Albert Wade Smith died on Thursday, August 7, 2025, about 110 miles and many worlds away from where he was born on December 28, 1932 in Greenbrier County, West Virginia as the ninth of twelve children in 1930s Appalachia.  They were poor and living was hard.  There was little room in his childhood home for people or dreams.

Albert moved to Virginia as a boy during World War II after his older sister, Edna, landed a manufacturing job because so many men were overseas.  All his family brought with them from West Virginia was what they could fit in-between each other in the bed of a pick-up truck.

It didn't get much easier for Albert.  Soon his mother insisted that he stop attending high school so that he could earn money for the family, a particularly bitter pill for a young boy like Albert who loved learning.

Suffice to say that young Albert continued to experience the hardships and deprivations often interwoven with impoverished environments.  But Albert—Dad—aspired for more.  Gifted at math, he attended technical college in Richmond while working as a plumber's assistant and sleeping in his car.

Pursuing dreams is a type of privilege.  He never got that degree.  Life kept intruding, including in some good ways.  Meeting our mother, Shirley, and starting a family required that Dad put his nose to the grindstone, as he used to say, and focus on making a living.

So Dad worked.  He worked his day job as a bridge draftsman with the Virginia Department of Transportation, and he worked evenings and weekends mowing lawns and tilling gardens.  Work was how Dad demonstrated love and calmed his fears.  But he didn't stop dreaming.  In the winter months when grass didn't need cutting, Dad would take high-level math and engineering classes in the evenings at nearby colleges.

Dad didn't always meet us in the way that we wanted him to.  He didn't know how.  He bristled at physical touch, assuredly a vestige of childhood trauma.  And while working all the time, he didn't place enough value on how much his physical presence meant to us.

But to use understated language like Dad would have done, he did alright.  He traveled a great distance, crossing a chasm replete with poverty, pain, and diminishment.  Dad not only designed bridges in his day job, Dad was a bridge.

And in those moments when worry and responsibility retreated, Dad was funny.  Dry as a bone.  Punctuated with a sweet and beautiful giggle.

Albert is predeceased by his wife of 62 years, Shirley, and one grandson, Conrad Smith.  He is survived by his three children, Michelle Smith, Stephanie Bolton (Steve), and Eric Smith, along with seven kind, bright, and ferociously talented grandchildren who constitute the best type of legacy—Ian Bolton, Caroline Bolton, Jack Smith, Eleanor Smith, Louisa Smith, Wade Smith, and Daisy Smith.

Dad, it is with the deepest love that we thank you.

Albert Smith's funeral will take place at Second Presbyterian Church in Waynesboro, Virginia on Monday, August 11, 2025 at 2 p.m.  Interment will be in Augusta Memorial Park in Waynesboro, Virginia on Friday, August 15, 2024 at 11:00 a.m.