Philip Smith

“Phil was a great guy,” Cudge Ellingwood wrote. “He had lived on the outskirts of Spokane on a small ranch which his parents had. He had really worked for what he had,” and his boyhood on the ranch left him with mechanical skills that always amazed his father-in-law: “He always knew how to put things together. He knows cars, wood working, and almost any mechanical field.” He was studying electrical engineering at Washington State College when he met Mary Jane Ellingwood; “he had a long trying time to convince Mary,” and they waited until both were out of school to marry, at Spokane on 15 July 1949 (memoir, scan 162).

Westinghouse sent him east for a training course and then to its Salt Lake City office. Later he left Westinghouse and moved the family to Denver, where he opened an office as a manufacturer’s representative: “They have been very happy there, even with their ups and downs, and it was a very good move for them” (scan 176). When Cudge flew in to Denver unannounced, Phil met him at the airport and plotted to hide him in the basement on Greg’s bed to surprise the children, with his camera ready; the children found him first, and he and they turned the joke on Phil (scans 188-189).

His obituary (Denver Post, 10 July 2018) gives him a career of more than fifty years in the lighting industry across the Rocky Mountain region; he died at his home in Centennial on 29 June 2018, aged 92, survived by his children Christie, Greg, Carolyn and Doug, five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren; “he was pre-deceased by his wife of 58 years, Mary Ellingwood Smith” (obituary), who died in 2007.

Open questions

• His birth date and place, and his parents (the ranch outside Spokane).
• His grandchildren: five, not named in his obituary.