|
John T. Casteen III |
For many who knew Carl Smith, his death on December 8, 2005, is turning out to be hard to accept or quite believe. In my own time here, Carl and his wife Hunter have been engaged in, generally at the center of, every important venture the University has undertaken. Hunter remains deeply engaged in the University, and her engagement supports lines of continuity that benefit all of us. Still, Carl’s absence is a hard reality.
Carl Smith first came to Charlottesville as a student in the late 1940s. A genuine scholar-athlete, he majored in economics and played football. Dividing his time between the Alderman Library and Scott Stadium, he prospered: he found pleasure in hard work done well. After marrying Hunter in 1952, Carl entered on a career, primarily in coal, that made him legendary as a businessman. Carl, and later Hunter and Carl together, invented new ways of extracting and processing coal, ways that have become a national model for the business in an era when environmental and economic realities have made old ways of extracting and transporting coal untenable.
Beginning in Carl’s home region, in the hills and mountains of Southwest Virginia, and expanding across this country and eventually into other countries as natural gas and other interests developed, Hunter and Carl built their firm, AMVEST, into an international phenomenon. Its headquarters building, which you will see across the lake on the right as you enter the Boar’s Head Inn property, embodies values that Carl himself represented—not surprising because Hunter, Carl, and Jaque Robertson, the architect and our former dean, collaborated to conceive and perfect a building that is itself a work of art.
We remember Carl for these things accomplished or built, but we remember him at least equally for his human commitments—for mentoring young people, many now middle-aged women and men who stop me at alumni meetings or in hotel lobbies to say with pride that they learned their trades under Carl at AMVEST and to ask that I convey their greetings to Hunter; for his gentle elegance; for his creativity and high standards and lack of pretension; for the catholic range of his interests (he cared about everything he could know and wondered about everything else); perhaps most of all for his partnership with Hunter in ventures that endure and will endure as elements of the University.
Many may know Carl only as the name on the stadium and the athletics complex. He supported these projects generously because he wanted future generations of students and alumni to use and enjoy them. But I have been thinking that to remember Carl or to know his name only for that support, as vital as it has been, may be too little.
I came to know Carl after his time on the Board of Visitors because Hunter and he joined the group of private persons who intervened in the 1970s when state support for historic treasures, including Jefferson’s buildings in the Central Grounds, dried up even as age and wear and tear made the need for structural restorations apparent. Working with talented and tenacious allies, Carl helped organize action to save and enhance these structures. The re-creation of the Rotunda’s original interior and much of Murray Howard’s work on the pavilions are samples of what Carl and his friends put into motion.
In fall 1990, while heading what was then the Jefferson Restoration Board, Carl came to talk to me about the historic buildings and grounds. His manner and his ideas in that first meeting fascinated and excited me. Speaking quietly, modestly and thoughtfully, Carl explained how and why we ought both to preserve or conserve and to use Jefferson’s buildings on and around the Lawn. He wanted courses taught in rooms in the pavilions, faculty families with children mingling with students, and students and the public moving freely through the gardens and among the buildings themselves.
He influenced our board’s and my own thinking because his reasoning about the educational necessity of using the historic Grounds as they were intended to be used spoke to the University’s essential character, and to Jefferson’s intentions about it. The pavilion and garden restorations since that time reflect Carl’s advice, and so does our thinking about the eventual external or structural restoration (later in this decade, perhaps) of the Rotunda as we complete projects begun with Carl’s leadership during the generation when his mind and spirit brooded over our Grounds.
This talk about restoration and use turned out to be the first of many conversations over 15 years—conversations about the College at Wise, which Hunter and Carl have supported and shaped for a quarter-century or so; about the concepts that drive education for the world of commerce, a topic on which he focused at least as much on intelligence and personal character as on technical matters; about his affection for the arts; with Hunter always taking part in the conversation; about his lifelong desire to see what is now the Carl Smith Center developed for football and the other varsity sports; and later about his aspirations for the fine and performing arts as ends in themselves and also (like athletics) as common experiences to be shared by the entire community.
Two brief episodes define Carl for me. One was a quiet conversation in his office when he talked about working with Jaque Robertson to define AMVEST’s corporate headquarters. Unlike most conversations about building, this one was not about a building. Rather, it was about how people interact with one another inside buildings and about how buildings shape or contain interior and exterior spaces and fit into or impose on their environments. Carl talked about peaceful and disturbing environments in a way I had never heard. As always, he made excellent sense.
The other occurred one winter when I stopped to see Hunter and Carl in the house they occupied seasonally in Florida before they built their own home there. Carl took me into a bedroom to show me a painting, an impressionist painting full of subtle colors, that he had bought years before, and then he explained what he saw in it and talked about how and when he first saw it, and how he had come to buy it. The impression that lingers for me is Carl’s fascination with excellence—the painter’s way of shaping space, his eye for color full of meaning, his success in making a reality that one could not see except in the painting, and then the pleasure Carl experienced in sharing or telling what he saw.
A rare and wonderful man.
|
