Deceased March 24, 2023
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in memory
Charles K. Smith, who was my fraternity brother in Phi Psi, died on March 24, 2023. He was born in Boston on May 11, 1930, but grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Kay, as we called him, served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War and came to Amherst on the GI Bill.
After pursuing graduate studies in English at Brandeis University, Kay became a distinguished and beloved professor at UMass Amherst for 40 years, where we were colleagues in the English department. His teaching reflected his research interests and his attempt to integrate knowledge of the sciences, particularly biology, with insights gained from the humanities, particularly literature. “Because I have been a lifelong student of the sciences and humanities,” Kay wrote, “I love them both and have never felt a split between them.” Not surprisingly, he published in a wide range of subjects and styles, including essays such as “Darwin’s Style” and “French Philosophy and English Interregnum Poetry”; his popular text on how to write well, Styles and Structures; and prose poems he composed in later life.
In a stanza from a 2014 poem, Kay gently instructed his children on how to view his eventual death:
Your sadness will be doing me no favor.
Happy resonance is what I’ll savor.
Instead of funeral dirge, a garden party
among roses and lilies aromatic.
Kay is survived by his wife of 37 years, Katherine M. Conway; their son, Andrew; a daughter, Miranda Kay Smith Dow, from his first marriage, to Helen Sootin; Miranda’s husband, John F. Dow; and their triplets, Kay’s grandchildren: Emil, Harrison and Helen. A celebration of his life will be held later this year.
Robert Bagg ’57