Margaret Smith

Chatham, N.Y. — Margaret “Betty” Elizabeth (Bond) Smith, 94, widow of former deputy chief of staff of the Army and two-time commandant of the U.S. Army War College, Gen. DeWitt C. Smith Jr., died following a stroke on Saturday, March 31, 2018, at her daughter’s home in Chatham.

Born Dec. 26, 1923, in Dighton, Mass., to Florence Brown and Norman James Bond, Betty, a gracious natural beauty, was homecoming queen at the University of Maryland, her alma mater from which she graduated at the age of 19. Very much against her mother’s wishes, a World War II war bride who was able, from a job she secured in the Pentagon, to track her young husband as he went from training, to England as a second lieutenant (where he was put in the stockade briefly for fraternizing with enlisted men), to the continent where, among many other desperate experiences, he fought in the breakthrough at Bastogne and, at war’s end, accidentally came upon the horrors of Dachau.

Post war, Betty worked at times as a fashion artist, a model, a disc jockey, a high school history and English teacher, a Sunday school teacher, a reading tutor for illiterate soldiers, an executive in the family bookstore, as the better half of Task Force Smith (her husband’s military career) and — all of the time — as the mother of her six children. The author of, Summer Street, a book based on the stories her mother told to her about growing up at the turn of the century on a New England farm, Mrs. Smith was both a lady and an authentic liberal who raised her family, as best she could, to care about and be considerate of (all) others. Though her health last year had begun to fail, on Jan. 21, 2017, with the help of some of her family, of a jet plane and a wheelchair, and not wearing a garish hat of any color, Margaret Bond Smith was present, at the age of 93, in Washington, D.C., to participate in the Women’s March upon that place.

Predeceased by her son, Kevin, Betty will be forever in the hearts of her five children, 12 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.

There will be a visitation at 11 a.m. April 21, in the Sheffield Room at the First Congregationalist Church in Old Lyme.

In lieu of flowers, donations to the Foodbank in the church would greatly appreciated.

A graveside funeral will be held at 3 p.m. June 4 at Arlington National Cemetery.