By Gary Topping–
Last Sunday’s newspaper carried, for me, a very sad obituary, announcing the death of Melvin T. Smith. In 1978 Melvin, then Director of the Utah State Historical Society, took a big chance on me, a freshly minted Ph.D. flailing around in the infamously brutal job market for historians, and gave me my first job in the profession. I worked for him for the next eight years until he left to take over the Idaho State Historical Society, but we remained fast friends for the rest of his life.
Melvin grew up on a large cattle ranch in the harsh environment of Cowley, Wyoming, in the Big Horn Basin up against the Montana border. The cowboy in him was never just beneath the service; it was always right ON the surface, with his trim muscular body, his calloused hands, and his good looks which were the embodiment of “rugged.” For all his life, he loved horses and rural living, and kept in shape by running marathons. I would bet anything that his clothing size at the time of his death was exactly what it had been in high school. As a young man, he served a hitch in the Navy, and he proudly told me once when his crew had to throw a line (“rope” for you non-sailors) from one ship to another or some such thing, and no one could get it there, Mel volunteered, and with his great strength and cowboy roping skills, made it on the first throw.
During the years I worked for him, I held him in awe; for me, Melvin T. Smith WAS Utah history. For the first year or two, I was afraid of him and used to get really nervous when I had to go talk to him about something. In time, though, I learned that the problem was mine, not his, and that in fact he was humble, warm, generous, and very, very funny. I remember several times when he had me laughing so hard I was almost literally rolling on the floor.
Melvin was a member of THE Smith family, a descendant of one of the Mormon prophet’s brothers. He lived the Mormon faith as long as he could and as sincerely as he could, serving a mission in the New England states and earning his Ph.D. under the great Mormon historian LeRoy Hafen at Brigham Young University. But Mormonism, spiritually, somehow could never contain him, and he was always a religious seeker, mostly in Eastern and New Age faiths. I could be wrong, but I do not believe that he ever attended church during the years I knew him. Instead, he used to practice Transcendental Meditation. And now I learn, for the first time from his obituary, that he became involved as a practitioner and instructor in something called “A Course in Miracles” during the last decades of his life. I hope his restless soul found in it the fulfillment he claimed it did.
His short tenure at the Idaho State Historical Society was not, for reasons I never completely understood, a happy one. What I did observe, to my disappointment, was a growing disenchantment with history itself, and the possibility of writing objectively valid history at all. We had a couple of very uncomfortable, for me, conversations in which he told me that he was coming to see even the factual basis of history as very slippery, and that if we couldn’t know everything about history, then we couldn’t know anything at all for sure. I remember becoming very angry with him for seeming to reject the very premise that both he and I had dedicated our lives to—the existence of objective truth and the possibility of capturing at least a portion of that truth in our historical writing. I felt somehow like a disillusioned son who suddenly learned that his beloved father had been living a double life. In time, thank God, he got over it—prodded, I hope, at least in part by my angry rebuke.
Mel, I’m sorry I never took the opportunity to tell you how much of my life and my entire career I owe to you for taking that big chance back there in 1978. I do know that you followed my career, and I hope that you were able to find something, at least, in the little that I have accomplished, as vindication for that big risk you took. I had you in mind all the time.
*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles.
