated for small mouth bass and trout on the St Croix and Namekogan Rivers near the Wisconsin lake house he married into. He joined clubs of likeminded gentlemen and served them in various capacities. But, much of his fishing time was spent casting flies at largemouth bass on his home waters at the end of his dock at Beaver Lake. He occasionally caught a fish. One last big part of Bill’s leisure time was reading and writing. He had a literary bent from his youth and acquired a mixed group of favorites, from Henry Longfellow and William Blake to T.S. Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost in poetry, from Rudyard Kipling and Herman Melville to James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon in prose. He was a fan of the adventurous and the funny, Patrick O’Brian, C.S. Forester, Robert Parker, J.R.R. Tolkien, and P.G. Wodehouse. He authored or co-authored organizational histories and later was a freelance book reviewer for the Sunday Chicago Tribune. Bill was a beloved father and grandfather, cheerful, wise, generous and kind, and generally loved by all. He is survived by his wife Ludlow, sons Jim and Andy, daughter Katie, and grandchildren Jacob, Silvie, and Thea.

A life of happy service and pursuits.