From Assembly Line to Director's Desk

Ella Smith, ABE '66, HEAA Activist

by Christopher S. Queen, Dean of Students and Alumni Relations

Ella Smith

"Well, when I was growing up, I didn't know there was an opportunity to go to college--no one told me," Ella Pierce Smith, ABE '66, remembers. "My father was a Native American--Narragansett Indian--and the law states that if one or both parents are Native American you are entitled to attend college free." The high school guidance counselors in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, must have known about the law, Smith reflects, "but there wasn't much interest in minorities in those days."

Smith was one of the few minority students in the Bridgewater schools in the 1930s and '40s. But she made friends easily, mostly among the Irish-American majority (her mother's parents were of African and Irish descent), and enjoyed being invited over to their homes after school. In grade school Smith was known for winning the flower arranging competition for several years. "I was a free spirit," she recalls. "My younger brother and sister liked to stay home, but I just liked to wander around."

Going to college was part of the plan. But when senior year came and went, it was clear that the Pierces wouldn't be able to afford a college tuition, even at nearby Bridgewater State College. Instead, Smith's mother gave her an Underwood portable typewriter for graduation.

After unsuccessful attempts at waitressing and folding sheets at a laundry, Smith moved up to Roxbury to stay with her aunt. She took a job at the Cable Raincoat Company, sewing collars for men's raincoats. Earning a penny a collar ("double-stitched"), she tried to get ahead by sneaking back to her sewing machine during lunch breaks. But the labor union found out and "threatened to burn our house down if it happened again." Smith was placed on probation--not the first or the last time that she would come to the attention of her employers.

The Roxbury years were happy ones, as Smith met new friends and tried to save some money for college. She palled around with Inga, the German wife of a returning GI and a fellow coat-factory worker. They enjoyed going to the movies because Smith got to explain the many American colloquialisms to her European friend. She also attended public lectures and short courses at the local technical schools. She longed to enroll in a degree program, but the $5 a week she was able to save for college made her dream seem further away, not closer.

In the summer of 1953 a coworker gave Smith a brochure announcing fall courses at the Harvard Extension School. The tuition was low, the classes met in the evening, and many of the faculty were well-known scholars and scientists. Smith jumped at the chance to pursue her dream, embarking on a 13-year odyssey of full-time employment, all-night study ("I would try to get some sleep when I heard the birds start up"), and intellectual challenge. Taking one course per term, she found herself strongly drawn to the natural and biological sciences. Zoology with Professor Frank Carpenter opened her eyes to the complexity of "critters," while Dean John Munro's expository writing classes awakened her to the powers of self-expression ("If you have something to say, say it in the first paragraph").

During her years studying the arts and sciences at the Extension School, Smith pursued more hands-on vocational training on the side. She was certified in analytical chemistry as a laboratory technician, attending one of the many technical schools that flourished in Boston at mid-century. This training enabled Smith to leave the coat factory and begin a career in medical research and administration, and it was during this training that the gap between the expert instruction at the Harvard Extension School and the often haphazard training of the small vocational institutes became obvious to her. So, she helped to form a vocal lobby to press for the upgrading and full accreditation of the institutes and a four-year college degree requirement for medical technicians--reforms that were ultimately adopted in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

By 1960 Smith was working in the office of the eminent cardiologist Paul Dudley White and serving as a clinical manager for the Massachusetts Red Cross Blood Program. The Red Cross sent her to California for special training in the collection and storage of blood, and she published two technical papers on blood banking when she returned. She also contributed to the development of new machinery for the processing and preservation of blood plasma, the patents for which were taken out by the medical equipment corporation for which she consulted.

Smith met her husband, Hinton, in an old brownstone house where they both lived while studying for medical careers. He was pursuing lab science at one of the institutes and would often bring tales from the laboratory back to the dinner table. While the news that "we dissected a kidney today" may not be everyone's choice of mealtime chitchat, she was fascinated by the stories--and more by the storyteller. Like Ella, Hinton Smith went on to become a research chemist, and he contributed to the growing fields of vitamin research and nuclear medicine.

Ella Smith was awarded the Bachelor of Arts in Extension Studies (ABE) in 1966 along with the well-known Boston businessman Edgar Grossman. Over the next two years, Smith, Grossman, and other recent graduates worked with Dean Reginald Phelps to found the Harvard Extension Alumni Association (HEAA), and in 1968 during Commencement week the HEAA held its first banquet. As she wrote in "A Founder's Perspective" (Alumni Bulletin, fall 1999), "We held our June banquets in the President's House on Quincy Street and in the Busch-Reisinger Museum on Kirkland Street, and we had social gatherings at the JFK Library in Boston. Some of the great organizers from the early years are still active in the HEAA: Marion Cameron, ABE '71, Catherine Minahan, ABE '71, Ruth Leabman, AAE '77, ABE '82, Ruth Grove, ABE '67, Al Vaudo, AAE '71, ABE '73, and Gloria Vaudo, ABE '68."

Shortly before completing her Extension studies, Smith took a part-time job as supervisor at the Boston Evening Clinic--a position that would evolve into a 31-year career as the clinic's Executive Director. Founded by Dr. Morris Cohen to meet the medical needs of service workers in Boston's Back Bay, the clinic was open 4 to 11 pm daily, making it possible for workers to be treated before returning home to other parts of the city. The medical staff were moonlighters--"rather like the Extension School faculty"--offering their services in the evening after a full day in Boston's major hospitals. Patients were charged on a sliding scale, depending on their means; visits were typically 50 cents to $2 per visit, or free for those who could not afford the minimum. On the other hand, Governor Edward King's wife was one of the clinic's early patients.

Until the 1990s, the Boston Evening Clinic was housed in The Burrage House, a French provincial townhouse at the corner of Commonwealth Avenue and Hereford Street. Smith recalls, "It was quite a challenge to coordinate 30 employees on four floors in 123 odd-shaped rooms--without an intercom. We would just have to yell up and down the stairs." As director, Smith devoted most of her attention to financial and personnel management, but rarely a day went by that she wasn't called upon to fill other critical roles. She was the notary public and the security officer in the building. "Because of the prescription drugs and cash in the building, I was licensed to keep a loaded handgun in my desk." Smith even broke her knee moving furniture about the building and could be counted upon to appear, shovel in hand, on the corner of Commonwealth and Hereford when snowstorms blanketed the city and the custodian called in sick.

Despite the heavy demands of her professional career, Ella Smith always found time to volunteer in the community. While working as an analytical chemist in a research laboratory at MIT, she volunteered as a freshman advisor, a position she held for five years. In 1980 she joined the board of directors of Family Day Care Programs, Inc., in Brookline, and the following year became a board member of the West End branch of the Boston chapter of the American Cancer Society. From 1985 to the present, she has been a member of the Mayor's Commission on Elderly Affairs for the City of Boston, and in 1987 she was appointed as a member of the Senior Center Task Force for Boston.

In 1989, Smith and a friend from California were waiting for a cab after attending a medical convention in Boston. On a whim they decided to visit the Museum of Science. The museum was abuzz with excitement over the upcoming Ramses exhibit of rare artifacts from the tombs of the Pharaohs. Anticipating overflow crowds, the museum was inviting volunteers to be trained as tour guides for the exhibit. At her friend's urging, Smith spent the next four weekends immersed in the history of ancient Egypt, and within a month made her debut as a museum tour guide. Then, two years later--characteristic of Smith's free-spirited ability to try new things and excel at them--she was invited to join the Board of Overseers of the Museum of Science, a position she holds today.

Of all the commitments that have marked Ella Smith's rich career, none has meant as much as her leadership of the HEAA. As a member of the Steering Committee since 1968, as president from 1982 to 1985, and as chair of most of the committees the association has formed over its 35 years, Smith's goal for the HEAA has remained the same: "to make sure that the Extension School is seen as the important part of Harvard that it is." As the Extension School's longstanding, elected representative to the Harvard Alumni Association (HAA), Smith has become for many the most familiar face of the Extension School, serving with distinction on the Graduate Schools Committee and the Communications Committee. Noting the leadership of growing numbers of women and minorities among HAA directors, Smith observes proudly that "it is no longer a club for businessmen in gray flannel suits."

James Hunt, Chief Executive Officer of the Massachusetts League of Community Health Centers, for which Smith has served as senior policy consultant since 2001, recently had a granddaughter whom the parents named Ella. Smith lost no time in giving her infant namesake a US savings bond. "Whether or not the Hunts were thinking of me when they named their daughter, I wanted to put in my two-cents. Ella's not such a bad name," she adds. "I'm told that it means ‘Great Oak' in Hebrew."