CHAUTAUQUA-Joan Aspell Smith, 91 of Chautauqua, NY, and formerly of Buffalo, NY, passed away peacefully at her home on Saturday. Joan will be remembered as an early childhood innovator and educator, environmentalist, bicycle champion, equality and peace activist, a loving mother - grandmother - great-grandmother, champion of trees and nature, joyful friend, and creative community leader.
Joan was born June 19, 1931, in Muncie, Indiana, the daughter of the late David Inglehart Aspell and Beatrice Norinne Darst Aspell. Her family lived in Indiana and then moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where her father, an engineer, first continued work on highway systems before joining U.S. Steel and her mother volunteered in the community. Joan lived in Seattle as a middle school student during World War II where both parents served in the Navy, her father as a Lt. Commander in the Navy’s Seabees.
Joan was a graduate of Mt Lebanon High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she became a member of the National Honors Society. She then completed her undergraduate studies in Business at Marietta College, where she was a member of Chi Omega, and Miami University of Ohio. She worked in administration with a general contractor team in Pittsburg during college and after graduation she was a buyer at the May Company and Joslins in Denver, Colorado before marrying W. Merle Smith Jr and settling in Buffalo, New York where they raised three children. While teaching preschool at the Circle Nursery School located at the First Presbyterian Church in Buffalo, Joan earned a Masters degree in Early Childhood Education from SUNY Buffalo State College. She then worked as an early childhood educator, teaching preschool and kindergarten in the Buffalo Public School System for nineteen years. Her tenure included teaching in several magnet schools including the Bilingual Academy, Futures Academy and for her final teaching position before retirement, she returned to SUNY Buffalo State as a master teacher in their co-located Buffalo State College Learning Lab campus school, teaching while also training teachers in her classroom.
In the summer of 1964, Joan first visited the Chautauqua Lake region, a visit that led to a life of service and community engagement in the inclusive learning mission of the Chautauqua Institution. During the summer months, she was first a teacher and then became the Director of the Chautauqua Children’s School where her leadership and innovations helped the school and community flourish. Her initial summer commute from her parent’s Lighthouse Point cottage in her 1939 convertible Ford was great fun for all before she moved her family to the Chautauqua grounds in later years. Her creative solutions for the Children’s School were many: from the covering of the large porches to expand the play areas during rainy days, engaging the University of Pittsburgh to co-create a practicum program for new teachers which included college credits earned in summer months while teaching at Children’s School – a program echoing one of the purposes for Chautauqua’s original founding, bus transport and clever buttons & tags for helping preschoolers arrive home safely, color coding for classrooms, and most importantly, hiring wonderfully experienced master preschool teachers – some still teaching at the school today. Joan and her colleagues’ innovative curriculum options aligned with early concepts of nursery school education in practice at Chautauqua, pioneered from its founding into the early 1920s — engaging hands-on play-based learning espoused by Chautauqua-connected educators Frank Beard, Mrs. BT Vincent, John Dewey and the Chicago Institute (Univ Chicago Lab School).
Joan’s 2009 lecture “Chautauqua Children’s School Remembrances” illuminates significant details of this early history she built upon, and helped gather, including noting the innovation of the Chautauqua Desk – which she often referenced as “the first laptop” with over 2,000,000 sold nationally before the Great Depression. In her lecture, she shared her personal connection to the Chautauqua Desks’ manufacturing in Valparaiso, Indiana where, full circle, many in her mother’s family (Darst) worked with the Chautauqua Desk company leadership, and where her parents first met. All of this inspired her continuing collaborative leadership to scale developmentally appropriate effective early learning approaches, moving away from rigid schooling practices for youth; her focus both in Buffalo and at Chautauqua was on prioritizing our youngest in society to set everyone up for a full life of contribution and participation with confidence, joy and a solid learning capacity. A few of Joan’s innovations included integrating water and sand tables, clever play structures and materials, integration of themed musical, artistic, science and nature experiences often with expert visitors from the Chautauqua community, an early childhood informed babysitting certification for teens, and a parents council. She loved the work of Fred Rogers and Sesame Street, and often incorporated Rogers’ methods into programs. Joan’s addition of pre-Club, now known at Group 1, helped the eldest children in the school to have a smoother transition to Boys & Girls Club. Her ‘window-easel’ invention allowed children to paint with each other face-to-face on each side of the plexiglass window, cleaning it together was fun for them as well. She wrote the interactive “Children’s School Enthusiasm” school song with her daughter Robin. As one community member remarked after her passing, “I can remember her all the way back to my own time at Children’s School when she was always a loving, nurturing and encouraging presence.”
In Buffalo, Joan founded the Niagara Frontier Bicycle Club (NFBC) for riders of all ages and skill levels — still growing over 50 years later with 425+ members, rides in every Western New York County and the motto “We ride every day.” Through the 1970s Joan, with club leadership she recruited, built the NFBC foundation which stands today — expanding from weekend only rides to every day of the week, special weekend rally participation including travel to national events like the Great Eastern Rally (GEAR), engagement and collaboration on events and policy with the local bicycle racing club (Buffalo Bicycling Club), building a cross-country skiing component for winter engagement, established progressive dinner rides, and safety courses for youth and other new riders. In 1969, she created and was the first Chair of a a policy organization working in tandem with the club for over a decade, “Bikeways for Buffalo,” which advocated for regional bike routes, bicycle transport prioritization, public safety education, and re-engaging the designs of Frederick Law Olmstead and others for the benefit of the Buffalo community; the organization helped move from the concept of the bicycle as a ‘toy’ to acknowledging its value as a sustainable, healthy, family, fun, community transportation and recreation solution.
For the first Earth Day in 1970, Joan organized a community-wide bicycle parade down Buffalo’s Main Street for hundreds of riders — complete with a commuter race between a bike, a car, a bus, and a walker racing from the city line to downtown, and she always shared when recounting these events, that the bicycle won the race. For Chautauqua’s 1974 Centennial, Joan and the NFBC organized a weekend of bicycling in Chautauqua County – with all rides leaving from the Miller Bell Tower. As part of the American Bicentennial in 1976, thousands of Americans engaged in a “Bikecentennial'' celebration with groups riding all or sections of bike route mapped from coast-to-coast; Joan signed up and with her family rode five hundred miles through the Rocky Mountain section of the routes traveling from Missoula, Montana, to Jackson, Wyoming. One year she hosted the Unicycling Association of American for a visit to Buffalo, empowering hundreds of neighbors to learn to ride unicycles. In the 1979 United Nations UNEP report from meetings in Kenya there is a section on alternative transportation where Joan’s Bikeways for Buffalo with her former Buffalo address is listed first as a regional leader. Joan’s vision to recognize Buffalo’s tremendous historical and cultural resources and showcase those using her abilities, as a volunteer leader, to recruit and organize the efforts of hundreds of volunteers — preserving parks, improving neighborhood accessibility, developing integrated community-economic-environmentally friendly policy (way ahead of its time) linking neighborhoods, schools, and parks — contributed to better transportation solutions, health and well-being for all of us and for generations to come. Governor Mario Cuomo appointed Joan to the New York State Transportation Commission, officially adding bicycle transportation representation to the committee.
In addition to her work on bicycles, Joan also worked tirelessly across decades on many environmental issues faced by Western New York and the Great Lakes Region. She was one of the concerned citizens who recognized the ecological importance of the Tifft Farm site south of the Buffalo River and collaborated to convince city legislators to plan for the area’s preservation. Their efforts included organizing group clean up events, with Joan and crew often arriving by bike, creating an urban sanctuary for people and animals to share its ponds, marshes and woodlands. Today bicycle paths link Tifft Nature Preserve to other parts of the city for all to enjoy. Joan was also actively engaged in many other aspects of Buffalo’s civic progress on projects including schools integration and education quality with Citizens for Better Education, historic preservation, lifting women's history, security women's rights including passage of Title IX and ERA campaigning, civil rights, Native American rights, environmental justice, peace and nuclear arms reduction, child rights, and more. She collaborated with others from her church, the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo where she served on the board for several years, and with many friends from her Highland-Richmond Avenue and other neighborhoods. In the early 1980s, she took a one-year break from teaching to live in Alexandria, Virginia working for the Alexandria Police Department. Joan’s confident, creative approaches always engaged others to join in, and she surfaced the joy in the work, even when complex issues made the future unclear for all.
After her retirement, Joan moved full-time to the Chautauqua Institution and shifted her focus to working collaboratively on a range of programs and projects including Chautauqua’s history preservation and sharing including tours – volunteering with the Chautauqua Archives and Smith Library teams, joined the team hosting Road Scholar education programs in the fall and spring, focused on expanding environmental and recreation opportunities like Rails to Trails, collaborated on the installation of the Chautauqua Labyrinth, served as Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle (CLSC) Class of 1996 President, co-created a community neighborhood emergency communications network, developed newcomer orientations and various walking tours, hosted peace pole seasonal walks, researched and published booklets about the Chautauqua Desk and early Chautauqua Schools history, enthusiastically participated in many winter and summer community events, took adventures across the U.S. and overseas with with Elderhostel and bicycle tours, and welcomed grandchildren for fall colors, snowy adventures, freshly made maple syrup spring pancake trips, or much summer fun.
Joan served as a board member for Chautauqua’s Bird, Tree and Garden Club for sixteen years where she was the inspiration and coordinator for the Fire Circle and Nature Classrooms in the Thunder Bridge Ravine; her path sign at the end of the bridge still guides all to find these places in the beautiful, wooded ravine. Joan invited and hosted many Native American leaders to speak at Chautauqua, she brought several historical American Forest trees to be planted on the Grounds of Chautauqua, and protected and commissioned the planting of many trees. Joan was a trained mediator who volunteered her services on a regular basis, first in Buffalo Dispute Settlement Center and later for Chautauqua County residents when requested. She was honored to be named a Giant of Chautauqua in 2018.
Joan often reflected on George Bernard Shaw’s quote:
“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no 'brief candle' to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to the future generations.” She was thankful for the wonderful community of family, friends and colleagues she was able to engage with throughout her life. And whenever we dance, we can think of her, as dancing was one of her favorite activities.
Joan is survived by three children; Robin Sue Smith of Portland, Oregon, Clay Chip Smith and his wife Aicha Omar of Austin, Texas, and Megan Joan Smith of Washington, DC, four grandchildren; Ian Clay Garretson and his wife Pei-Hsun Garretson, Oliver Thomas Garretson, Louis Benjamin Smith Swisher and Alexander David Smith Swisher, one great grandchild; Penelope Tzichen Garretson, one sister in-law; Carol Schreiber Aspell, and many nieces, nephews and extended family.
In addition to her parents, she was preceded in death by an infant twin sister; Martha Jane Aspell, and an older brother; David William “Bill” Aspell.
A memorial service will be held in the summer of 2023 at the Hall of Philosophy on Saturday, July 8 at 11am. Burial will be in the Chautauqua Cemetery. An online memorial is available here for those who wish to share memories. A bench has been donated in her honor to be placed with a view of the lake at Chautauqua.
Memorial contributions can be made to the Chautauqua Bird, Tree, and Garden Club; to Chautauqua Institution for either the Children’s School or the IDEA programs (for supporting Native American programs); to the Chautauqua Center for Resolution and Justice Child and Family Services based in Jamestown; or by planting a tree – especially one dedicated to someone you love (she planted one for each grandchild and great-grandchild).
To leave a remembrance, to share a photo or to post condolences to the family, please visit https://www.freayfuneralhome.com/obituary/joan-aspell-smith
90th Birthday Chautauqua Children’s School Visits Joan Smith
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=4200452470042193 (video)
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