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Sam Smith
By Neil Peterson | August 31, 2009
When I was executive director of Seattle’s METRO, I reported to a board of directors forty people strong. Amongst them were the mayor, all nine city council members, the elected county executive, all five county council members, mayors of several nearby cities, and various others. In short, all the key elected officials in the region were my bosses.
I often got the question, “How on earth can you work for 40 bosses?” But the truth was, I had more latitude than I probably would have had with just nine bosses since they realized my job would be impossible if they all placed demands on me at the same time.
One of my bosses, a Seattle city council member named Sam Smith, was the first black ever elected to the Seattle city council, a position he held for 24 consecutive years. His achievement is all the more impressive when you realize that less than 10 percent of Seattle is black.
For eight of those years, his peers elected him as president of the city council. He also served five terms in the Washington State Legislature, representing southeast Seattle’s 37th legislative district.
Sam was an incredible man. Shelby Scates, a local political reporter, once stated that Sam paved the way for subsequent African-American and Asian politicians, such as Mayor Norm Rice, Governor Gary Locke, and King County Executive Ron Sims.
City Council member Jean Godden has said that she looked to Sam as a political role model. “Agree with him or not,” she commented, “you had to admire his savvy politicking. It was Sam who often lectured the press on the importance of being able to count to five. If there weren’t five votes out of nine for an issue, Sam didn’t mess with it.”
Godden also noted the “personal touch” Sam brought to his office. “Despite his role as a veteran councilman and a sometime council president,” she said, “he almost always answered his own phone, saying, ‘This is Sam.’”
Sam was a wonderfully nice man. He always had a huge smile on his face. He would call me over to his office on occasion when he wanted to talk about some issue. Being pleasantly heavyset, Sam would lean back in his office chair and frequently open the conversation with, “Neil, I’m just a country boy, but…”
In fact, Sam was a country boy. He was born in Gibsland, Louisiana, son of a Baptist minister, and lived on a farm as the youngest of eight children. One of the stories about Sam is that he repeated the seventh grade three times because that was the highest grade for black children to attain.
Well, I learned very quickly to hold on to my hat whenever Sam said, “I’m just a country boy,” because what followed was always a message intended to be carefully heeded. Ever since then, I’ve used the expression myself many times, as a way of emphasizing the importance of what I’m about to say. And it works. People are disarmed, and they listen better.
“I’m just a country boy…”
Sadly, Sam passed away in 1995.
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