Talented Young Cellist Thought Victim of Surf

A 25-year-old man described as a promising classical musician is missing and presumed drowned after vanishing from a beach in South Laguna, friends and Orange County authorities said Wednesday.

The missing man is Gregory Donnell Smithe, who has been the principal cellist with the UC Irvine chamber and symphony orchestras as he worked toward obtaining his master’s degree in music from the university.

Smithe, described as a “street kid” from a modest San Francisco family who became recognized as a talented and dedicated musician, disappeared late last Friday afternoon from West Beach in South Laguna. He had been fishing with a friend, Ben Pham, a classical guitarist. Pham told Smithe’s professor, Stephen Erdody, that he left the beach about 5:30 or 6 p.m. to retrieve a wallet from a car on the bluff. When he returned 20 minutes later, Pham said, his friend was gone and only Smithe’s tackle box and watch were on the sand.

A witness later told sheriff’s deputies that he saw a fisherman matching Smithe’s description waist-high in the surf, casting into the waves.

Pham searched the beach and at 7 p.m. contacted the Sheriff’s Department, which dispatched a helicopter and Harbor Patrol boats to the waters where Smithe was last seen fishing. For the next four hours, deputies searched a half-mile south and north of that location and found no trace of Smithe, Sheriff’s Lt. George Johnson said Wednesday.

Johnson said Smithe--who was reportedly a strong swimmer--is presumed drowned, although his disappearance is still under investigation. Prevailing southern currents along South Laguna shores often carry drowning victims down the coast before they surface and wash ashore. Sometimes the bodies are never found, Johnson said.

Erdody, conductor of UCI’s chamber orchestra and cello professor at the university, remembered taking a special interest in the young man after meeting him through the owner of a San Francisco instrument store where Smithe had worked. Soon, Smithe was studying with Erdody and performing with the UCI orchestras.

Faculty, students and graduates of the university’s music department are planning two memorial concerts next month in Smithe’s honor, although they aren’t certain he is dead. Also performing will be members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s chamber orchestra who knew the student cellist.

‘Very Poor Background’

“We are all very broken up about this,” Erdody said. “The (uncertainty) . . . of it is what is hard to take. . . . He was a young black graduate student from a very poor background who rose above all this and got a BA in music and was almost done with a master’s here. That in itself is very unusual. There aren’t many black classical musicians anywhere. He was very talented,” Erdody said.

“The proceeds from the concerts (on Nov. 11-12) will go towards a scholarship fund in his name, but we are all kind of hoping he’ll walk into rehearsal and say it was all a mistake.”

Smithe, who was attending UCI on a fellowship, had fished since he was a boy in San Francisco--long before he learned to play the cello that would later open a new life for him, said Joan Murray, his first cello teacher at San Francisco’s Aptos Middle School. She had kept in touch with him through the years: She wrote to Smithe when he studied in Cincinnati, sent him financial aid and saw him when he returned each year to work with young cellists at Aptos.

By the time he had reached sixth grade, teachers had identified Smithe as musically gifted, and when he reached seventh grade Murray became his beginning orchestra teacher. She said Smithe lived in a rickety house in the area south of Market Street known as Yerba Buena with his mother, Etta Morehouse, his stepfather and two brothers and three sisters.

Taught Him to Fish

Morehouse divorced the children’s father and married Frank Morehouse, who taught his stepson how to fish when he was 5 years old, she said in a phone interview from San Francisco.

“I really feel bad about the fishing part,” Morehouse said of her son’s apparent drowning. “I’d take Greg and his brother, Donald, fishing every day until I got tired of it. I stopped fishing, but he liked to fish at the little lake, Lake Merced, because there’s rainbow trout there. . . .

“The last five days I’ve been through so much grief and anger and oh. . . . My husband taught them how to fish, but now I think we should have taught them tennis or bowling.”

Besides fishing, the mother recalled, her son loved music.

“He started out on the violin, but he didn’t like putting that thing up under his chin,” she said. “He said he liked the cello because he didn’t have to hold it up.”

Joan Murray recalled: “He was kind of a street kid and wouldn’t study right, but I noticed he always had a pocketbook on him; he was always reading. I thought even though he was a pain, he seemed to have hope. He started on violin and didn’t like it, so I switched him to the cello.”

Became Serious

After she made him stay late one afternoon to study, and he vandalized her car, she made him sweep the orchestra room each week as penance. It was here, Murray said, that she believes he learned respect and got more serious about music.

“All of a sudden he was telling kids to be staying off his clean floor,” she said with a laugh. “I remember him falling in love with the cello at the same time.”

In the eighth grade he got his first cello from a woman he met on the bus, Murray said. She asked Smithe if he was a serious cellist; he said yes, and she dug the instrument out of her attic for him. Later, while working as a shopkeeper for Cremona Musical Instruments, owner Nash Mondragon loaned him a $3,000 cello that he continued to play at UCI.

He attended San Francisco’s Balboa High School and played with the student All-City Orchestra. That was when he “found himself and starting applying himself” to a career in classical music, Murray said. His grades weren’t good enough to be accepted at the San Francisco Conservatory, but he got a scholarship to the Cincinnati Conservatory.

Two years later, Mondragon introduced the budding cellist to Erdody, and Smithe transferred to UCI, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in music, Erdody said.

Living in Cubbyhole

Erody said he learned Wednesday that Smithe received a stipend of no more than $5,000 for living expenses. He said Smithe had said that he was living with roommates in Westminster, but they learned only after his disappearance that he’d actually been staying in a cubbyhole of the orchestra’s rehearsal room.

Erdody learned of Smithe’s apparent death Saturday morning, when he arrived at the university for a rehearsal with the chamber orchestra. The session was cancelled.

The first memorial concert will be a “cello-oriented program for him,” Erdody said. Erdody and other faculty members, along with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic who knew Smithe, will perform Nov. 11. An all-student concert is scheduled the following evening.