Curtis Vaughn Smith

Graveside Service

May 17, 2024

Juan Perez-Valdes:

Just about a week before Curt had the fall that killed him, at the event of his father entering Hospice, we had a conversation about what he would like to have done after his death in a way of a memorial. When I asked him, Curt very quickly answered, "I don't want a Memorial Service or a Celebration of Life, nor do I want an obituary in the paper." He paused and then went on: "I want for you to stop anyone who would say, 'Curt would have liked this done this way or that way,' you can say that no one asked me while I was alive how I would like things done after my death. You can also can say that, in lieu of thoughts and prayers, they can send you flowers, casseroles and home-made cakes. But you can bury my ashes in Oakland, I know that is important for you and I always have liked Oakland. You can get John Adamski to bless the hole and ask Cleve to read the Whitehead poem about Georgia Towns. Do it like your family likes it, no chairs and no tent and you can shovel the dirt and cover the hole in the ground like you like to do, before you leave. Invite any one you want but called it a graveside funeral not memorial or celebration of anything."

So here we are at Curt's graveside funeral at Oakland. You can't get any more Southern than this....!

On behalf of Curt's sister Vally, Brothers Alex and Matt, and myself, Thank you for coming.

John Adamski: blessing of the grave

Curt's college roommate, Tom Ekerzel has asked to say a few words.  (Tom reads letter from Curt).

Juan Perez-Valdes:

For his mother's funeral, Curt wrote a brief memorial that he read during the service, the opening went like this: "The Georgia writer Flannery O'Connor wrote: 'To know one's place and past is to know one's self.'" That day he told us how his mother passed that concept on to her children. And for that reason Curt felt that he was what "has been before him, and what he had to face during life." The day Curt died, I got a message from our friend Melissa; she wrote: "I don't think I will ever see a camellia, a passenger train going by, a Manhattan cocktail, or a small Georgia town without thinking of Curt." She very much summarized Curt's passions in life. Curt often gave credit to his love for these things and to the knowledge of them to the fact that they were passed to him primarily by his mother and his two favorite Aunts, Sister and Betty Jo. And indeed Curt was what was passed down to him and what he made of what he was given. Yes, the craziness of his Aunt Sister and the southern gentility of his aunt Betty Jo was how he lived every day.

Curt had a great knowledge of American railroads, passenger trains, and the routes of the late 19 century and first half of 20 century, including towns, junctions and depots. I never saw him happier than when he was working with his camellias (at one point, 147 pots in his greenhouse), or when he would be on a train reciting to me the history of every town and depot from Atlanta to Baltimore to the north, or from Atlanta to New Orleans to the South. Then, after we moved to Darien, we would take the Florida Trains. Again, he surprised me with his knowledge of the Flagler rail era in Florida. Curt will get very animated and would tell me all about Flagler's railroad camps every ten miles, pointing them out to me as we moved South, and how they became the towns of today's Florida. For a few years he was a volunteer for the National Park Service and he rode the Amtrak Southern Crescent from Atlanta to New Orleans and back doing historic interpretation along the way in the Club Car.

Every year in the fall and early spring Curt would come up with a place he had to visit in South Georgia and would ask me to "fix a picnic" so we could drive to certain town where his grandfather had opened a Piggly-Wiggly or to a cemetery where some Wares, Snows, Powells or Studstills might be buried. To "fix a picnic" - and not to stop in a fast food place.  We would search and search to find those places. One time we were looking for a remote two room school house where his grandmother taught, another time a hydrangea plant next to a house in ruins that was planted by same grandmother, probably 100 years ago - he had heard that the hydrangea was still alive. We would find most of these places; the graves and the buildings, the two room school - and even the hydrangea (in full bloom).

On that speech on his mother's funeral, he continued: "Mother introduced us to people, long dead, with first names that did not sound logical to us as children of the 1950s, people who had inhabited places down the road from Atlanta. These characters would form a chorus of South Georgia voices that was to remain with me throughout my life and finally come into organized focus through the genealogical research of our uncle Sonny and the editing of the Smith-Ware letters done by our bother Alex." He told me some time after, when he and I were discussing his mother's eulogy that the story of those people and those places was "the foundation of what I believe to be my soul."

Curt was an unbelievably talented person. He was an accomplished musical theater child actor. He had leading roles in such Theater of the Stars summer productions as, The King and I, The Music Man, The Sound of Music and Oliver!. He sang Oh Holy Night more than one year during the Rich's Christmas Tree Lighting with the Atlanta Boys Choir. And then later as a young adult he played Beauregard Jackson Burnside in a production of Mame in Atlanta and as well as other roles in different productions of the Saint Simons Island Players.

He was a very creative china painter, a master needlepoint craftsman. He kept bees and harvested honey and crafted beer before craft beer was popular. And most of all he was a devoted gardener. I could honestly say that for the last 41 years of my life, the grass has always been greener inside my fence. Curt loved dogs and became a dog breeder. He was very proud to say that his dog breeding hobby paid for the restoration of our historic cottage in Darien.

So all in all, on a personal note; I am going to end by quoting a friend we had many years ago, a very talented woman, a college professor and a theologian who was a very eloquent speaker and lecturer, she was asked to speak at her partner's funeral and she said that she would do it. At the scheduled moment during the event, she got up - we all were expecting the eulogy of the century. She looked at the audience and said: "What a privilege, what a privilege!" and walked away.  Because nothing else needed to be said.

Our friend Cleve, by Curt's request, is going to read a poem. After he finishes the last verse, he is going to repeat that last verse. I invite you to flip the memorial card which has that last verse of the poem in the back, and read it out loud with Cleve in a chorus.

Cleve Reads Poem, "Georgia Towns" by Daniel Whitehead Hicky

Deep in my last dark Georgia night

When I have come to rest,

Am one again with her red clay hills,

May all the names I loved the best

Drift back, in music, over me,

May each come ringing like a rhyme

For one who loves each door, each lane

An old man losing sleep and Time.

* * *

From the poem, "Georgia Towns"

by Daniel Whitehead Hicky

~ A reception will be held graveside, or in the event of rain, at the Georgian Terrace Hotel ~