81-year-old La Sierra grad proves it’s never too late to learn

Smith graduated in June 2018 the eldest of La Sierra’s largest-ever graduating class of 501 students. He now lives at The Villages in Florida near one of his four sisters and where he is closer to his three sons who reside on the East Coast. With fond memories of his time at La Sierra in mind, he encourages others, regardless of their age, to never stop learning.

“It’s exciting,” said Smith following La Sierra's June 17 Founders’ Green ceremony. “I gained much more than the education process.” 

Smith, father of three and grandfather of 11, earned a bachelor’s degree in history in 1961 and pursued a successful 47-year management career with Fortune 500 wholesale paper companies in locations around the country. 

He had always enjoyed learning and possessed a penchant for writing picked up during his early schooling. So a few years after his retirement in 2004, he became interested in taking college English classes. By then he was living in Riverside where a chance encounter in 2010 with La Sierra University Foundation Executive Director and president emeritus Larry Geraty proved pivotal. The two sat next to each other at a sports medicine clinic where both were undergoing physical therapy. They struck up a conversation during which Smith told Geraty of his interest in college courses. Through Geraty’s direction, Smith audited a class at La Sierra titled “The Bible as Literature” with English professor emeritus Robert Dunn. 

The class proved to be a positive experience and Smith audited four more classes, World War II, Russian History, Creative writing and Memoir Writing, where he was exposed to the creativity of associate English professor Sari Fordham’s students. In 2016 he signed up for Fordham’s memoir writing class. She asked whether he had considered enrolling in La Sierra’s Master of English degree program. 

“I met with [department chair] Dr. McBride and it fell into place,” Smith said. He officially enrolled as a La Sierra graduate student in February 2016. 

While he pursued his master’s degree, the English department, impressed with Smith’s abilities, hired him to serve as an instructor in the Writing Center teaching undergraduates how to write research papers. His efforts resulted in his selection as College Writing Instructor of the Year in May 2018. 

Fordham noted Smith’s dedication to his students which included getting out on the softball field with several of those who were ball players. “Jim is wonderful. He is just a class act,” she said.

Melissa Brotton, associate English professor stated, “Jim gives something of himself to his teaching, something students will remember about him once they move on through their university experience.”

For Smith, it was a mutual experience. “When I came here [La Sierra University] I fell in love with the place. I was challenged by the younger people,” he said. And the literary works, many of which he had read in prior years, took on new life through the teaching of the English department faculty, he said.

Smith grew up 12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh in the manufacturing enclave of Turtle Creek, Penn., the eldest of five siblings. He has four younger sisters. His father was a carpenter, and his mother was a homemaker who raised the couple’s five children. 

When he was 6 years old, he was given a book and a football and was told that one of them would serve as a mechanism for getting him out of the industrial area if he worked hard. His parents explained this concept by describing to him the biblical parable of the servants whose master gave them each talents of his property, or money. All but one wisely invested and increased their talents, and the one who did nothing with his allotment had it subsequently taken away. His parents’ guidance impacted the young Smith.

His interest in writing budded in elementary school where he wrote short stories and was introduced to poetry by his fourth grade teacher. While in high school, two of his poems were selected to be included in the National Anthology of High School Poetry, one of which received one of the seven special mentions given. And while studying at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Penn. he wrote the lyrics for a student-produced musical that merited a writeup in the Philadelphia Inquirer. 

During his adulthood, he wrote eight binders filled with memoirs, in part to deal with the deaths of two wives. He and his first wife of 34 years raised three sons. The approach they used in guiding their children Smith would apply years later as a teacher in La Sierra’s Writing Center. “You go with the assumption that they are capable of achieving the objective. My role is to shepherd them through it,” he said.

Smith holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Albright College, a 162-year-old private liberal arts college in Reading, Penn. He spent 39of his 47-year professional life in management positions in three divisions of International Paper, the largest pulp and paper company in the world. Its website states the conglomerate has52,000 employees operating in 24 countries.

Smith built sales forces and distribution systems in Illinois, New Jersey, and California. He moved to Southern California from New Jersey in 1989 to take over International Paper’s western region, a milk carton production division whose products end up in virtually every supermarket in the country. 

“They allowed me to do what I wanted to do,” he said. “They gave me free rein to be creative and meet objectives. I had fun for 30 years.”

He now looks forward to whatever his next challenge may be. Smith says while he’s been asked whether he will pursue a doctoral degree, he is satisfied with his latest academic achievement.

“I have gained much from this experience and I hope I’ve given some of it back,” he said. “This has been the jewel in the crown.”