Born in Latham in 1918, the year World War I came to a close, Leslie Smith has seen the modern history of Baldwin County and the world unfold.

After teaching elementary school in Elberta and Loxley, Smith, a World War II veteran, served in the South Pacific as a Navy gunnery officer for four years. On Feb. 23, 1945, he watched through binoculars from the U.S.S. President Adams as six men raised the famed flag on the island of Iwo Jima.  

“I saw it when it went up,” Smith said. “It was into the fifth day, and we knew how terrible things were ashore. They had assaulted that old mountain four days in a row and were driven back. You could see puffs of smoke up the hill, and then all of the sudden, (I saw it go up) and I heard them radio them down to the base, ‘We got it.’”

After the war, Smith returned to Baldwin County and began teaching again at Foley High School, where he eventually became principal.

Many of the students he taught in fifth grade ended up being his students again in high school, and some boys that had been deployed during the war weren’t able to finish high school until after Smith became principal.

“The boys were all delayed because they had been in service, and they filtered back in through my high school through my days as principal,” he said. “So I wound up giving high school diplomas as principal to boys I had taught in the fifth grade. It was a wonderful experience. They just became my lifelong friends.”

Before eventually becoming superintendent of the Baldwin County School System from 1981 to 1985, Smith spent 15 years in charge of transportation and buildings. During that time, he experienced the growing pains of desegregation in the mid-1970s.

“They closed all the black schools in Baldwin County and dumped them into the white schools, and they dumped them in whether there was any room or not,” Smith said. “The challenge of trying to find space — we chopped up our auditoriums into pieces, we walled off hallways, we had teachers in closets and we went all over Baldwin County and hauled in all of these one-room schoolhouses that were still standing around, and we took them to the big schools and we set them on pillars.”

Smith fondly remembers the days of one-room schoolhouses from his childhood, along with historic events like electricity and telephones coming to the county, the first paved roads, and of course, the rise and fall of the logging industry on the Mobile-Tensaw Delta.

Out of all the history Smith has lived through, however, he said one development is the most important of all.

“The greatest thing I’ve seen in my lifetime is the ability of women to step up and do whatever they want to do as well or better than men do,” Smith said. “That’s a great addition to our world. All girls could aspire to in my high school class was to be either a teacher or a stenographer.”

Smith remembers the days when Stockton was on of the largest establishments in the county because of its proximity to the river, which served as the area’s interstate — it was the fastest way to Mobile before the railroad.

“It has changed from a place of hard, physical labor to a vacation land, and that is particularly true of the swamp,” Smith said. “In the old days, the Delta was the source of living for everybody in north Baldwin County.”

Living wasn’t always easy, especially during the Great Depression.

“We didn’t call it the Depression; we called it the Panic,” Smith said. “People did panic because they didn’t know where their next meal was going to come from. It was that bad. The banks closed, and my dad went broke.”

One particular summer was so bad that Smith’s father basically lived in the woods with the black families there, surviving on corn and peas he planted.

“He would leave here Monday morning, and it would take him nearly all day to walk through there,” Smith said. “He said he couldn’t stay here and eat the food that his children needed. They ate peas without salt, and no meat to season them. We still had at that time about a dozen black families who lived along the river, and they knew how to exist on absolutely nothing. That’s how my dad existed that particular summer.”

At home, his mother used whatever resources the family had to keep her children fed. They had a cow and a garden, and that’s how they survived, Smith said.

“My dad was so proud; he would not accept a sack of flour from the federal government. He just couldn’t face that,” he said. “Fortunately, the person who was distributing that stuff came here and set the sack on the back porch, and my momma accepted.”

Today, at 94, Smith is in excellent shape. He moves around like a man half his age, and his sense of humor, memory and wit are still in tact, along with the house where he was born and raised and still lives. He still tends a massive garden, boasting some of the largest tomatoes in the county. Smith also owns two antique cars he restored after he retired — a 1925 Model T Ford and a 1930 Model A Ford. He doesn’t drive them much anymore because of the increased traffic on Highway 59, but every now and then, he’ll take them out for a spin.

Smith is well known in north Baldwin County and beyond for his 2008 book “Gone to the Swamp: Raw Materials for the Good Life in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta,” and he is also involved with the Stockton Civic Club.

When asked about the secret to living a long, healthy life, Smith laughed heartily and replied, “Clean living. Just clean living.”