Richard Andrew Smyth

Richard Andrew Smyth died at his home in Orange County, January 19, 2009.
He was born in Milton, MA, December 28, 1933, the son of Ralston Blackburn Smyth and Eleanor Rogers Green Smyth.
He is survived by his wife, Luan; son, Nathan, of Orange County; daughter, Susan Smyth, and husband, Andrew Morris, of Versailles, KY; son, James, of Santa Barbara, CA; and grandsons, Edward and William Morris. Dr. Smyth graduated magna cum laude from Yale University in 1955. He was a Fulbright scholar in Freiburg, Germany. Afterwards, he served in the U.S. Marine Corps, then returned to graduate studies at Princeton and Indiana Universities. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana in 1961. From 1961 to 1999 he was a member of the Philosophy Department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He also received a joint appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature. He was the author of Forms of Intuition and Reading Peirce Reading, as well as journal articles on a variety of topics.
Dick, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was an active member of the Republican Party, running unsuccessfully for the North Carolina State Senate in 1978. He served as Precinct Chairman, County Chairman, and as a member of the North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee. He was appointed to the Orange County Social Services Board by Governor James Martin, and served a term as Chairman. For many years he was the Saturday overnight volunteer at the Chapel Hill Interfaith Council Homeless Shelter. He worked with the prisoner release program at the Orange County Correctional Center in Hillsborough, and, as a member of the Marine Corps League's Detachment 1292, Orange County Regulators, he filled his truck with Toys for Tots. An accomplished genealogist, Dick completed more than a thousand pages of family history, a chapbook, for his grandsons.
Some of his happiest hours were spent in the Family History Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Chapel Hill.
A service will be held at the Damascus Congregational Christian Church, where he was a member, on Saturday, February 7, 2009, at 2:00 p.m.