A tenacious volunteer and community activist who helped lobby for Legends Field persists through constant pain.
By JAY CRIDLIN
Published June 27, 2003
It is late in the day - 4:45 p.m. - and in all likelihood, the pain will soon get worse for Joe Smith.
It's a relative pain, of course. Smith wakes up aching every day, and endures knifelike jolts throughout every bone in his 6-foot-9 frame until he goes to bed.
At night, the pain gets worse. When he has been on his feet all day, his body slows. His reconstructed right shoulder, brittle left wrist and polio-ravaged legs all cry out for rest. Each movement requires a small grit of his teeth.
No matter. Smith sits in his Brandon office, 30 minutes from his Wimauma home, ready to keep working.
"That's what I do," Smith said. "You get up and you go. The alternative is unacceptable."
For 25 years, Smith has been one of Hillsborough County's most tenacious community activists and volunteers, serving on as many boards, committees, panels and associations as possible.
During the late 1980s, he led the push for a massive sports complex in Ruskin that would have brought the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Tampa Yankees to southern Hillsborough County. It was part of a comprehensive push to prepare SouthShore for an urban invasion that is now taking effect.
These days, Smith is at the center of a different fight: the battle between the House and Senate over medical malpractice insurance reform.
Smith has spent a quarter of his life in hospitals, enduring more than 50 operations for afflictions that include polio, encephalitis and a crushed arm that nearly every doctor agreed should be amputated. His heart has stopped on numerous occasions.
He credits risk-taking doctors for not only saving his arm, but his life, many times over.
Smith grew up in Chicago with eight siblings. His father, Robert V. Smith, was deputy chief of police in Chicago and one of a 100-year family lineage of Chicago cops.
At the age of 4, Joe contracted polio. Several building projects in his neighborhood had gone unfinished because of hard economic times and pools of rainwater collected in dirt holes beneath buildings.
The neighborhood kids didn't know better, he said. They didn't know mosquitoes gathered there, and sewage drained into the pools, and sick children swam there without telling their healthy friends.
He wasn't the only one to contract the disease. Many more in the Chicago area caught polio in one of the last major polio outbreaks before Jonas Salk introduced a vaccine in 1954.
Smith got it worse than many. He contracted severe rheumatoid juvenile arthritis, causing his legs to curl up and forcing doctors to straighten them out with sandbags. He slipped into a coma for two and a half weeks and was confined to an iron lung.
"I don't have any recollection of ever being pain-free," he said. "It's pretty much been my life."
The pain only got worse in 1974, when his right arm was crushed by a car while he was working at a friend's rental car business.
Doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota implored him to let them amputate the arm, saying it would never heal. Smith wasn't convinced, so he searched until he found a doctor in Europe willing to perform a series of risky operations that might allow him to keep it.
The operations were a success, and Smith's arm, now in a sling, is partially functional.
Pain in the arm forced him to move to the warmer climate of Florida. When he moved to Hillsborough County, he banded together with about 30 landowners in southern Hillsborough County to examine what the future of Ruskin and Brandon held.
One of his highest priority projects was a grandiose athletic complex in Ruskin that would have encompassed a new stadium for the Bucs, a spring training facility for the Yankees, an Olympic training site and several more fields spread over hundreds of acres.
Tampa leaders ultimately refused to let the Bucs out of the city. But Smith, who had since struck up a friendship with Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, was asked to lobby the county for a new spring training facility.
The result: $30-million Legends Field, a framed photo of which rests on his desk.
"That's my baby," he said.
At times during his life, Smith has enjoyed the spotlight. At others, he has shunned it.
These days, he strives to do the latter. But last week's special legislative session about the medical malpractice insurance crisis drew him back into the realm of public debate.
At the request of the governor's office, Smith spoke in support of doctors June 11 at a medical malpractice rally in Sun City Center. He introduced Gov. Jeb Bush and talked about his own medical history.
The governor's staff was so impressed that they asked him to testify on doctors' behalf in front of the Senate.
A few days later, he drove to Tallahassee, on his own dime, to testify. As a witness, he counterbalanced the testimony of patients who had been the victims of malpractice.
The experience exhausted him. When he returned from Tallahassee, he spent the majority of last weekend resting at home. But he said he hasn't ruled out testifying again if Bush calls.
In the meantime, he'll continue coming to work at Walbridge Aldinger Co., the construction business where he serves as an adviser, and volunteer wherever he can.
"I feel very blessed," he said. "I go through a veil of pain every morning when I get up, but I count my blessings. I thank God I'm here, I thank God for my wife, I thank God for my children."
Joe Smith
HOME: Wimauma
FAMILY: Wife, Diane; son, Jason, a youth pastor at a church in Tampa; daughter, Kim Willis, a teacher at East Bay High School. One grandchild, 19-month-old Madison Smith.
HOBBIES: Photography, poetry.
PAPERBACK WRITER: Smith is writing two novels. He says he has written more than 200,000 words for what he hoped would be a trilogy, but is now paring it down.
PINSTRIPE WEDDING: Smith invited New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to his son's wedding. Steinbrenner had a prior commitment and replied with his apologies.
DOC HOLLYWOOD: When Smith's arm was crushed, the doctor who operated on him was Anthony de Palma, father of filmmaker Brian De Palma, who directed Scarface and The Untouchables.
NO ORDINARY JOE: Smith's common name has been a source of comedic confusion. On Smith's honeymoon, the hotel operator refused to rent him a room until he provided identification proving his name was really Joe Smith.
