By Amber Jurgensen | Associate Editor
Four football players crouch low to the ground, hands out in front ready to receive the ball, ready to play, ready to attack. The boys appear young, handsome and ready to take on the world in the old black-and-white photograph from 1942.
But one player stands out from the others.
He is poised in the foreground, making direct eye contact with the camera, showing confidence, raw athleticism and tenacity. He is William Reece Smith Jr., a 1943 graduate of Plant City High School, accomplished scholar, talented athlete and a successful lawyer.
Little did Smith expect a phone call 70 years later from the date of that picture from his alma mater. Sherrie Mueller, college and career counselor, contacted Smith in August to notify him he was selected to be part of the Plant City High School Hall of Fame.
“I’m proud and very pleased that my friends in Plant City remember me,” Smith said. “It’s nice to be remembered.”
Although Smith was born in east Tennessee, he grew up in Plant City on West Reynolds Street. Smith liked hunting, fishing and flirting with the pretty girls while he was in school.
Smith and his friends used to sneak down to the pool hall on weekend nights, careful not to tell his parents because the pool hall sold beer. His father knew, however, because the owner would call and tell him that Smith was there and that he would keep an eye on him.
“It was a good place to grow up,” Smith said. “It was a small town where almost everybody looked after you.”
At Plant City High School, Smith played football with some of his closest friends, Jack Bender, Joe Brown and Shorty Brown. The highlight of Smith’s Plant City High School football career was when his team played Plant High School in 1942. As one of the smaller schools in the Big Ten Conference, Plant City High School still managed to beat Plant High School, a football giant in Tampa.
After Smith graduated high school he joined the Navy. Upon completion of boot camp, he attended an officer-training program, for which he took classes at Georgia Institute of Technology. He then went on to join ROTC at the University of South Carolina, where he also played football.
During his time at the University of South Carolina, he was quarterback in the first Gator Bowl. More than 15,000 people watched him play.
“That is a proud and happy memory,” Smith said. “It was a thrill for those of us who participated.”
Smith took many math, science and engineering classes at college, but wanted to study liberal arts instead. However, he graduated in 1946 with a bachelor’s of engineering from the University of South Carolina.
“Back then they were training people to be part of a war,” Smith said.
But, Smith finally got to study what interested him. He graduated from the University of Florida Levin College of Law with high honors as first in his class in 1949. Smith practiced law for a short period of time until he received a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford in England.
He originally started earning his baccalaureate of law, but after a year switched to graduate studies in private and international law, which was the equivalent of conflict law in the U.S. Except for the cold and rain, Smith loved his three years studying abroad.
“It was an enlightening time for me,” Smith said. “I had never really had a normal university experience because I had to do naval training in college while in the service. That was always hurry, hurry, hurry, catch up to something.”
Smith kept his athletic spirit up at Oxford. He went out for English rugby at first, thinking it might be similar to football.
“I learned very quickly that English rugby and American football were two different things,” Smith said.
Lacrosse was the next alternative. Smith ended up playing for three years and lettered in lacrosse after playing the University of Cambridge.
Smith also played basketball for three years, which was a club sport in England.
After becoming a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford in 1952, Smith came back to the U.S. and joined the faculty at the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where he taught for a year.
In September 1954, Smith joined the Carlton Fields law firm and became active in the Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association. He has been part of the American Bar Association for 55 years.
Smith was sworn in as the president of the ABA in 1980 in Australia, where he spoke on how to make legal services available to the poor and made it his life’s mission.
“I think law has a desirable social goal, a useful goal,” Smith said. “It’s about making a notable contribution. It’s not about money for me.”
Smith helped save the federally funded Legal Services Corp., after former President Ronald Reagan announced a plan to eliminate it. He brought 100 leaders representing 300 associations to Washington, D.C., to lobby and testify on behalf of the LSC, which handled approximately 1.5 million cases at the time.
For his humanitarian efforts, he has received various awards such as the B’nai B’rith National Humanitarian Award.
Smith has obtained many notable accomplishments, including the president of the American Bar Association, chair emeritus of Carlton Fields, 12 honorary degrees at the doctorate level and the Distinguished American Award in the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame.