Nothing keeps this 96-year-old MIT alumnus from attending his college reunions
Robert Smith isn’t one to miss a party.
The 96-year-old MIT alumnus has attended every class reunion since he graduated in 1941.
The school is hosting its Tech Reunions for 4,100 alumni this weekend, and Smith will maintain his perfect reunion attendance streak, returning to campus for its 15th celebration.
“My MIT experience helped me become a great lover of the city of Boston, and normally I’m not a big city man. I’m more of a country boy,” Smith said. “…It gives me the chance to get reacquainted with my classmates, and make new acquaintances that maybe I didn’t know from my class of about 400.”
Smith will be the only graduate from his class to attend this year, according to MIT’s Alumni Association.
But for Smith, who studied civil engineering and participated in advanced ROTC while at MIT, the reunions mean even more than a time to reconnect with old classmates. Some of his life’s most important moments are rooted at MIT and in the Boston area.
Smith ’41, shortly after his graduation, in his dress uniform.
After graduation, Smith was ordered into active duty in the U.S. Army Air Corps and served until February 1946. During his service, he taught math to navigators and bombardier cadets and later assumed administrative duties at Ellington Air Field.
After World War II, he was in town for his fifth-year reunion because he decided to take a few graduate courses at the university under the GI Bill.
“It was a very small reunion,” Smith said. “It was a lunch at a downtown restaurant so I thought I would go. And it happened to be at time I was courting this young lady and I asked her to go along. We both really enjoyed it.”
His date to the dinner, Eleanor Smith, would become his wife about a year later.
After leaving Boston, Smith joined his father and five others in forming an engineering consulting firm in Pennsylvania, where he worked for the next 48 years.
In between working, raising his three children, and golfing, Smith volunteered for the university by interviewing prospective students for the Admissions Office for several decades. Smith, who still lives in Pennsylvania, said he and his late wife went to each reunion together every five years throughout their 48 years of marriage.
The 96-year-old still has many family members in Massachusetts, including his granddaughter, Megan Goldman, who graduated from MIT in physics in 2004.
“We have a lot of common things to talk about and reminisce about,” Smith added.
And Boston and Cambridge are dear to him for more than being the setting of his love story and where his family resides.
One of the reasons Smith loves the city is because it’s home to the Boston Pops.
Tech Night at Pops, the Symphony Hall concert exclusively for MIT alumni and their guests, is his favorite part of the reunion—and it’s another event for which he has perfect attendance.
“I started going to Pops concerts as an undergraduate,” he said. “Where we lived, we had no orchestras so at school I did not miss any opportunity to go to a Pops concert…The concert was [Thursday] night and it was just terrific.”
Aside from the reunion, Smith added he’s most excited to spend time and go out to dinner with his family, including his sister, Goldman and his two young great grandchildren.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated Robert Smith’s age as 90.
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