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Smith-Raymond.Pdf The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project RAYMOND F. SMITH Interviewed by: Charles Stuart Kennedy Initial interview date: January 14, 2009 Copyright 2015 ADST Q: Today is the 14th of January, 2009, and this is an interview with Raymond F. Smith, and this is being done on behalf of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, and I am Charles Stuart Kennedy. And you go by Ray, is that right? SMITH: That’s right. Q: Okay. Alright, let’s start at the beginning. When and where were you born? SMITH: I was born May 31, 1941, in Philadelphia. Q: Alright, let’s talk about- What do you know about your- say on the Smith side of the family first. SMITH: The Smiths, well, my father was Frank, Francis Raymond Smith. He was born in September, 1896 in Philadelphia and died in 1977 in Los Angeles. He had an eighth grade education. My mother, Catharine Miriam McGrory, was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, February 12, 1912 and died on February 11, 2005 in St. Augustine, Florida. She had a high school education. Both sides of the family are of Irish ancestry. Q: Alright. Do you know- Well, in the first place, what, say your grandparents on both sides, what were they up to? SMITH: Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. On my mother’s side, my grandfather was William Philip McGrory, born March 16, 1879 in Philadelphia and died May 6, 1941, just a few weeks before I was born. He had an elementary school education, ending at 6th grade. He was a delivery driver most of his adult life. In 1910, he drove a milk wagon, presumably, at that date, pulled by a horse. I can still remember those wagons from the 1940s. Later, he drove a delivery truck for the Pennsylvania railroad. Both of his parents were born in Ireland. My maternal grandmother’s name was Florence Rogers McGrory. She was born in 1880 and died April 28, 1970. Her father was born in Ireland and her mother, Catherine Muldoon, was born in Pennsylvania. Both of Catherine’s parents were born in Ireland. She was the only one of my grandparents I really knew. She died the year after I entered the Foreign Service. She was a housewife as was traditional then and lived most of her life with the youngest of her daughters. She had five children, three sons and two daughters, the oldest of whom was my mother. 1 On my father’s side, my grandparents were James P. Smith and Alice Rodgers Smith. He was born in Pennsylvania in1857 and died June 27, 1908. I believe that not longer after he died my father had to leave school and begin working. Both of his parents, James Smith and Elizabeth Fogarty, were born in Ireland. My grandmother, Alice Rodgers Smith, was born in Pennsylvania in 1871. She died in 1944 in Philadelphia. Both of her parents were born in Ireland. Q: What was your father’s business? I mean, what did he do? SMITH: My father did a lot of different things. When he was young he was in the Merchant Marines. He was actually in the Merchant Marines during World War I; he was a radio operator. But during my lifetime he only made one trip in the Merchant Marines. Most of the time he was a salesman, doing different kinds of sales. The most important fact about his business life is that he had pretty severe alcoholism. He was a binge drinker. He might go months without taking a drink, but once he took the first one he drank constantly day and night for weeks until he was either too sick to drink any more or too broke to buy any alcohol. At that point, he would go through a drying out process that took several days. Of course, he could not hold a job consistently given his condition. Q: What sort of neighborhood did you grow up in? SMITH: I grew up in a housing project in South Philadelphia. It was a low cost housing project and I lived there until I went in the Army when I was 17. My family was quite poor because of my father’s alcoholism and his inability to make a consistent living. At that time, the housing projects were segregated. I was in an all white housing project made of cinder block two story homes that were sort of whitewashed. The black housing project was about a mile, mile-and-a-half away from us and was made of much more flimsy and even less attractive materials. Q: How big was your family? SMITH: I’m the oldest of four children. I had two sisters younger than me and the youngest one was my brother, who was 11 years younger than me. Q: In your family- Was it a religious family would you say? SMITH: My father was not religious. My mother was raised Catholic, in fact went to a Catholic private high school outside of Philadelphia called Immaculata, which is a college now. She remained a devout Catholic until her death. We went to public schools but were raised to go to church on Sundays and we had to go after school to what they call catechism training, which the Catholic school kids got in school and for which we had to go in the summer and after school, which I resented highly. Q: So what did that do to you? 2 SMITH: What did it do to me? Nothing that dramatic. I was very rebellious about it for quite awhile and I refused- they had this catechism which was basically a bunch of questioning and answers, who is God, etc/, and I just refused to learn any of it and I was always like the black sheep. There was this other kid, I remember this, who was always doing well in this thing and I finally got teed off about it and started studying a little and became one of the star students. Q: How about as a kid in this, say in a project, was there- how’d you play around? Were there either gangs or just groups of you? And I’m not using the “gang” in a pejorative sense; I’m using it in the, you know, I mean sort of a group of kids getting out and playing there and all that? SMITH: Yes. You know, it really was a more innocent era than it became later and that extended to the housing projects too. I grew up, although I was a bit of a pre Baby Boomer, on a block that must have had 20 kids roughly around my age and there were just a whole gang of us that hung out, played; there was a playground nearby with the usual swings and that sort of thing. And you know, we made games of softball, touch football, and we were gone like from early in the morning until dark. Q: Yes. You know, I’m quite a bit older but it was the same thing; I’d call us almost feral. You know, your mother would say go out and play and we’ll be eating- don’t come back until 6:00 when we eat, or something like that and you went out and played and- SMITH: Exactly. Q: -I mean, there was no particular problem. SMITH: Nope. And sometimes we’d be knocking on other kids doors, before anybody else was even up and if we were in the house too much I remember one of my mother’s favorite expressions was, go out and blow the stink off you. You know, just get outside and get some fresh air. Q: As a kid were you much of a reader? SMITH: Yes, I was. I loved to read and early in my reading life I only had a couple of books. I had “Bambi,” which I must have read 100 times. Q: Felix Salten. SMITH: Yes. And I had “A Life of Christ,” which I didn’t read nearly as often but I read it. And you know, I was just reading to read. If those were the only books I had I would read them again and again. I also read tons of comic books and then as I got a little bit older, and got access to a library and stuff, I started reading a little bit more widely. I developed a fondness for science fiction; I liked to read science fiction a lot. 3 Q: In the neighborhood, you say there was a black section; I mean, I take it the two didn’t mix very much. SMITH: There was no interaction whatsoever except at school. Schools of course were integrated and I took a bus to my elementary school, which was called Bregy. My bus was all white and it would arrive there and then a bus would arrive from the black project and then we’d all be there together. Q: How did you find school? Let’s talk about the elementary school. How’d you like it? SMITH: I liked school a lot, because I got a lot of positive reinforcement there. I was a smart kid like most Foreign Service officers I guess are and they had a system where you get- at that time you got O, S, I, and U -- outstanding, satisfactory, needs improvement and unsatisfactory if you failed. I never got anything less than an O, I don’t think, in my entire elementary education so the teachers liked me, I liked the school.
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