Gerald A. Smith; Educator Helped Establish Museum

Gerald A. Smith, an educator and Inland Empire pioneer who helped launch the respected San Bernardino County Museum, then spent his later years defending the assertion that a desolate patch of California desert was once a cradle of civilization, has died.

Smith, a rambunctious renaissance man whose eclectic interests swung from coaching high school football to documenting the cattle brands of the San Bernardino Valley, died at his home Tuesday. He was 85, and the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Smith had remained energetic and active, maintaining his usual prolific standards by writing about baseball, mission Indians, the museum and his family history in his final years.

“He was one of those people from the World War II generation that really valued life and squeezed a lot into it,” said the oldest of his four children, Jerilynn Smith. “He enjoyed learning and growing and sharing. Everybody thinks their parents are special, but he was a rather unusual person. And yet he still made breakfast for us every morning. I don’t know how he did it.”

‘He Lived a Very Full and Rewarding Life’

Smith was the superintendent of schools in Bloomington, an unincorporated San Bernardino County community near Colton, when he helped launch the museum in 1952. The museum’s first headquarters consisted of barns and warehouses, then surplus school buildings.

In the 1970s, Smith persuaded the county Board of Supervisors to open the museum’s permanent offices in Redlands, where the building’s dome is still visible from the San Bernardino Freeway, peeking through the dwindling number of orange groves in the area. The move was made largely because of the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, which, many feared, would rattle the institute’s collection of bird eggs.

Until 1983, Smith was the museum’s first director, and he helped mold it into a venerable educational site and a historical marker in a region that desperately needed one.

“I think he lived a very full and rewarding life,” said Joan Dotson, a Redlands resident and the secretary of the San Bernardino County Museum Assn., who met Smith in the early 1980s. “He had a vision. The museum is just a terribly important institution for this place.”

The museum was taken over by the county in 1961, an early measure of Smith’s tireless devotion to the preservation of history.

Smith was born in Gravette, Ark., but moved to Redlands, then an upper-crust citrus town, as a child.

He graduated from Redlands High School in 1933 and, in 1937, from the University of Redlands, where he was later inducted into the Athletic Hall of Fame for basketball and football. Smith did graduate work in anthropology, business administration and educational administration at Harvard University, UCLA and USC.

Serving in World War II, he was stationed in the Marshall Islands, where, in his spare time, he developed education programs.

He was later schools superintendent in Warm Springs, Bloomington and Colton, all the while churning out publications on education, history, archeology and anthropology.

In the scientific community, he is perhaps best remembered as a key backer of the Calico Early Man Archaeological Site, a patch of Mojave Desert north of Barstow where archeologists have allegedly unearthed evidence of ancient human occupation.

After amateur archeologists found what they believed to be primitive stone tools there in 1942, Smith was instrumental in luring famous anthropologists Ruth DeEtte “Dee” Simpson and Louis Leakey to the site. Leakey formally launched the dig in 1964.

Since then, workers have unearthed thousands of relics that they believe are scrapers, picks, axes and anvils, many of which are stored at the San Bernardino County Museum. The site’s supporters, and some scientists, believe that the relics are tools manufactured about 200,000 years ago.

If they are right, that would make the site by far the earliest indication of a human presence in the Western Hemisphere--and one of the most important archeological sites in the world, one anthropologist recently pointed out, with more than a dash of skepticism.

Unfazed by Criticism of Archeological Theory

Many mainstream scientists believe the “tools” are just old rocks, and some have discounted the site’s importance. But to this day, the Early Man Site remains a quirky obsession for a group of volunteers convinced that they are sifting through the oldest remnants of people in North America.

The criticism of the project never bothered Smith, his daughter said.

“He liked the puzzles. There wasn’t an ego investment in it,” Jerilynn Smith said.

” . . . I think he was very hopeful that it was going to be a contribution to our knowledge about early man. I never heard him say that he didn’t think it was a possibility.”

Smith is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maxine McGowan Smith, a psychiatrist; the four children--three educators and a physician; and nine grandchildren.

The family asks that written memories of his life be sent to P.O. Box 1004, Redlands, CA 92373. A celebration of his life will be held at 2 p.m. March 24 in the Casa Loma Room at the University of Redlands.