Young man’s love of old stuff attracts him to public service
On a mild Wednesday night in October, a dimly lit Tony’s Top-Cat Bar & Grill in Catasauqua is empty but for a halfdozen historic society members and local government ancillaries laughing and talking over glasses of wine.
In walks 21-year- old Cameron Smith, grinning and bespectacled, his blond mat of hair atop a lanky frame making him easy to spot from across the room. He’s last to arrive, but on time.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have enough room at this table,” joked Jody Thomas.
“Cameron, you’re the youngest, you’ll have to go,” said Cliff Lathrop, Smith’s neighbor, whose wife Janice helped found the Historic Catasauqua Preservation Association.
Smith is less than a year into his job as Catasauqua’s youngest-ever councilman. He turned 21 in office. As far as he knows — and that The Morning Call could find — there are no peers his age among the Lehigh Valley’s boards and councils.
Nearly every Wednesday, he walks the two blocks from the house he’s lived in since he was 8 years old to join the group at the Top-Cat for “Wine Wednesday,” often after a laborious day at his father’s industrial construction company. He opts for a Jack-and-Coke because he hasn’t warmed up to wine.
Conversation quickly diverges, with Smith telling Councilwoman Debra Mellish about a blacktop job he worked on and Lathrop talking about the latest coronavirus data. Smith rolls up his plaid sleeves to dig into a burger piled with onion rings and served with a side of onion rings. While he eats, he ponders the coronavirus numbers.
“I’m glad I’m not running for governor,” Smith said.
“You have plenty of time,” Lathrop chimes in.
Young historian
The history exhibit begins on the stairway ascending into the attic of the family’s 140-year-old brick home on Second Street.
On the wall are pictures of four generations of Smiths, who have in the Lehigh Valley for 300 years. Up a few stairs, a window sill displays bricks salvaged from the blast furnaces of the Lehigh Fire Brick Co., which was demolished in the 1930s.
At the top of the landing, the wall is covered in framed historic photographs and newspaper clippings, including one from 1918 thanking the silk maker D.G. Dery for his $100,000 contribution to Catasauqua’s war bond effort, and a 1949 conceptual design of the Pine Street Bridge.
“It’s amazing what you can find that survives,” Smith says, glancing around his attic bedroom — a sprawl of artifacts and antiques that he collects as a hobby, and sometimes to sell. These include everything from early 1900s prescription bottles to antique fans and a 1950s Kirby vacuum that he uses to clean, sometimes.
That’s just the bedroom. The basement is hardly navigable with antique light fixtures — Smith’s specialty — abounding. On a table is an antique ballroom mirror he got from a Philadelphia apartment building nearly 10 years ago. He’s restoring it using Q-tips.
His interest in historical artifacts began in earnest when he was a preteen and his peers mostly were worried about pimples. He was around 12 or 13 years old when he noticed being drawn to the architecture around town, just a few years after he moved to Catasauqua.
“I think it’s just something that he naturally gravitated to,” mother Stephanie Curtis said, noting that the interest did not come from the family.
Smith wanted to know the history of every home, and what the homes looked like on the inside in the past, she said.
He’d walk down to what used to be a hardware store on Front Street owned by council President Vince Smith — no relation — to buy obsolete parts from the 1950s, like switches and wiring, so he could rewire old light fixtures from historic homes.
“He is a little bit of a geek like that, and so am I, with the industrial stuff,” the elder Smith said.
On the Dery Mansion, his favorite home in Catasauqua, he’s spent hundreds of hours studying and collecting more than 250 news articles and the original 1919 blueprints.
“Kid’s like a computer, man,” Vince Smith said.
The council president said he knew from the time he met Smith that he’d serve the municipality in some way.
The younger Smith loved growing up in Catasauqua, with its small-town feel, longtime residents who know and talk to one another, and rows of historic homes. As a boy, he would walk down to the Wachovia Bank on Bridge Street to put $5 in a savings account, and the bank teller would let him peek at the marble vault. He made friends by knocking on doors on his block and inviting kids to the playground across the street.
It was easy enough to become friends, too, with the retired couple next door who helped found the historic society, the Lathrops.
“He was always like a little adult, as a kid,” Curtis, his mother, explained — he asked questions of people of all ages.
Janice Lathrop would see his blond head over the fence and say hello; he was always conversant. The chats grew longer. Smith loved the Lathrops’ 1800s Victorian-Tudor home and always wanted to talk about it, as well as the historic Dery Mansion just up the street.
“He has the ability to work himself into a friendly relationship,” Cliff Lathrop said. “He observes things, he looks at things.”
During high school, Smith started volunteering for the historic society, cataloging in the history room at the public library, even dressing up in a tuxedo from Hess’s to give tours of the Dery Mansion.
And he started attending borough council meetings with the Lathrops, every week.
“I just sat and listened,” Smith said. “I didn’t really have much to say.”
But occasionally he would comment or ask questions, like about why there was little movement on the Iron Works project for a long time. He didn’t always like the answers he got.
A former board member encouraged him to get involved in the borough planning commission. He attended an eight-hour training with the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission to prepare.
Smith was concerned with the condition of the borough’s streets and “the way the town looked,” so he set his sights on an open borough council seat.
He did a traditional door-knocking campaign to garner support. It helped that he knew plenty of local business owners — he was the sort of teen to strike up a conversation with adults, or walk into a pizza shop for a slice and a chat with the owner behind the counter.
“It’s not crazily complicated — you have to know people,” he said, nursing a Coke and a coffee in Blocker’s Coffeehouse on Front Street one October afternoon. “For a town of 6,500 people, name recognition goes a long way.”
Curtis said she was surprised to discover, once her son’s self-run campaign was underway, how many people in town knew him. But he was always social, she said — his classmates at Lehigh Career & Technical Institute voted for him to give the class speech at graduation in 2017.
There were four open seats on council in the November 2019 election. He got the second-highest number of votes, just five votes behind the highest earner, who was an incumbent.
Listen and learn
A year later, Smith leads a “general government” subcommittee meeting with casual ease, wearing a T-Shirt with the insignia of his father’s industrial construction company, SmitHahn Co. The job has him rising before the sun most mornings.
The committee consists of him, borough Manager Steve Travers and Councilman Brian McKittrick. They tackle the nuts and bolts of running the business of municipal government; at this October meeting, for example, they discuss an outline of the borough’s first employee handbook.
While they consider what should go into the cellphone policy, someone mentions Nextel devices another township used to use. Smith wonders what other kinds of devices should be included.
“How many employees have iPads?” Smith asks Travers. “We should definitely include those — I don’t know if that’s what a Nextel device is like.”
“A Nextel,” Travers begins to explain, then interjects: “See, you’re showing your age.”
His age can be an unavoidable topic. As someone who ran for office at 20 and spends many nonwork hours with people two to three times his age, he’s usually the youngest in the room.
He doesn’t advertise it as a selling point, fearing it can do more harm than good by encouraging strangers not to take him as seriously.
“It can be a deterrent,” he said. But the fear often fades as conversation flows and co-workers see the thought he puts into problems or the knowledge of history he has to offer. Council President Smith still believes his age is an asset.
“You need that tie-in with the younger generation to keep that civic pride going,” he said. “They don’t often have the time or discipline to run for office. But Cameron does.”
Thinking of future generations, Cameron Smith has a vision for revitalizing Catasauqua. He supported redevelopment of the Iron Works site, a long-dormant brownfield, with the understanding that a few former Crane Iron Works buildings will be preserved. He’s concerned about improving the roads leading into Catasauqua and believes the borough should get more involved in regional planning and tourism. He wants the borough to spread revitalization efforts beyond the east side of Front Street, which is where the Iron Works and new municipal complex projects are.
“I’m not trying to do anything major right now,” Smith said recently. “I just want to listen and learn and think of ways I can help my community.”
In the last year, Catasauqua moved forward on projects that had stood still for up to a decade, including the Iron Works and improvements to the Race and Lehigh Street intersection — a key entryway to the borough.
“Catasauqua I believe is really at a crossroads,” President Smith said. “So you have someone here who knows and loves Catty, but he doesn’t have preconceived notions about how things were.”
“He gets out there, he’s always swinging,” he said.
Here to stay
Cameron Smith’s most recent prized possession is a front-page article from a 1903 Catasauqua Dispatch. It shows inside photos of a home on Second and Pine — a rarity, he told Janice Lathrop at a recent Wine Wednesday.
The collector he bought it from is known in history circles as a tough sell. Smith struck up a relationship with him, chatting about history for two years before the collector finally sold him something.
There are few people left who know enough about Catasauqua history for Smith to have an extended conversation about it, but that’s what he seeks — outside his work schedule, government meetings and Wine Wednesdays.
It’s not a very popular hobby, he admitted. And most of those involved are selling things.
Lately, Smith has been selling, too. He wants to save money to invest in a home of his own — in Catasauqua, where he pictures himself staying.
He thinks often about how many young people want to leave where they grew up, particularly if it’s a small town like Catasauqua, for the idea of bigger and better things. Smith doesn’t even have his sights set on higher office right now, though his mother believes that could change. His idea: Stay, and make Catasauqua better.
“Why not stay and invest yourself where you live already?” he said.