Copyright berkshireeagle
GREAT BARRINGTON — In 1925, one year after Morton A. Smith joined the Great Barrington Rotary Club, Lou Gehrig joined the New York Yankees. The "Iron Man" of professional baseball then proceeded to make an appearance in every Yankee game for the next 14 years, a record of 2,130 consecutive games. Thirty-five years after Gehrig's career ended, and 50 years after his own career as a Rotarian began, Mort Smith is still working on a consecutive-appearance record of his own. Since Oct. 22, 1924, the day he joined the Rotary Club here, Smith, now 78, has maintained perfect attendance at weekly meetings, thanks in part to a Rotary provision that allows members to "make up" an absence by turning up at another Rotary meeting within a week. Making up meetings when necessary, Smith recently completed 50 years without an absence, a minimum, he figures, of 2,500 Rotary meetings. "And that's a lot of dinners," the slight, bespectacled Smith said the other day at his Brainard Avenue home. Smith's half-century as a Rotarian began only five months after the Great Barrington Rotary was founded. In the years since, he has outlasted not only all those who were Rotary members when he joined, but also most of the places where the Rotary once met. Some, like the Wayside Inn, have been torn down. Others, like the Barrington House and the Oakwood Inn have either disappeared behind new facades or simply closed. Smith does not speak about his 50 years of perfect attendance as if it is anything remarkable, however. He attributes it simply to good health and force of habit. "Once I started going," he says simply, "I just kept going. And I never got into the habit of going anywhere else, so I was usually around." With a couple of exceptions, Smith has been "around" Great Barrington since he was born here in 1896. One of his journeys took him to Cambridge, where he attended MIT; he graduated in 1914. When he returned here several years later, he broke the news that he didn't want to carry on his father's milk business. Instead, he took his electrical engineering degree and started a radio repair shop at a time when he estimates there weren't more than two or three radios in town. It was probably the last time he was ever concerned about not having enough business; his repair shop was a fixture here on Main Street for 34 years. And even at work, Smith's attendance can only be described as exemplary. He said that he once went for 23 years without a day off.
