“He meticulously drew an F-4 Phantom (fighter-bomber),” Guy Smith said. Guy Smith, who lives still on the family ranch that includes his late father’s Georgetown western set and collection of Hollywood artifacts, was sharing a bedroom with Walt, three years his senior, when Walt took a pencil to the ceiling. Most of those aircraft were on approach at the former World War II Army Airfield that following the war reverted to the Sonoma County Airport. “Really young, Walt would climb to the top of this Douglas fir in front of the house and for hours would just watch airplanes go by,” said one of his brothers, Guy Smith. It began in the late 1950s, when he was country kid on his family’s apple ranch on west Sonoma County’s Frei Road, near the Laguna de Santa Rosa. To the end, Smith – sturdy, beaming and 6-foot-2 – sustained a love affair with flying machines. He stayed active as an international projects consultant with a Virginia-based air-traffic and aerospace consulting firm until just a couple of years ago. When he stepped back from daily work as a regional leader of the Federal Aviation Administration at age 58, he left an office in the San Francisco International Airport tower with glass all around and a million-dollar view. 10 in Idaho, home to him and his wife, Lois, since his retirement in 2007. Reflecting on his survival of perilous situations and his full life, he once told The Press Democrat, “My guardian angel did a fine job. He fed and worked to protect giraffes and zebras and other exotic wildlife at the Safari West preserve northeast of Santa Rosa and he oversaw federal air-traffic control operations across a vast swath of the western U.S.Ī genial, top-of-class sort, Smith took to each challenge and adventure with the same wonder that fueled his childhood fascination with flying things and his foraging through the Old West town and Hollywood memorabilia museum that his father, George Smith, built near Graton. He enlisted in the California Army National Guard and rose to the rank of brigadier general. He was an armed bodyguard for California Gov. He risked his life flying fire-attack bombers and the Sonoma County Sheriff’s helicopter. Through Walt Smith’s bold and richly accomplished life, he fought and was badly wounded as a teenage Marine in Vietnam.
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