DownloadMay 4, 2009 issue
Key to a legacy of learning
By Jim BishopPage:
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I thought: What an exemplary gesture in honor of one whose life touched so many, including a relative of mine who never met this man, the late C. Henry Smith.
Jim Bishop is public information officer at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.
Smith (1875-1948), was an outstanding Mennonite historian and educator. He influenced generations of young people through his long years of teaching — at Goshen (Ind.) College, 1903-1905 and 1908-1913, and at Bluffton (Ohio) College, now University, until his death in 1948.
Smith wrote volumes on church history, his magnum opus being The Story of the Mennonites, published in 1941. He was a major figure in the planning of the Mennonite Encyclopedia and served as co-editor until his death.
His unflagging commitment to the Christian values of peace, justice and nonresistance continues in part through the annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratory Contest held annually on Mennonite college campuses.
While a student at the University of Chicago, Smith became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an academic honor society. Its motto: “Love of learning is the guide of life.” Today there are 276 chapters and more than half a million living members.
All this brings things around to a distant relative of Smith — my second cousin, Samantha (Sam) Bishop of Malibu, Calif. She recently received an unexpected honor that first belonged to the legendary historian and educator.
Samantha will graduate in May with a degree in communications from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. On March 27 she was among 130 people inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society at USC.
Jim Miller of Oakland Hills, Calif., a great-nephew of C. Henry Smith and a nephew to the late Verna Smith Bishop (my aunt), surprised Samantha with a gift — Smith’s Phi Beta Kappa key from his student days at the University of Chicago a century ago.
Miller inherited the key from C. Henry Smith, who designated that the first of his lineage to earn the Phi Beta Kappa award should receive his key. (Smith and his wife, Laura, had no children.) Laura sent the key to Miller in 1959, exactly 50 years ago.
Miller was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Society while studying at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. He went on to medical school at the University of California, Berkeley.
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