Our Arklahoma Heritage: Washington County woman lived life to the fullest for all of her 106 years before 2021 death

Ellen Smedley Smith was born on December 7, 1914, in Denver, Colorado, the third of six children in a family of dentists. Her grandfather, William Smedley, a Quaker from Pennsylvania, had packed up his drills and moved west in 1870 to open the city’s first dental practice.

By the time Ellen arrived, her father Victor Clyde and two uncles had joined the business, turning it into the Smedley Dental Clinic downtown. Summers, though, belonged to the mountains. While one of the men pulled weekend duty in a tiny log office next to the family cabin in Estes Park, Ellen and her siblings and cousins ran wild, hiking, fishing, chasing chipmunks, and learning every trail by heart.

The cabin would later be renamed the Clyde Smedley cabin, and for the next nine decades Ellen never missed a July reunion there.

She spent two years studying humanities and world cultures at Scripps College in Claremont, California, then finished her degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder in 1936. Delta Gamma sorority parties introduced her to Jim Smith, a quiet engineering student with a quick laugh.

They married in Denver in 1937 and headed south to Dallas and Fort Worth, where Jim worked and their two children were born: Sarah Anne in 1940 and James L. Smith III—Jimmy—in 1942.World War II scattered the young family.

Jim shipped out to Europe; Ellen shuttled the kids between her parents in Denver and Jim’s in Baxter Springs, Kansas, always carving out six weeks each summer back at the Estes Park cabin.

When the war ended, Jim wanted a smaller town with good schools and room to breathe. Fayetteville, Arkansas, fit the bill. They bought a house on Ranch Drive and never left.

Ellen went straight to work making newcomers feel at home. She joined Welcome Wagon, clipboard in hand, delivering baskets and gossip about the best butcher and the safest babysitters.

While Sarah and Jimmy were at Washington School, she ran the PTA for a year.

She also co-founded a PEO chapter and tended roses with the Perennial Garden Club.Golf arrived in the 1950s. Jim and Ellen joined Fayetteville Country Club and played every chance they got. \

After the kids left for college, the couple swapped diapers for duffels and started traveling: Yellowstone at dawn, African safaris at dusk, bird lists growing longer than their Christmas cards. They came home with new friends on every continent.

Jim died in 1993. Ellen, 79 and newly solo, signed up for Meals on Wheels, flew to China with a University of Arkansas tour, and kept teeing off three mornings a week.

In 2014, at 99, the Golf Channel showed up with cameras. She striped a drive down the middle, grinned, and told the host, “It’s all in the follow-through.”

She held Razorback season tickets, front-row seats at the Walton Arts Center, and a library card that never expired. Mornings began with coffee, meditation, and a short prayer at the kitchen table; evenings ended with a handwritten note to someone, somewhere, who needed a lift.

At 97, back surgery grounded her for three months.

She fired up the walker, rebuilt her swing, and was back on the course by fall. When asked the secret to 106 years, she answered in two words: “Live with gratitude.”

At her 100th birthday party she quoted a Hindu line she’d carried since college: “The winds of grace are always blowing; we just have to put up our sails.”

Ellen died at home on March 18, 2021. Fayetteville lost its unofficial greeter, the Razorbacks their loudest cheer in the cheap seats, and the mailman a stack of envelopes every Christmas.