Curtis Smith '73

Why did you choose to create a scholarship at SUNY Geneseo?
At Geneseo, I was able to work my way through school and still write for the Lamron and other forums. I wanted to help students who face the same challenge that I did—paying expenses while also forging writing and speaking skills that make possible a career.

What would you want the recipients of this scholarship to know about the person for whom it is named?
For half-a-century, Mel Allen at one time or another aired the World Series, All-Star Game, Movietone Newsreels—heard by 80 million each week—and This Week in Baseball. As 1940-64 Voice of the Yankees, he was a daily presence in Upstate New York. Variety Magazine termed his among “the world’s 25 most recognizable voices,” with Eisenhower and Churchill. Mel became a good friend in the last 20 years of his life, visiting Geneseo in 1989 to inaugurate his scholarship—kind, generous, and endearingly unaware of how great or popular he was.

Tell us about your favorite Geneseo memory, favorite tradition, or what Geneseo has meant to you.
Geneseo meant so much that I wrote a book, Long Time Gone: The Years of Turmoil Remembered, tying my vignettes on campus life and classmates with interviews of public figures who made 1969-73 in college incandescent: from Richard Nixon to Betty Friedan, Jerry Rubin to Ronald Reagan. My favorite memory is twilight, gazing at the Genesee Valley, gleaming in the dusk: “its land plain and rolling and unbroken, pleasant, almost golden”—still.

What do you hope your recipients gain through this scholarship?
An appreciation for hard word, loyalty to and from Geneseo, and the priceless gift of learning—the gift that students give themselves, from one generation to the next.