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| Corinne Smith (Photo: The Detroit Times) |
For nearly a
decade, I lived next-door to a woman in Michigan who was a pioneer of her time. I never knew it until now. Corinne
Smith was elderly and retired, very independent, lived alone, and didn’t share
anything about her life. She was
reclusive, yet friendly when we saw her.
If there was ever a need for her to ring our doorbell for something, she
wouldn’t come inside, preferring to talk to us on our front porch. Likewise, when we wanted to check on her or needed
to share something with her, it was done just outside her front door. We were never invited into her house. Assistance and help were rarely accepted from
us, yet occasionally we would find a grocery bag of fresh vegetables from her
garden placed inside our screened porch.
It seemed she appreciated our efforts.
We lived in Grosse
Pointe, a walkable community with sidewalks fronting neighborhood yards on both
sides of every street; a grocery store and retail shops were just a few blocks away. Every day Corinne walked somewhere, often
with scarf over her head and the ends tied under her chin to keep her hair in
place. It’s a visual memory I carry
about her and I always wondered where she was going. Sometimes she pulled a folding shopping cart
behind her; most of the time she was without it. I later learned many of those walks were to
places where she volunteered, something she did from the moment she reached
retirement age. I’ve no idea if she ever
drove a car as we never saw her behind the wheel, but given her past it is very
likely she did at one time.
When we moved to
Chicago in 2004, she wished us well and told us goodbye. That was the last contact we ever had with
Corinne, and I just recently discovered that she passed away in 2015. She was ninety-four, and her obituary stated
that “even as her health declined, Miss Smith resolved to live with as little
assistance as possible.” It was her
obituary that surprised me.
A journalist with
a Master’s Degree, she traveled extensively in the 1940s and 1950s, served with
the American Red Cross in such countries as India, China, Japan, Korea and
North Africa; travel writing took her overseas, as well. In 1952, she became “one of the few women
ever to ride in a jet plane,” according to a Detroit Times article. She worked as a writer and editor for the Wyandotte Tribune, Detroit Times and Detroit
Free Press, eventually having her own column. Retiring in 1986, she was once quoted as
saying, “I’ve been very lucky to have had the opportunity to travel all around
the world. Not many people can list the countries they haven’t been to easier
than the ones they have been to.”
When you’re a
vital and active person walking through that door of retirement, hearing it
slam shut as you cross the threshold might cause the outlook for the rest of
your life to be a little sobering. This
would be especially so for a woman who, as far as I know, never married and had
no children. I often wondered how lonely
she might be, yet she lived a healthy and independent life for twenty-nine
years after retiring.
I wish I had known
this information about her when we were neighbors, even though given her
solitary lifestyle, knowing wouldn’t have changed much, if anything. It’s doubtful that any knowledge of her past
would alter how and when she wished to interact with us, and it would not have modified
her guarded privacy. As a former
colleague once said of her, “She was a trailblazer…ahead of her time. She was a wonderful role model, a wonderful
mentor.”
Saying such words
to Corinne Smith would not have mattered much to her, however, having the
opportunity to do so held greater meaning for me. I hope she at least knew of that trail she
blazed, and the barriers that were dented due to her life. It meant something to women in general and to
me; to the little girls who looked toward the future with promise and hope,
wondering what they were capable of doing, she was a role model. How I wish I could’ve thanked her.
