Peterborough native Jimmy Smith has a mission — to share how the values he learned growing up in Peterborough transformed his life, and brought him opportunities he never dreamed of.
“People always ask me, what keeps a 71-year-old guy coming back to a place he hasn’t lived in since 1973?” Smith said. “My answer is, this is home. Peterborough made me who I am. I came from the wrong side of the tracks, and it is 100% thanks to this community that I have had the life I had, and that I got to where I am today.”
Smith, a lifelong social worker and mental health counselor, has dedicated his life to helping others.
“It was different when I was growing up,” Smith recalled. “Peterborough was a true community, and the ‘haves’ took care of the ‘have-nots.’ But they didn’t do it for public recognition; they didn’t do it to have their name listed somewhere. It was just taking care of the people in your community; it was just what people did. Peterborough made me who I am, and I have spent my life tried to make the playing field level for others, especially children.”
Smith adds, “My family was dirt poor. I grew up with nothing, and look where I am today.”
In 2011, Smith was presented with the Jefferson Award for Volunteerism, an award created by Jacqueline Kennedy in to honor outstanding volunteers. In 2010, Smith was presented with the Schauffler Legacy Award by his alma mater, Defiance College, for 35 years of service to the board of the school, and in 2013, Smith was inducted into the Ohio Senior Citizen Hall of Fame for his service to the community. Recently, Smith and his wife, Connie, were honored for raising over $200,000 for children with Type 1 diabetes.
“I’m lucky,” Smith said. “Everything I have is because I grew up in Peterborough. It is the basis of my entire life, and I am so grateful. The way I was raised, everyone took care of one another. It was just what people did.”
Smith’s father worked in the Noone Falls mill, and his mother was a cook in the Guernsey building.
“My mother only had a sixth-grade education, and my father only finished fifth grade. I was the youngest of eight kids,” Smith recalled. “I shoveled snow, I raked leaves, I did whatever I could to help my family survive. Then one day, Mert Dyer from Dyer Drug saw me working, and asked me if I wanted to come over and work at the soda fountain. I thought I had died and gone to heaven, getting to work inside!”
Smith says that his years working at Dyer Drug were the most important of his entire working life.
“In my years at Dyer Drug, I worked harder and learned more about people than I ever did in the rest of my career, and that was thanks to Mert Dyer and his dad and his brother,” he said.
Smith’s many role models included his Little League coach, Bob Borsari, who owned the Peterborough Shoe Store, and Paul Hobbes, founder of the Peterborough jewelry store. He remembers delivering valuable jewelry and watches for Hobbes, “and never once did I have to lock the car.”
Smith recalls taking out his first bank loan after graduating from college.
“I was just 21 years old, and I had to take a loan. I don’t know who co-signed on the loan, but someone did. They gave me a loan, and I paid every penny of it back,” Smith said. “For people in Peterborough back then, your word was your bond. It was all small businesses competing, and you had to keep your reputation. If you were dishonest to your customers, word got around.”
Smith recalls that for kids and teens growing up in Peterborough, there was an open-door policy.
“We all ate at one another’s houses; we were all in and out. The rule was, you could eat whatever you wanted, you just had to clean up afterwards and put everything back where you found it,” Smith said. “We all had a whole bunch of ‘moms,’ and everyone looked out for everyone else. You would see someone else’s mom years later and say, ‘Hi, Mom!’”
Smith remembers one time when the “eat anything” rule caused a minor upset at the home of his close friend, Bradley “Butch” Brighton.
“Mrs. Brighton had three pans of Lobster Newburgh in the oven, and we boys all came in, and Butch pulled out a pan, and we ate most of it. We didn’t know Mrs. Brighton had it all ready to take to a fundraiser up at the hospital,” Smith recalled.
Smith reflects that in many places, he might not have had become lifelong friends with Brighton, who was the son of a judge.
“Butch and I were from opposite sides of the tracks, but we have been the best of friends since we were kids, and there is real love there, because of where we came from and how we grew up. His parents were like second parents to me, ” Smith said. “Everyone treated everyone else with respect back then; no one put on airs. I remember Perkins Bass, Walter Peterson – they would say, ‘Don’t call me by my title, not when I’m home in Peterborough.’ People like Judd Hale, Clarence Derby and Jimmy Grant and Paul Cummings – they all took care of people in the community.”
Smith said that until he was much older, he never knew the identity of a neighborhood “Santa Claus” who distributed gifts to the children in low-income families on Old Street Road and Old Greenfield Road.
“When we were kids, we just thought, it’s Santa,” Smith said. “We never questioned it. We never knew.”
When he was older, Smith learned that the neighborhood Santa was none other than George Parker, of the Parker Bros. game company, who had a summer home near the Smiths.
“He sent his caretaker, Estella, to the town clerk to find out what kids lived in the neighborhood – whether they were girls or boys and how old, and sent everyone gifts,” Smith said.
Although he never moved back to Peterborough after attending college in Ohio, where he met his wife Connie, Smith still considers Peterborough home. Jimmy and Connie retired to Florida from Ohio nine years ago, but Smith still returns to Peterborough regularly. He has given talks about Peterborough history for years, and more recently, has started popular trivia nights around the region.
“The trivia nights are not so much about the actual trivia,” Smith said. “It’s about telling people what it was like back then — what Peterborough was like. It’s about how people treated one another back then, and the way things were. People ask me, ‘Jimmy, do you get paid to this?’ And I say, ‘I get paid by seeing the looks on people’s faces, in bringing back those memories.’”
While giving a talk at Summerhill recently, Smith was delighted to run into one of his old teachers from Peterborough High School.
“She probably knew 85% of the questions,” he said.
When Smith’s father, Charles H. Smith, died in 1973, Jimmy came back to Peterborough for six months to help his mother adjust.
“I remember Hans Kaufhold from the monument company came over to our house and came in our kitchen, and he said to my mother, ‘Let’s go out back and find a field stone that Charles would have liked.’ Hans knew my family could not afford a memorial. He just helped and let me mother keep her dignity,” Smith recalled. “Where else could someone like Hans Kaufhold have created his business and succeeded? He spoke hardly any English when he came, and the Peterborough community just embraced him. The leaders of the business community said, ‘We need your skills here.’”
In 1973, Smith went into the Army, where, thanks to his social work degree, he was assigned to counseling Vietnam veterans returning with what was just being identified as PTSD.
“Back in those days, they still put people in straitjackets, which is illegal now. Mental health has changed a lot,” Smith said.
Smith credits Borsari, his childhood Little League coach, with pushing him to make more of his life.
“He said to me, ‘Jimmy, are you going to just stay here in Peterborough and work at the mill and never leave? Or are you going to make something if yourself?’ And I said to myself, ‘I am going to get an education,” Smith said.
Smith said he sees differences with the way children are raised and experience the world today.
“Money is nothing to kids now. They don’t understand what its worth. What I learned very early on is don’t expect, appreciate,” he said. “Who would ever thought a kid whose dad worked in the mill and mother worked in the kitchen at the Guernsey would get to where I have gotten? It’s all thanks to Peterborough – everything. ”