Stark County man still seeks answers to mysterious death of Ravenna sailor 65 years ago

Barry Gilligan only encountered Kenneth Smith once, but he left an impression that lingers more than 65 years later.

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The Lake Township resident believes it was around 1956, the year he turned 14, that he went to a farm outside of Warren for a gathering of the Warren Astronomy Club, now the Warren County Astronomical Society.

That was where he saw Smith.

Gilligan did not speak to Smith and does not remember whether Smith was wearing his Navy uniform or civilian clothing. What he does remember is the way others treated Smith.

"He seemed well known by various [people], and in conversations with him, they seemed to defer to him, even the older and more experienced club members," Gilligan wrote in notes he has taken in his research of Smith's life.

Like Smith, Gilligan was not only an amateur astronomer, but he also built telescopes to sell to other amateurs. Following Smith's death while on his ship off the coast of Greece in September 1957, Gilligan went to the Ravenna home of Smith's parents to purchase telescope parts that Smith stored there. He also acquired business documents, including copies of correspondence between Smith and others.

"I had the impression that he was a good writer," said Gilligan. "And a bit of a go-getter."

The memory of Smith and those documents have stuck with Gilligan, now 80, and over the last few years, he has been attempting to research Smith's life, with the eventual aim of writing a definitive obituary for Smith to post online. This includes Smith's somewhat mysterious death, leading Gilligan to wonder whether Smith's parents were ever even told how their son died.

"There was something his parents said that led me to believe he died in a ship's fire, but if I'm to believe the ship's log, he died by suicide," said Gilligan.

From teenage businessman to sailor

Kenneth Theodore Smith Jr. was born on Aug. 16, 1936, and died Sept. 27, 1957, according his gravestone in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

According to an obituary published in the Record-Courier on Sept. 30, 1957, Smith was born in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, a town about 35 miles northeast pf Pittsburgh. Gilligan said he looked at Pennsylvania census records but had difficulty finding useful information.

"The way they're organized, I could not make any sense of them," he said.

The obituary only mentions Smith's parents, a grandmother and grandfather in Ravenna and a grandmother in Kittanning as survivors. Gilligan said it appears Smith was an only child.

It is unclear when the family moved to Ohio, but Smith attended Ravenna High School. Gilligan was able to find Smith's sophomore year photo, taken around 1951, while doing research at Reed Memorial Library in Ravenna.

The only other photo of Smith that Gilligan was able to find during his library research was one of him in his uniform that ran with the obituary. However, Smith's face was in shadow and did not reproduce well enough to make out significant detail. The original is likely either lost or was returned to his family.

Sometime during high school, Smith started his telescope business. Gilligan was able to find several advertisements that Smith placed in Sky and Telescope magazine in the early 1950s. Over time, Smith amended his business name, going from K.T. Smith to K.T. Smith & Co. to K.T. Smith Jr. & Co. Gilligan speculated with a laugh that the "Jr." was eventually added because Smith's father was tired of receiving "unsolicited phone calls" meant for his entrepreneur son.

"SMITH PRESENTS A sensational new 4" Newtonian telescope," reads the heading for a March 1953 ad.

Smith enlisted in the Navy while still 17 in January 1954. From June to September that year, he trained to repair binoculars and telescopes, becoming an opticalman II. Gilligan said this would have been an ideal job for Smith, who apparently had settled on a career in optics.

"Reading between the lines, he never graduated from high school," said Gilligan.

Smith was stationed for a time in Norfolk, Virginia. re-enlisted in 1956 and served aboard the U.S.S. Amphion, a 500-foot repair ship. He had attained the rank of petty officer second class and was on board when it set sail for the Mediterranean to service ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

What exactly went wrong after that is something Gilligan is still trying to figure out.

Research has been slow going

Besides his library research, which was with the help of Kevin Gray, an adult services and genealogy librarian, Gilligan has made a number of Freedom of Information Act requests to both the Navy and the National Archives.

Legally, an individual's service records become public information 62 years after the person dies, as Smith's did in 2019.

But tracking down the location of records has been a bit of a slog, with the pandemic slowing things down even more.

One useful document outside of Smith's own records that Gilligan was able to acquire was the Amphion's log for August, September and October 1957.

In an entry at 7:50 a.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28, while the ship was off the coast of Greece, it was noted that Smith was absent when the crew was mustered.

The next entry, at 8:05 a.m. states that "Smith, K.T. Jr…was found dead in compartment C—603—A apparently as a result of self inflicted hanging."

A board of investigation was immediately appointed, but Gilligan said he has not been able to find any additional details of that investigation. If the date of death on Smith's gravestone is accurate, it was apparently determined he had died sometime before midnight.

And if Smith did take his own life, the main question remains unanswered: Why?

The obituary is only five short paragraphs.

"A telegram was received Saturday by Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Smith Sr., 128 Wall St., Ravenna, from the U.S. Navy Department, Washington, D.C., notifying them of the death of their son, Kenneth Jr…Details pertaining to his death have not been learned by the family," the obituary states.

A search of Portage County property records did not come up with any results for the address in the obituary.

Gilligan said services and burial were on Oct. 9.

A 'poignant' discovery

Every grave in Arlington National cemetery has a story, said Gilligan, and he is in the position to tell one of them. So he continues his research of Smith's life as he can. He said he would really like to find someone who knew Smith, a family member or perhaps a friend, but so far he has been unsuccessful.

Gilligan studied physics at Ohio State University in early 1960s and considered a career as an optical engineer, designing lenses, but decided he enjoyed computer programming more. He worked for an aerospace engineering firm in Princeton, New Jersey, authored a number of technical papers, and worked in California before retiring early in 1992.

Gilligan says that when he looks back at his own experiences, he thinks of Smith.

"In some sense, I had the life that could have been Ken's," he said, noting that the Russians launched Sputnik I less than a week after Smith's death, an event that spurred the United State's own push into space.

"He missed Sputnik I and the launch of the space age," said Gilligan.

Among the documents Gilligan acquired from Smith's parents is a rendering of a non-existent astonomical observatory. The drawing includes a sign that says "Smith Observatory."

"It struck me as rather poignant because that was obviously a dream he had for himself and it obviously never came to pass," Gilligan said.

Reporter Jeff Saunders can be reached at jsaunders@recordpub.com.

This article originally appeared on Record-Courier: Stark man seeks answers to 1957 death of Ravenna sailor aboard ship