Robert Kingdon Smith

Red Smith (or Bob, depending on when you came to know him), died suddenly on January 14, 2018. He was born in Toronto on March 18, 1946. He is missed deeply by his son Vaughan, Vaughan’s wife Yu-Fang, and grandchildren Dylan and Ryan. Bob loved them profoundly and was always immensely proud of his son and family.

Bob strove always to be the best father possible to Vaughan. So any others with whose life is intertwined over these seven decades will also miss Bob greatly. Foremost among these, Paula Neville, Vaughan’s mother and Bob’s close friend for so many years, his siblings Marylin, Kathy and Andy, nieces Cleo and Emma, stepdaughter Rosie Brown, and his whippet, Soleil, himself brokenhearted by Bob’s passing.

Bob never really recovered from the death in 2017 of his wife Barbara Smith. He struggled with this loss and grief until his own death. Her presence in the years before her death sustained him. Red leaves a great many friends from the past and present to mourn him. Red would want all of us to lift ourselves beyond this moment and remember the best that each of us has to give to others.

Bob was predeceased by his parents Ruth and Osborn Smith. He attended Upper Canada College and then received an engineering degree from University of Toronto, in 1968. He moved to Vancouver in 1969 to take a Masters in Social Work at UBC and lived in a ramshackle second floor apartment on West 4th Avenue. Vancouver was his home for the rest of his life. That early period of the 70s was a time of social and cultural flux, of optimism and change. It was when Bob became what we now call a progressive, although he’d have preferred a stronger term. Bob was an intelligent man, an excellent writer, and a principled person. Most of all, he was compassionate—someone who cared deeply for others and was affected by that which he and we could not repair.

Bob worked a variety of jobs over the years—social worker, writer, union staffer, among others—the longest being a bus driver for BC Transit and its successors. Who can forget his response when accused of reading while driving in North Vancouver? “The traffic was hardly moving; what’s the problem?” Unusually, perhaps, for a man raised in the 1950s, Bob’s work did not define him. He was more concerned with the people in his life and the world in which he lived. He deeply missed his best friend, Vaughan Corbett, who died in January 2014. Were Corbs here, we would all have some obligation to raise a glass one to the other.

It was no secret Bob struggled in his later years with alcoholism, a terrible disease, the affliction of which he made no secret. He was keenly aware of the burden he placed on those who loved him - in particular, Vaughan, Barbara, and Paula. He did not hide from this; he wouldn’t want us to. In lieu of flowers, Vaughan and his family and Bob’s extended family of friends and comrades ask that you make a donation to mental health and addictions help organizations and facilities.

A Memorial Tea will take place on Saturday, January 27th, 2:30pm - 4:30pm at First Memorial Burkeview Chapel in Port Coquitlam. Vaughan and his family and Paula invite all of you to come to celebrate Bob and to remember the past and look forward in these difficult times to a better future.