Warren Allen Smith, a teacher, editor, businessman, author, W.W. II veteran and longtime Villager, died on Jan. 8. He was 95.
In recent years, he had moved from his Jane St. apartment to assisted-living facilities, first in Stamford, Conn., and then on the Upper West Side.
Smith was born on Oct. 29, 1921, in Minburn, Iowa, the son of a South Dakota homesteader’s daughter and a grain dealer who was a scout for the Chicago Cubs’ farm team in Portland, Oregon.
He was drafted into the U.S. Army and served from 1942 to 1946. Smith landed as an acting first sergeant on Omaha Beach in 1944, and in 1945 became chief clerk of the Adjunct General’s Office at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), in the Little Red Schoolhouse, at Reims, France.
After the war, in 1948, he received his B.A. degree from the University of Northern Iowa, and in 1949, with Lionel Trilling as his adviser, received his M.A. from Columbia University.
Smith taught English at the Bentley School in Manhattan from 1950 to 1954, New Canaan High School from 1954 to 1986, and at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1961 to 1962.
In the 1950s he was a book review editor of The Humanist; wrote reviews for the Library Journal; and, under the name of Lvcretivs, founded the Hvmanist Book Clvb.
In 1961, with paramour Fernando Vargas Zamora, he founded Variety Recording Studio, an independent company in Times Square. The studio was located first at 225 W. 46th St, then at 130 W. 42nd St, advertised as being “in the heart of showbiz.” Vargas and Smith were companions for 40 years until Vargas’s death from Kaposi’s sarcoma in 1989.
Smith was the personal agent to Gilbert Price, a three-time Tony Award nominee, from 1963 until Price’s death in 1989. In 1971, Mr. Smith co-founded Taursa, a mutual fund he named by combining Taurus and Ursa. He was chairperson of the International Mensa Investment Club from 1976 to 1993.
Eight of Smith’s works were published after he reached the age of 80: “Who’s Who in Hell,” a 1,264-page biographical listing of more than 10,000 philosophic nonbelievers; “Celebrities in Hell,” a biographical listing of people whose belief systems ran against the grain; “Gossip From Across the Pond,” a collection of a decade of his columns in the United Kingdom’s Gay & Lesbian Humanist organization; “Cruising the Deuce,” written under the pseudonym Allen Windsor, a vivid description of Manhattan grindhouses and the subculture that flourished on 42nd St. in the 1940s through the 1980s; his three-volume autobiography, “In the Heart of Showbiz, A Biographical Triography of Variety Recording Studio, of Fernanda Vargas, and of Warren Allen Smith”; and the “Unforgettable New Canaanites,” an irreverent look at the Connecticut town in which he taught for 32 years.
According to Smith, his free online search engine, Philosopedia, received more than 6 million hits between its inception and the day of his death. Smith was an activist member of ACT UP and participated in the Stonewall Riots in Greenwich Village in 1969; the Bertrand Russell Society, where he was a board member from 1977 until 2014; Freethinkers NY, of which he was a co-founder; Mensa, from 1964 until his death; the New York Society of Ethical Culture; the Rationalist Press Association (United Kingdom); and the Unitarian Society.
Smith left no survivors.
