Clancy Smith, February 18, 1946 to July 3, 2024, RIP
One of the most important people in my life died on Wednesday.
My most important mentor when I was in college was Clancy Smith. He’s the one referred to in Neil Young’s song “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing.” (Although there’s a whole story there, telling it will distract from this post.)
I wrote about Clancy in Chapter 1 of my 2001 book, The Joy of Freedom: An Economist’s Odyssey.
Here’s an excerpt that tells of my first interactions with him. I’ll publish another excerpt in the next few days.
September 1968, Winnipeg
It’s the first day to register for the 1968–69 academic year at the University of Winnipeg. After completing my forms, I head over to the orientation tables. I see one table behind which is a big banner that says Libertarian Club. That strange word “libertarian” catches my attention because, in a discussion the previous month, a sociology professor called me a libertarian.
“A what?” I asked, thinking of librarian and libertine at the same time.
“A libertarian,” she said, “you know, that group that ran the student newspaper last year—Dennis Owens, Clancy Smith, those guys.”
“No,” I replied, “I didn’t know, but I’m sure going to look them up.”
“Damn,” she said.
Standing by the table was a guy who looked about 21 or so whom I recognized from a philosophy class I had taken. Spread out on the table were about 40 books, some by authors whose names I recognized, including Milton Friedman and another economist named Ludwig von Mises, and some by authors whom I had never heard of: Friedrich Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter, and others. Then my eye caught a book that looked very familiar: The Fountainhead, the first novel I had read by Ayn Rand. “Have you read this?” I asked the man. “Over and over,” he replied. We introduced ourselves; he was Clancy Smith, one of the people the sociology professor had told me about.
Later that week, Clancy called to invite me to meet with his group on Saturday evening at 8:30 p.m. For me the meeting was late, since my usual bedtime was about 11:00 p.m. So Saturday night at about 8:00 p.m., Don [Redekop], who was also getting interested in libertarianism, and I walked to the meeting. I was a little nervous, but also excited. At the meeting were about five or six guys, all 2 to 4 years older than us. That evening was one of the most exciting of my life.
First, they talked about politics, but in a way that I had never heard anyone, young or old, talk. They knew so much, both about current events and about history. They talked about the Democratic convention in Chicago the previous month, William F. Buckley, Jr.’s run-in with Gore Vidal when both were commentators for one of the networks (I had heard of neither), and Buckley’s thoughts about Catholicism and the Pope and how that compared to those of some nineteenth-century British guy named Lord Acton. Their talk was matter-of-fact, yet focused and sometimes passionate. I was used to people who talked politics quickly turning to personal attack and rage. I had never heard anything like this. Two of them—Clancy and Michael Prime—talked about the trip that they had taken the previous month to visit Milton Friedman at his summer home in Vermont, and how welcoming and warm Milton and his wife Rose had been. They also spoke of visiting Leonard Peikoff, an associate of Ayn Rand, in New York. Peikoff had asked each of them in turn if they had any disagreements with Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. They stated that they had just a few and, in fact, had come to discuss them. Peikoff then asserted that they had misrepresented themselves in their letter and that the meeting was over. After that, Clancy referred to him as Professor Pissoff.
Besides knowing so much, they spoke clearly and were open-minded. They were partisans, but honest partisans. In their discussion of the conflict between Buckley and Vidal, for example, they were on Buckley’s side, but not uncritically so. They seemed to think they had the right, and the ability, to evaluate what people 30 and 40 years older than they were thinking and doing. I had always thought I had that right too. But what I often didn’t have was the information to evaluate people’s ideas, which is what they seemed to have in abundance. I was used to having a big role in conversations. Yet, even though everything they discussed was interesting to me, I said almost nothing all evening and stuck to asking questions because I wanted to know more. They were always able to answer me. This was totally new territory for me.
After about two hours of listening to conversation in which hockey, football, or other sports hadn’t been mentioned even once, I was firmly convinced that these guys were gay. (At age 17, I carried a few stereotypes.) They were totally into ideas, and I had never met any other males like them. Then we got talking about women. They seemed to have a real appreciation of women too. They talked about women they found attractive, but even there it was different from what I had heard before in my life; it wasn’t crass, but was more the talk of connoisseurs admiring paintings. They also talked about what woman said and thought, not just what they looked like. I liked that.
Then, at about midnight, which was well after my bedtime, someone announced that he was hungry. Okay, I thought, here’s where I get left behind. They probably have expensive tastes in food and I won’t be able to afford to eat where they want to go to eat. Wrong. We all piled into Clancy’s father’s big Oldsmobile and drove to Lockport, a town north of Winnipeg, where they knew of a great hotdog stand open till the wee hours.
I got home at about 2:30 a.m. I lay in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about what had just happened. I had found some friends. The next day, I rode my bicycle over to visit Don, who had accompanied me the night before, and the first thing I said was, “Do you think it was real?” Don’s grin showed that he had been thinking the same thing. I felt as if I had enlisted in a grand moral crusade that would also be a lot of fun.
In the final two years of my three-year degree (the standard length of a college degree program in Canada), I got two college educations. For approximately the first half of the day, I faithfully attended classes for my math major and physics minor and did the homework for those classes. As soon as I finished, I would spend the rest of the day getting my two main rewards. One was the chance to read a book or article on economics, politics, history, or philosophy that Clancy or one of the other libertarians had recommended. I, who had never been a regular reader, was reading about a book a week. The second reward was even more fun: the chance to be together with Clancy and the other libertarians. If I didn’t see Clancy around in the library, I would usually find him in the cafeteria, arguing with a liberal or socialist or, occasionally, a conservative. I learned a lot just from being around him.
Great piece, looking forward to the second part.
I had intended to say "So sorry for your loss" until I read again about your meeting Clancy and recalling how you looked forward each year since to your visits with him. Now I can only think how lucky you were to have such a mentor in your life and how lucky he was to have you as a lifelong friend.