_{"Most Folks Just Called Him Smitty"}

One of the most familiar faces about town and along Vermilion’s waterfront for many decades was a man named Warren G. (the “G” was for Gold) Smith. Most folks just called him “Smitty”.

Born in 1897 he was the second of three sons born to Lewis and Nellie Smith. Possibly because his father was a farmer neither “Smitty”, his older brother Jame “Alfred”, nor his younger brother, Sterling, were strangers to hard work - physical or cerebral.

By the early 1920’s Smitty had left off farming to take up a business of his own design. The first enterprise was a gasoline and tire sales business located in the building which is now the home of Freeman-Eckley Inc. on the bank above Don Parsons Inc. boat marina/storage concern along Liberty Avenue. The Age of the Automobile had arrived and Smitty was there.

His next business was what most folks today would consider to be a convenient-type store. Its not clear whether that store was also located in the gas/tire station or if it was in the building now housing the Central Basin Bait and Tackle Store just to the west. Whatever the case, it was a tidy little emporium with a few tables, a four-stool lunch counter, candy and tobacco products in glass showcases, and various non-perishable goods neatly stacked on shelves around the room. All of this surrounded a strategically placed “one-armed bandit”. (This, incidentally, was not very unusual in more than a few bars, restaurants, and stores about town during that era.)

By about 1940 when the accompanying shadows of Smitty and his wife, Emily, were captured on film interacting with a veritable plethora of potential customers, their business had become primarily one of selling fishing supplies to sports fishermen, and renting boats to anglers and/or persons looking to simply spend an afternoon on the water.

To accommodate this enterprise he had moved from his stores on the bank above the river to the riverside. Along with his wife, and his brother Alfred they pounded in heavy piles and built docks along the river. He purchased a trolley car from the recently defunct Lake Shore Electric Railway system and used it for a bait store. The family, which now included son, Robert, and daughter, Jean, lived above the boathouse along the river just to the west of the bait store. And, as is quite obvious, business was not just good. It was great.

And it was there that Warren G. Smith - the fellow that most folks just called “Smitty” - came into his own milieu. It’s a place that only a few men or women are ever fortunate enough to find. It’s a place where one is comfortable not only doing what they want to do, but also have the ability to do it well, and to make a living doing it.

Sometime in the 1950’s Smitty sold the riverside enterprise and moved to a new, and a rather unlikely, location. He retired to a property on the north side of Darrow Road just west of Joppa Road in Vermilion Township. There he dug several lagoons to raise bait and operated a boating/fishing supply business out of a two-car cement block garage along the roadside. As before, his business prospered. Folks from Cleveland to Toledo who were going to fish out of Vermilion harbour went out of their way to go to “Smitty’s Bait”. It didn’t matter where it was.

In a different snapshot taken by another Vermilion, Ohio icon, Dr. Dickason, sometime near the end of his time on earth (1967) there Warren G. Smith stands: Fishing gear in his hands; old hat cocked across his brow; signature pipe in his mouth; forever doing what he loved and being who he was. Most folks just called him “Smitty”.

_{Ref: Ancestry.com; U.S. Federal Census - 1910, 1920, 1930; Ohio Deaths, 1908-1944; Special Thanks to Jim Smith, the late Mr. Robert Smith; Smith Family Photo Collection, and K. Dickason Kvach; Story orginally published in the Vermilion (Ohio) Photojournal on July 20th, 2006.}


7/16/06
12:58 PM

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© 2006 Rich Tarrant