👨👦 Eulogy for Dad
Must be the haircut.
I don’t know how to take it, honestly. My dad was pretty good-looking.
He’d tell you he was a handsome man.
Toby had style—something my mom might question.
He was fit, took care of himself, watched what he ate, and was an active member of many gyms. He crushed his vitamins and got his cardio in.
He was vain, too. Growing up, I remember my dad dying his hair with a product called Option or Opinion; we mixed up the name, both were funny to us.
He put cream in his laugh lines with a toothpick and used tooth-whitening before it was in almost every toothpaste.
My dad grew a goatee at one point, drove a rag-top Suzuki Samurai, and got his ears pierced during a midlife crisis.
He often styled his look with a hat—he wore many.
I honestly don’t know which my dad liked more, taking photographs with his camera or being photographed with someone else’s.
The man was something of a ham.
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I’m not ashamed to admit this, Toby is a lot to live up to.
The guy had a big life. Wrote a lot of stories and books. He won awards. He was good at what he did.
His biggest accomplishment, though, goes beyond these accolades or what he published. After all, he was rarely satisfied with his latest stories.
Proud of the pieces, sure, but it was always onto the next one.
And by the end, even he was surprised he wrote all he did.
“I wrote that?” my dad asked after we’d read a story from one of his books.
What I think made my dad great wasn’t what he put into print, but the imprint he had on others: teaching at UNM, picnicking with someone he met in Dawson, working at weekly Alibi, or hawking beer at an Isotopes game, or coaching middle or high school tennis.
All my dad wanted me to be, as he toasted at my wedding, was a New York football Giants fan. And happy. And a few times in my life, those two things lined up.
But he never wanted me to be like him. He discouraged it. His life was his own. And he wanted me to make my own.
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My dad was lucky enough to meet my mom at Marble Collegiate Church in New York City some 50 years ago. They were part of a young adult group.
A good friend of my dad’s from that era, Skip Gunn, recently wrote my mom, ‘Toby was such a welcoming soul in those early days at the church.
‘Always with a smile on his face, a sense of humor, an affirmation, he was a good person to be around.’
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The bulk of my dad’s journalism career was done at the Albuquerque Journal—in case you didn't know. The paper my dad worked on for nearly 30 years ran a long obituary recently, in which Paul Logan, who hired my dad and became his best friend, said:
‘The secret to Toby’s success was how quickly he related to those he interviewed. Once they were comfortable, he used his ability as a good listener to get people to open up.'
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Hal Piper, a former editor at the Baltimore Sun, where my dad contributed stories, and who he later worked with at the International Herald Tribune and JoonAng Daily, wrote that my dad’s 'best work was not writing headlines and currying copy for the news pages. It was working with the young feature staff, talking to them, finding out what they were thinking about, and figuring out where there might be a story.
‘Toby was a good man, Hal wrote, who had the heart and the skill to touch many lives, including mine.’
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Chun Su-jin, a staff writer with at that Daily paper in Seoul, wrote to the Journal after my dad's obituary ran that she would only be where she was thanks to the late Mr. Toby Smith.
‘As you probably know,’ Su-jin wrote in, ‘Toby traveled around the world to work, and trained writers in countries like South Korea and Romania. Being his disciple was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me (and I am sure Toby would think that I have too many redundant words in my sentences here!).’
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Fifteen years ago, after my dad retired from the Journal, he found a subject to obsess about, a heavyweight boxing match that took place in New Mexico.
In the beginning of my dad's many, many years of reporting on this historic event, he emailed his longtime friend, Bob Groves, after one of his many trips to Las Vegas. He shared that he chanced upon Joe's Ringside Inn, a boisterous bistro whose owner had a remote connection to Johnson.
'I didn't learn too much about [the 1912 fight] that day," my dad emailed Bob, ‘except that I wanted to know more.’ A typical Toby Smith credo, Bob says.
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Rick Wright, who also worked with my dad at the Journal and who wrote his obituary, joked with me that he grew up wanting to be like Toby.
In the obit, he wrote that it was readers beyond the awards, who took notice of my dad’s talent. One reader Rick quoted in the obituary responded to a column that my dad did on Ben Gonzales, a runner who was killed after being hit by a car one morning.
‘Ben’s story lives in our hearts and minds and underlies something we need to remember,’ the reader reacted.
‘How many of us will be so fortunate at the end of our lives to have a Toby Smith, who may say in print or otherwise:
Pay attention. This life was worth living.’
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I have a lot of memories of my dad growing up and from when I got older. I also got to be with him as he grew old, suffered from Alzheimer's, and then died from a stroke. It was a profound experience, being next to him as he took his final breath and will take time to process.
But what I know right now is that my dad cared more than just for his family. He lifted others. His interviews weren’t just transactions for a story he had to write. It was how he connected to people. He was authentic.
My dad was many things, accountable, articulate, insubordinate, a master-interviewer.
He was funny, precise, private, faithful, and sneaky. He had an ego and was humble. He worked hard and played, and didn't want life to end.
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I’m not bitter about looking like my dad. I don't care anymore that he gave me this hairline—he gave me so much more.
Now when I look in the mirror, I see him. Sometimes he’s looking at me, not telling me what to do — he hated authority. Instead, it’s me reminding him how grateful I am to have been his son.
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But what was my dad really like? He’d tell you. In fact, he’d show you. He built a whole museum to himself, conveniently located in his study.
'Well, no one else was going to,’ I can hear him say.
He worked on his museum as his Alzheimer’s progressed. As his world got smaller, and then when COVID kept him at home, that’s when he really built out its interior.
Admission to the museum was free. And it was almost always open—unlike when he was at work in his study. In Toby's museum, he was both the subject and the docent. And it became his safe place.
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Above his desk, he curated his life into exhibits.
This included a 1997 fellowship at the James Thurber House at the Ohio State University, his time in Korea in the early 2000s, his undergraduate years at the University of Missouri, at graduate school at NYU, his two years in the army during the Vietnam era, when he served in Japan, two years teaching young writers in post-communist Romania, the summer he attended Harvard and his Oscars in Agriculture writing, which I guess is a thing.
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My dad used what he’d collected (and he had a lot of collections over the years) to recollect memories. To tell you stories of his life, however, he could, whoever his audience.
On the wall next to the door, for instance, is a printed article of a Wall Street Journal piece, one I knew he was proud of, called Neither a Book Borrower Nor Lender Be.
My dad lived by that, too. It wasn’t just an article. It was his truth. I wanted to borrow a photography book one time and my dad, my own father who strongly encouraged me and my brother to read, told me I could look at it, but that the book wasn’t to leave the house.
Well it’s mine now!
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On that same wall of my dad’s study is a photo of the Marble Maulers, a touch football team they formed in those New York days. One win, one loss, it says. That was the extent. Games were not the point.
Below that photo is one of his high school swim team. Swimming was his favorite. If he was working at his museum, he'd tell you about David Steckle, the best swimmer on the team, who went on to become a doctor.
Next to the swimming photo, is his high school track team photo and an article he wrote about pole vaulting, published in the New York Times.
Shelves of books line the walls in the study, books on writing and the best sports writing. And, of course, multiple copies of his own books take up half a shelf at least. Toby was his own biggest fan.
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On his desk is an old Smith Corona typewriter, a relic from another time, an electric pencil sharpener, another relic, and albums of clippings and letters and archives of research from his 11 books.
My dad saved so many things, a billion pens: he had notebooks aplenty, all his press passes, business cards from interview subjects, pins and patches. And on display are a few baseball cards kept in protective cases, still bitter that his mom threw out his childhood collection.
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Awards take up a lot of shelf space. The man had plaques for days. He won them but they were not a focus of his museum tour.
All over the museum, pinned or framed on the wall are photos of people who played a role in his final book, including several of boxer Jack Johnson.
"Crazy Fourth," my dad’s last non fiction book, was published on March 15, 2020, exactly five years ago today, a coincidence my dad would have gotten a big chuckle out of.
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Near the end of his life, my dad said he just wanted to go home. Even when he was.
His journey was over, his time working at the museum had come to an end.
Home is where my dad was born. Home was Christie Hill, Darien Connecticut, Home was Poko Moonshine, Camp Cunnibuck.
Home was his father, who died when my dad was 19.
And his mother, who helped get him into the University of Missouri.
Home was Tokyo, Japan and New York City.
Home was New Mexico.
Home was Albuquerque and this community.
Home was all the things my dad loved.
Home was my mom.
Home was you.
Home is where my dad died. And will live on