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Birth:          3 Sep 1922 Coytesville, N.J.
Death:          11 Feb 2004 Seattle, Wash.
Cause of Death: cancer

Notes
!PUBL
Wilson&Anna McGrew's Fam Tree on ancestry
1930 in Bethesda, Montgomery Co., Md.
Nancy Lee's Fam Tree on ancestry

Palmer Smith fought long, hard for desegregation Attorney worked behind scenes to 
get results
Seattle Times, The (WA) — Thursday, February 19, 2004
When attorney Palmer Smith argued for desegregating the Seattle public schools, he 
gave more than intellect to the cause. 

 He volunteered to teach in a dropout-prevention program in the 1970s, while sending 
his own children, who were white, to certain public schools where they were in the 
minority. 

 That decision embodied his progressive values and his belief that government could 
serve the common good. 

 Mr. Smith, of Seattle, died last week of prostate cancer. He was 81. 

 He grew up in Maryland, joined the Navy in 1945 and studied Japanese and Malay 
languages. Then, he earned a law degree from Harvard University and moved to 
Washington state. 

 He assisted attorney Robert Winsor on a housing-discrimination case in which an 
African-American couple were rejected when they attempted to buy a home in North 
Seattle. The couple lost, but Mr. Smith took up other racial-integration efforts. 

 "He was a very good student of the law. He didn't look for shortcuts," Winsor said. 
"He was the kind of lawyer that, when he came into the courtroom, the judge was 
pleased, because he knew he would get straight answers to his questions." 

 In the late 1960s, Mr. Smith drafted an abortion-rights bill to allow the procedure 
during the first four months of pregnancy with a husband's consent, or parental 
consent for minors. In 1970, state voters passed the provisions as Referendum 20, 
five years before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. 

 "He liked to work behind the scenes, with not much fanfare, and focus on results 
rather than on who gets the credit," said his son, Jared Smith. 

 Mr. Smith worked as an education researcher for Battelle Memorial Institute. In 1968, 
he collaborated with Central Area residents Charles Huey and John Little on a 
proposed 3,000-pupil "Seattle Academy" to serve black students, but they could not 
win state legislation to allow such a school. 

 Eventually, the school district began mandatory busing of students to schools outside 
their neighborhoods, but voters passed an initiative to repeal busing in 1977. The 
district attempted to block the initiative. Mr. Smith supported the district by filing a 
legal brief, on behalf of the League of Women Voters, to the U.S. Supreme Court. The 
court declared the initiative unconstitutional. 

 Mandatory busing was abandoned in 1999, and Mr. Smith himself eventually had 
misgivings about it. 

 "It seemed to be more of a numbers game, at that point," said longtime friend Kay 
Bullitt. She blamed the district for failing to sustain summer schools, newsletters and 
coffee hours for parents, as citizen volunteers had done. 

 Jared Smith, a regional manager for the transportation-engineering firm Parsons 
Brinckerhoff, said the desegregation movement improved some academic programs. 

 "My sisters and I went through Meany and on to Garfield when there was a lot of 
racial unrest. My dad felt passionately there should not be an abandonment of inner-
city schools," he said. 

 Mr. Smith loved hiking and sailing. He and his family built a log home in Wyoming. 

 "If it was raining, miserable outside, Palmer was so cheerful about it," said neighbor 
Jean Walkinshaw. She remembers a walk high above Leavenworth, Chelan County. 
"He came marching across the meadow with a slate and a bottle of wine on top of it, 
like he was a waiter," she said. 

 Mr. Smith kept quotations from poet Carl Sandburg, President Lincoln and the 
Declaration of Independence in his wallet. 

 He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Dottie Smith of Seattle; children Jennifer and 
Jared, both of Seattle, and Melissa, of Austin, Texas; and six grandchildren. A 
memorial gathering will be held at 5:30 p.m. Saturday at the Center for Urban 
Horticulture, 3501 N.E. 41st Street, Seattle. 

 Mike Lindblom: 206-515-5631 or mlindblom@seattletimes.com. 
Seattle Times, The (WA) — Thursday, February 19, 2004 

Palmer Smith, an unyielding advocate of civil rights, fair housing and mountain 
adventures, has died. He was 82. 

 Smith, who suffered from prostate cancer, died Wednesday. 

 Smith practiced law in Seattle for more than 40 years and during that time 
championed such causes as prohibiting racial discrimination in housing and supporting 
abortion rights and school desegregation. 

 "He took a great interest in public affairs," said former Washington State Court of 
Appeals Judge Robert Winsor. "He epitomized the lawyer who felt that holding a good 
hard line on the truth was the only way to go." 

 In the public arena, Smith wrote an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court for the 
League of Women Voters supporting the Seattle School District's rejection of an 
initiative to end busing in the early 1980s. 

 Smith, whose children remained in Seattle's inner-city schools during this time, argued 
that "under the guise of mandating 'neighborhood schools' and forbidding mandatory 
busing, (the initiative) would have resegregated the public schools of Washington." 

 He also worked to eliminate discrimination in public housing - in 1957 he helped get 
amendments to state rules that prohibited such discrimination. Also, he drafted the 
legislation in the late 1960s to reform criminal law against abortion, making 
Washington one of the first states in the nation to do so. 

 He chaired a committee in the early 1970s charged with making sure demonstrators 
during the Vietnam War era were treated fairly by police and had legal representation. 
Putting his passion for equal opportunity to work in the classroom, Smith taught an 
experimental class for students who seemed destined to drop out of Garfield High 
School in the 1967-1968 school year. The goal of the class was to inspire youths to 
remain in school. 

 Smith had an equally strong passion for carpentry and outdoor recreation. 

 "He always liked to get up really high into the high mountain meadows," his son, 
Jared Smith, said. "If he had a choice of being out of the tent, if it was a nice starry 
night, he would make sure we laid out under the stars and he would describe all of the 
constellations." 

 Even deep in the woods at the cabin he and his family built in Wyoming, he loved to 
talk politics. 

 Family and friends will gather to remember him at 5:30 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Center for 
Urban Horticulture, 3501 N.E. 41st St. in Seattle. 
Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA) - Monday, February 16, 2004 
pub rec on ancestry 1939 14th Ave E, Seattle, Wash.

Parents
SMITH Palmer (8 Jun 1891 - 1955)
BAYNES Martha (8 Jul 1898 - 13 Aug 1984)

Siblings
SMITH Palmer (3 Sep 1922 - 11 Feb 2004)
SMITH Frank White (20 Oct 1928 - 2 Feb 2003)

Marriage To BOETTER Dorothy L. (18 May 1922 - 14 Nov 2011)
    m.  

Notes

Parents
BOETTER Carl ()
BENDORF Helen ()

Children by BOETTER Dorothy L. 18 May 1922 - 14 Nov 2011
SMITH Melissa ()
SMITH Jared Adams ()
SMITH Jennifer ()

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