Pat Smith Parade a success

Jun. 13—GREENSBURG — Saturday's Pat Smith Bicentennial Parade was an unequaled spectacle of Tree City Who's Who, a slice-of-life display of a small American town where a tree grows out of the county courthouse roof while those beneath it live out their lives.

And it was fitting that the parade's Grand Marshall was Pat Smith, a transplant to the community and columnist for the local newspaper who has documented almost a quarter of Greensburg's history in her own words.

Anyone who has read Pat's columns through the years might agree with recent appraisals of "unparalleled" and "incomparable" to sum up her persona, but when she tells a story with her typical wit and honesty, those appraisals ring true.

"The person who first asked me to write for the newspaper was Editor Ed Nichols, after the original publisher of the Greensburg Daily News Walter Lowe sold it," she said as she began the story of her local celebrity. "And he'd just seen my work only briefly."

Pat McIntyre Smith was born in 1935, the youngest child of a family of hardworking Cumberland, Kentucky farming folk. She remembers when she was very young and her family moved to a farm on the outskirts of Louisville, and how that house had no indoor plumbing and only later had electricity.

"I spent my days walking in the woods and playing with our animals, and that's where my love for animals came from. Good Lord, I raised everything there!" she said. "But things were different then. We felt safe. I would never let my children do that now."

People would come to visit and stay two or three nights. Her father would stay up late talking to them, and Pat would stay up and listen.

"They talked about things that were so foreign to me," she said, "and that's how I became curious."

She remembers a particular discussion on one of those nights of the Cumberland River catching fire from an accidental oil spill.

"I couldn't imagine how water could catch fire. I was fascinated," she said.

Pat moved to Greensburg with her first husband. The young couple joined the Presbyterian church and had a beautiful daughter, but his work transferred the young family away just a few short years afterward.

And, as things sometime happen, marriages fall apart and needs must be met, so Pat, with daughter Tracey in tow, returned to Greensburg and put down permanent roots.

"We came back here because it was roughly halfway between my family in Louisville and Tracey's specialists," Pat explained.

While very young, Tracey contracted spinal meningitis and complications followed her most of her life.

"I fell in love with Greensburg. Here they took time to get to know each other, it wasn't like that in big cities," she said.

And so she settled into her life as a "Greensburgite," getting a job selling monuments at Smith Monuments in town. She first wrote when she started doing articles for the Indiana Monuments Association, stories about the interesting designs on gravestones and their many meanings. And she won awards for her work there. But being a bit bored writing about gravestones, she jumped at an opportunity to work at the Greensburg Daily News.

"I started selling ads part-time, but Ed Nichols asked me if I wanted to write a column and of course I said 'yes,'" she said.

For Pat, the columns she's written for the local newspaper have been an important part of her own history. Even though she argues the point, it has elevated her to unintentional local celebrity status.

"As anyone should know, it's never made me a pile of money, but it has kept me going through a few rough times in my life," she admits.

Her column in the Greensburg Daily News kept her going through her husband Jim's death. She wrote about the pain as a therapy of sorts.

And she wrote through the pain of daughter Tracey's death in her own very personal, matter of fact way. Tracey passed away at 59 from the complications she'd had with spinal meningitis.

"Depression? You'd better believe it," her column in an October 2021 issue read.

"But I learned, as probably everyone who lost a loved one did, to keep busy," she said. "Thank goodness I kept writing the column, which meant I talked with people. That is at least one way of dealing with that kind of depression. Maybe it will never go away. I can hope that everyone who lost a loved one finds a way to keep busy. That was the worst time in my life by any measurement, but I had my column to write."

Pat credits her longevity and local success as a columnist to the people who "brought her in." When she was first getting established as the local columnist, city founders would call her and say, "Pat, you might want to look into this" or "give so-and-so a call."

"They're all dead now, but I couldn't have done it without them. They took me under their wings and gave me things to write about," she said.

Pat has told many stories through the years — tales of places in the past, old and new trends, places people gathered — but she admits the stories she's most enjoyed have been about average people.

"Once you do a couple of interviews with an older person who's never had anyone take an interest in them, what they did when they were younger or when they were growing up, and have never been asked about it — those are the best stories. I've been glad to tell those stories," she said.

So why was a parade named after her?

"You know, I really don't know," she answered while laughing. "I don't even know whose idea it was to name the parade after me, but I would love to know!"

Then she added one other thought: "I think it would be fun 100 years from now for people to know my name, but they'll just say, 'Who in the the heck was Pat Smith?'"

Contact Bill Rethlake at 812-651-0876 or email bill.rethlake@greensburgdailynews.com