Glenn Smith: Right man, right time, right place

Sometimes, the right person for the right job comes along at just the right time. That was the case with Glenn Smith in 1973. We mentioned his passing briefly last week. Some amplification is needed.

Smith was hired as chancellor of the San Mateo County Community College District almost 45 years ago at a time when the district’s credibility was at a very low ebb.

A financial scandal and attendant leadership woes plagued the three-campus two-year enterprise. Public trust was a commodity distinctly lacking at the time. Smith, who lived locally, was brought in to try to remedy the situation.

It was something of a risk. Smith, though skilled, had not been the No.1 administrator at any educational outfit before. In an out-of-the box move, he was hired out of San Francisco State University where he was the righthand man of S.I. Hayakawa, the flamboyant college president who had been appointed to shape up that troubled campus during a particularly difficult time.

Hayakawa turned out to be more media celebrity than administrator. He was also absent a lot at critical moments. During a period of intense protest and occasional violence at SF State, Smith wound providing much of the day-to-day leadership there. It was no picnic by any stretch of the imagination. There was chaos on the 19th Avenue campus almost on a daily basis. Smith hung tough.

Pressure didn’t seem to bother him too much. If it did, he didn’t show it. Maybe his sterling military record had something to do with that. During World War II, as the U.S. Army surged east toward the heart of Nazi Germany and its capital, Berlin, Smith, a young member of the 102nd Infantry Division, was decorated for valor for rescuing an American officer trapped in a German minefield. He didn’t talk about that incident much at all. He wasn’t a “look-at-me” sort of fellow.

At the Peninsula community college district, lessons learned came in handy. Over time, the unflappable Smith was able to revive the district in spite of a variety of formidable challenges.

He was in charge as the district negotiated its first public employee union contracts during the same tight-budget era marked by voter approval of Proposition 13, the state’s landmark property tax-limitation initiative.

Complicating matters was a fractious, and occasionally dysfunctional, board of trustees, two of whom, Robert Tarver and James Tormey, utterly loathed one another and were more than pleased to allow their intense mutual dislike to boil over regularly in public and private. It got ugly. A lot.

In many ways, Smith realized early on that the district needed him more than he needed it. That allowed him to weave his way through the district’s pressing issues as his own man, sans political baggage, getting things done on his own terms in the process. He left the district in sound shape when he finally retired in 1991.

Smith, devoted to his family and his country, was savvy, witty (in an engaging, self-deprecating way), honest, shrewd and accommodating, even for prying, probing journalists, an annoying species typically viewed as a nosy nuisance by wary public officials. His blunt off-the-record perspective and solid background information were always valuable.

We don’t see his like all that much anymore. When he died in Oregon last month, he was 92. His was a life well-lived.