Note from an editor about Paul Smith

Many people can tell you about Paul’s great business sense, but that’s just part of who he was. He was also a profoundly humane man. I saw it every day in his judgments and dealings with the newsroom. He cared about results, certainly; but he also cared about employees’ lives and careers. Not every corporate executive lives his life that way, but Paul did.

The interesting thing, I think, is that for Paul those humane instincts weren’t some sort of deliberate, conscious choice. He didn’t learn them from a manual on executive skills. They were anchored beyond any doubt in the Christian faith that he attained in mid-life.

His faith was quiet, but it ran deep. More than once when we were talking in my office about some time of troubles, he would say, “May I close the door? Can we pray together?” His prayers were generous, searching, and suffused with trust in the designs of the Almighty. When the door reopened and we resumed dealing with whatever business lay at hand, it was possible to do so wiser, and in a different light.

There is a passage in a grand old hymn by Charles Wesley that explains Paul better than anything else I know. Like Wesley, Paul would admit that his younger years were less than wholly devout. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, during a time of great personal stress and even despair, he experienced a conversion:

“I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

My chains fell off, my heart was free;

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.”

In quiet times when Paul grew ruminative about his life, that moment long ago stood fast as the one that mattered most.

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