Promising Classical Musician, 25, Feared Drowned After Fishing Trip

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.

Missing is Gregory Donnell Smithe, who was playing as the principal cellist with the University of California, Irvine, chamber and symphony orchestras as he approached completion of a master’s degree in music at the university.

Smithe, described as a “street kid” from a modest San Francisco family who became a talented and dedicated musician, disappeared from West Beach in South Laguna, an unincorporated community just south of Laguna Beach, late Friday afternoon. He had been fishing with a friend, Ben Pham, a classical guitarist. Pham told Stephen Erdody, Smithe’s professor, that he left the beach between 5:30 and 6 p.m. to retrieve a wallet from a car on the top of a 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.

Observation of Witness

A witness later told sheriff’s deputies that he saw a fisherman matching Smithe’s description waist-high in the surf, casting out 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. An extensive search turned up no one, Sheriff’s Lt. George Johnson said Wednesday. He added that Smithe--who was reportedly a strong swimmer--is presumed drowned, although his disappearance is still under investigation.

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 Chamber Orchestra, who knew the popular student cellist.

“We are all very broken up about this,” said Erdody, conductor of the UCI Chamber Orchestra and the cello professor at the university. “The unfinality of it is what is so 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 sadly.

Philharmonic Members

Erdody and other faculty members, along with members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra who knew Smithe, will perform Nov. 11. An all-student concert will be performed the next night. Proceeds will go toward a scholarship fund in his name, Erdody said, “but we are all kind of hoping he’ll walk in to rehearsal and say it was all a mistake.”

Smithe, who was attending UCI on a fellowship, had been fishing 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.

“He was kind of a street kid and wouldn’t study right,” Murray said, “but I noticed he always had a pocket book 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.”

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 were not good enough to be accepted at the San Francisco Conservatory but he got a scholarship to the Cincinnati Conservatory.

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