R. Scudder Smith: 2006 ADA Award Of Merit Winner

NEWTOWN, CONN.

:If R. Scudder Smith, editor and publisher of Antiques and The Arts Weekly and The Newtown Bee, lived by a mantra, which, of course, he doesn't, it would be: work hard, have fun, be kind, indulge your passions (and your eccentricities), and don't take any of it too seriously, least not yourself.

As the winner of the 2006 Award of Merit, to be presented by the Antiques Dealers Association of America (ADA) at the group's annual dinner in Philadelphia on April 8, he will be mortified to read much of the following. Given the measure of his accomplishment, we've decided not to spare his feelings.

I'd recently been hired by the Museum of American Folk Art, as it was then called, when I met Scudder 28 years ago. My first assignment was dismantling the temporary exhibition, "The All American Dog: Man's Best Friend in Folk Art."

Scudder, already a well-known collector, stopped by to retrieve "Spike," his shaped-canvas portrait of a bull dog. Scudder struck me as gentlemanly if somewhat grave. He was matinee-idol handsome, Montgomery Clift in an Hermes tie and Gucci shoes. This was years before Tom Armstrong, the Whitney Museum of American Art's former director and fellow folk art aficionado, introduced Scudder to the bow-tie maker who has gift-wrapped him ever since.

Scudder and I met again eight years later when I answered his ad seeking an associate editor for Antiques and The Arts Weekly, whose genesis dates to 1963. I drove to Newtown and parked in the lot adjacent to the red-clapboard building on Church Hill Road that's been Bee Publishing Company's home since 1903. Entering through a side door, I was lost in a warren of the most extraordinary offices I'd ever seen. Trade signs, weathervanes, carousel figures and arcade devices mingled in distracting profusion with the Rotary Club trophies and Press Association awards that are to newspapers what diplomas are to dental suites.

Great drifts of paper - releases to be edited, proofs to be corrected, letters to be answered - welled up in Scudder's office, where I found him bouncing a baby on his knee. Others have similarly encountered him tussling with Bart, Bow, Starr or Rosie, one of four golden retrievers who have successively served as greeters (or growlers, if you are wearing a hat or smell like a horse, as some Bee visitors do.) Dogs have been on the payroll since at least the time that Scudder's aptly named mutt 'Tiquer' first signed his name to his ghost-written weekly gossip column, "Pooch Pause."

Scudder gave me an appalled look when I asked if the child was his. Grandchild, he said, stiffly. Scudder and his lovely wife, Helen, recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Their two children, David Smith, Antiques and The Arts Weekly's associate editor, and Sherri Smith Baggett, The Bee Publishing Company's assistant business manager, as well as Sherri's husband, Scott, are longtime Bee employees. The child was David's son, Ben, star of the long-running "Grampa Says" ads in Antiques and The Arts Weekly and one of four Smith grandchildren, all boys, including his brother, Gregory, and Scudder and Judd Baggett.

We spoke briefly of people we knew in common. There was Robert Bishop, director of the Museum of American Folk Art, and my thesis advisor, the late Charles Montgomery, a former Wallingford, Conn., pewter dealer, Winterthur director and Yale professor. The conversation was amiable and Scudder disarmingly casual. Before I left, he asked when I could start.