IT’S POLITICAL SEASON AGAIN, when you’re bound to hear a lot of presidential wannabes talking about moral fiber and family values and making the world a better place.
But you might hear one who also preaches the gospel of nonviolence and safeguarding the environment. He’ll say his three role models in life are Jesus Christ, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and he can easily debate the ethical conundrum of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He’ll talk of colonizing space and curing birth defects and slowing the aging process, and surely you will hear people call him a genius.
And you might think, Hey, I’m going to vote for this guy!
But you can’t.
Because this guy is a 10-year-old mop-haired kid who just graduated from high school in Orange Park, Fla., and is about to enter college.
And, yeah, he’s a genius.
“I have three main goals,” Greg Smith will tell anyone who asks. “I want to become a biomedical researcher, an aeronautical engineer and president of the United States.”
Not one or another, mind you. But all of them. And don’t get him started on becoming an ambassador to the United Nations, because that might lead to a discussion of the tragic ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Greg’s rather elaborate plan for the war-torn former Yugoslavia, including democratic elections and a supervisory council and a tricameral government and a new alliance he would call the United Balkan States. Then again, if it were possible for any one person to bring about global peace, Greg Smith might well be the man – or rather, boy – to do it.
HIS PARENTS NOTICED something different about him even before he could talk. He would lie in his crib and catch the characters of a mobile spinning overhead – snatching one, then releasing it and snatching the next. Most babies, his mother knew, could only bat clumsily at such a moving target.
By age 1, Greg knew the alphabet and could speak in complete sentences. “What comes after ‘H’?” you can hear his mother ask the tot in a home movie. “I,” he says, crawling along happily.
“We didn’t really know how to explain it to people,” says Greg’s mom, Janet Smith, a former dancer, model and actress. “Every time we talked to other parents, it was, Oh, yeah, yeah, my kid’s that way too.”
Chances are, though, their kids weren’t identifying the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods at 18 months. And probably their 4-year-olds weren’t reciting the Gettysburg Address or reading Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth. At 5, Greg presented a science project on photosynthesis to his kindergarten class. By 6, he was diagramming molecules of silicon dioxide – which, he explained, “we know as sand.” At 7, he whipped through high-school algebra in eight weeks.
And this past June, two days after his 10th birthday, he graduated from Orange Park High School, outside Jacksonville, with a 4.8 grade-point average – the youngest graduate ever in Florida public-school history.
On stage that day, one of his baby teeth fell out.
In July his family moved to Virginia so Greg could attend Randolph-Macon College, a small, private liberal-arts school just north of Richmond, where tuition alone runs $17,000 a year. Greg got a full scholarship.
“When we first got his application – with an 8-by-10 glossy of this little mop- top – we thought it was a joke,” says John Conkright, dean of admissions and financial aid for the college. “But we talked to the parents and quickly realized it was very serious.”
Greg – all 4 feet 6 inches of him – is one of only a handful of students accepted each year into the school’s honor program, and he has been granted permission to have three majors and take five courses instead of the normal four.
His mom, of course, drives him to college every day and chaperones him around campus.
But you could know all of that about Greg Smith – you could know that his IQ is so high it’s considered immeasurable, that it is somewhere over 200, that he is in the top one-half of 1 percent of the population in intelligence, that Duke and Swarthmore and some 50 other universities all wanted him – and still only scratch the surface.
Because Greg Smith is much more than merely brilliant.
DO YOU GET ALONG WELL with dumb people?” David Letterman asks, eyeing the tyke in the suit who is appearing on the show before Lauren Bacall. “Do you have trouble talking with just, um – well, you’re doing all right here tonight.”
Greg Smith does not snicker. He doesn’t roll his eyes or shake his head. With David Letterman, as with the rest of humanity, Greg sits politely and explains patiently and answers all questions put before him with the poise and eloquence of a charm-school instructor, even if he has answered them a thousand times before. Giving a graduation speech before 8,000 people didn’t faze him, nor did being on 60 Minutes or meeting Gov. Jeb Bush, nor sharing a national television audience with the Top Ten Things You Don’t Want to Hear from a Hot Dog Vendor – “There’s a zoo in every bite!”
Seemingly, nothing intimidates him, nothing rattles his humble but unquestioning sense of self.
He is the type of kid who chews with his mouth closed. Who wipes his feet and takes his shoes off before he walks across a white carpet. Who always says “please” and “thank you” and even apologizes if, in a moment of exuberance over some newly uncovered fact, he might happen to interrupt.
He became a vegetarian at 2, in large part because he doesn’t like the notion of killing animals. Should he find a bug in the house, he will gently shepherd it outside.
And for Christmas last year, he asked for money – so he could buy gifts for his family and friends. He likes to browse through antiques shops for presents. When he’s not reading Hemingway or Plato or The Basic Works of Aristotle, he tends a butterfly garden in the front yard of the Smiths’ new house, a house he helped design and decorate.
And unlike the usual crop of political aspirants, Greg really believes in that moral fiber stuff.
His rule for watching videos, for instance, is: Three curse words and you’re off.
Last year he launched an organization to promote peace and compassion. It’s called I.E.M. for Nonviolence – “I” for inspiration, “E” for education and “M” for motivation. But Greg pronounces it “I am for nonviolence.”
“It’s bad English,” he confesses. “But it’s catchy.”
Give him a little time, and pretty soon he will start talking about his “mission.”
“Greg knows he has been given a special gift from God,” his mom says. “And he feels he has a mission to use that gift to help people.”
In Greg’s book, the sooner, the better.
His high-school teachers describe him as engaging, unbelievably driven and insatiably hungry to learn. So rapid was his pace that, in most classes, he was the only student. Either no one else could keep up, or no one else wanted to try.
“He is absolutely the hardest working student I’ve ever had. Ever,” says Jeanne Chambliss, an English and gifted-studies teacher at Orange Park who first volunteered to teach Greg one-on-one in summer school. In six weeks together, Greg churned through five courses.
Because he had bypassed so many grades, his writing skills needed polish to bring him up to college standards, and Chambliss wasn’t about to coddle him. “Sometimes I’d have him rewrite assignments five and six times,” she says. “His attitude was amazing. He was always excited at the opportunity to redo it. He loved constructive criticism.”
If, when he was speaking, she corrected his grammar, he thanked her. He told her he didn’t want to sound ignorant.
Of course, on occasion Greg suffered the jealousy of other students – particularly the bright ones, who didn’t appreciate a pint-sized upstart coming along and stealing their spotlight.
And he had few close friends. Not because he is geeky – he loves soccer and baseball and pillow fights, and he adores junk food – but because he didn’t have much opportunity to make them. With his lone-student class schedule, he led a somewhat sheltered existence.
“Usually he was accompanied [on campus] by his mom or one of the administrators,” says 17-year-old Eric Macam, who competed with Greg on the school’s math and chemistry team. “But I definitely consider him a friend, and the age factor doesn’t really make a difference.”
He and another pal, incoming senior class president Erich Spivey, also 17, took Greg to a Jacksonville amusement park as a graduation present. The three spent the day playing laser tag and arcade games and go-carting.
“When he wants to have fun,” Spivey says, “he has fun.”
And, ultimately, what Macam wants people to know about his young friend is this: “Everybody hears about Greg’s intellect, but not everybody knows about his heart.”
“AS FAR AS we’re concerned, he doesn’t have to go to college,” says Bob Smith, a former microbiologist who joined his wife in the modeling industry for a few years and now runs a printing business. “In fact, we lobbied for him not to go.”
He eyes his son across the table. Greg, munching on french fries, shakes his head playfully. “No!” the boy says, grinning.
His dad sighs. “He could take a year off and travel. He could have a mentor. He could just take a course somewhere. . . . Greg, you have plenty of time. . . .”
But the argument is moot, and both of them know it. Greg has an agenda. His father is not about to stand in his way.
“We’ve not yet seen his ceiling,” Bob Smith says, relenting. “We don’t know where that is.”
Unlike many brilliant people, Greg is not just remarkable in, say, math or science or chess. His talents extend to virtually anything he pursues – except perhaps pottery.
“Let’s just say I am the Picasso of pottery,” he says. How did this kid get to be so smart?
There’s no simple answer to that. Greg’s parents were exceptionally nurturing of his education, but you could also argue that smart kids are just born that way. Researchers recently reported that the brain of Albert Einstein, for instance, was shaped differently than your average Joe’s.
“Certainly I think a lot is biological,” Greg’s dad says. “The wiring he has allows him to see something one time and then bring it back hours and even days later. That’s something you can’t teach.”
If it helps to have good genes, Greg couldn’t have done much better. Dad not only has a master’s degree in microbiology, he was an All-American football player at the University of Maryland. After college he worked in research for eight years, including a stint with the Food and Drug Administration, before he went into modeling and business.
His IQ is around 130.
Janet was a speech communications major at Maryland, where she met Bob while she was a cheerleader. She also was a dancer who would go on to model and act and finish in the top 10 of the 1972 Miss USA pageant. Eventually she launched her own performing-arts studio.
Her IQ is in the 140s.
After Greg was born, all of them were in the modeling business for a while, once posing together in an ad for a vacation resort as the happy, impossibly photogenic family they really are.
The Smiths waited 15 years for Greg to come along. Janet lost a baby early in their marriage, and her pregnancy with Greg was rough. In her seventh month, she developed toxemia, and her blood pressure skyrocketed, forcing her to be hospitalized. Doctors delivered the boy three and a half weeks early via Caesarean section.
He was perfectly healthy.
But when Greg was 2, there was another scare. Janet, young and otherwise abundantly healthy, with no known risk factors and no family history to warn her, found a lump high in her chest and was diagnosed with a particularly virulent form of breast cancer.
“I didn’t know if I would live,” she says. “My decision and Bob’s decision was that I was going to take the harshest medicine they could give me, and take as many treatments as they could give me, as I could physically stand, to cure myself, because I had a 2-year-old child. I wanted to be here for Greg. I wanted Greg to have me as his mother.”
She kept a journal during her treatment, writing letters to the boy she hoped she would get to see grow up, letters she hoped would never be delivered. It’s your 16th birthday, she said, and as you’re reading this book I just want you to know how much I love you.
The chemotherapy and radiation left her violently ill. It affected her skin, her teeth, her vision, her hair, her stomach. It blurred her memory. It made her feel she could not get warm, no matter what the temperature was or how much she bundled up. Since the anti-nausea medicine left her too groggy to care for Greg – and because Bob still had to go to work – she refused to take it.
“I had lost myself,” she says. “You just get to the point where the medicine is so strong you don’t know if you can keep going.”
One day that summer, she curled up on a lounge chair in the back yard, trying to soak up some warmth from the sun. Greg toddled out and knelt down beside her.
“I realized, looking at him, that I had to be strong enough,” she says. “I didn’t want that to be his last memory of me.”
Last year she passed the five-year milestone in her recovery, the point at which a cancer patient is considered cured.
THEY NEVER SPOKE baby-talk to Greg, and they never yelled at him. Discipline – on those three or four occasions in his life when he did something he shouldn’t have, such as going into a neighbor’s yard without permission – consisted of a casual suggestion that he change his behavior. At worst, he got a timeout.
If Greg showed an interest in something, his parents immediately embraced it. In his dinosaur phase, for instance, they bought him books on dinosaurs, videos on dinosaurs, dinosaur toys. They took him to museums with dinosaur exhibits.
“He’s just been a pure joy to us ever since he was born,” his dad says.
If anything pained them, it was the shortsightedness of the adults who were never sure what to do with Greg in school.
In kindergarten, for instance, when he was already reading entire books, Greg sat patiently, cooperatively, through The Alphabet Song. Hmmm, he figured, must be some sort of review.
“I don’t think there’s anything worse than having your child hate school,” Bob says. “To have a brilliant, creative mind not able to express itself, that’s a dangerous thing.”
They began looking at schools – both public and private – from Connecticut to Florida that would offer Greg what he needed. They kept looking for six months. Everyone talked about enrichment rather than advancement. They only wanted to give him extra work.
“We weren’t looking for more work for Greg,” Janet says. “We were looking for work that would challenge him, something that would keep him interested in school, not just bogged down.”
Finally, in Fleming Island Elementary in Orange Park, the Smiths found a school that was not only willing to help Greg, it was eager. Bob and Janet sold their home, quit their jobs and moved 1,000 miles south without even the promise of a full-time income to sustain them. For three months, they lived off Bob’s part- time teaching salary from a local community college.
“Hurdles are sometimes just disguised opportunities,” Bob says. “You don’t always know.”
The Smiths bought a nice house in an upscale subdivision where Greg could ride bikes and play with kids his own age. They figured they’d be staying for a while.
But that first year alone, Greg went from second grade to middle school to high school. At one point, Janet was shuttling him to all three at various points in the day.
“It had been an emotionally grueling time for us,” Janet says. “But at that point we just decided we were going to let Greg follow his own path.”
He had just turned 7.
GREG’S PATH, IT TURNS OUT, is uncharted territory for all concerned – his parents, his professors, his coeds. Certainly no one close to his age has ever attended Randolph-Macon, and not many students sign up for a first-semester load of calculus, physics, French, European History (the Renaissance to 1815) and “War in Antiquity.”
“It’s going to be a little weird,” says D’andre Murray, a senior who, like other students interviewed, welcomed the arrival of a pre-pubescent genius on their campus. “He’s so little, but he’s probably going to be answering questions that we can’t.”
Administrators expect reporters from across the country to visit the campus. “Strange as it may sound,” says Ned Moore, the university’s vice president for development, “we really are not promoting the story. We want Greg to have as normal a college experience as possible, and we really don’t care to disrupt things.”
Nor did Greg’s parents seek any of the attention. In fact, when they moved to Florida, they had an explicit agreement with the school district that there would be no publicity. But soon local TV stations were sending reporters to the school, posing as students. Cooperate with us on the story, they bullied Janet, or we’ll say whatever we want.
She and Bob quickly contacted one of their former agents in New York to handle the onslaught. But the ultimate decision was left to Greg. If he wasn’t eager to do it, they certainly wouldn’t make him.
“He actually likes it,” Janet says. It has given him a forum to promote nonviolence, a topic he works into interviews whenever he can.
Still, Mom and Dad are understandably wary. They hardly want their only child to be a spectacle, and they know a certain amount of the lunatic fringe comes with any notoriety. They’ve already gotten chummy letters from Aryan Nation types, presumably hoping the fair-skinned, white-blond genius-boy would be their poster child.
(Apparently, they were unfamiliar with Greg’s fondness for cultural diversity.) At Greg’s high-school graduation, reporters followed the family to a McDonald’s, and the National Enquirer showed up for the ceremony.
“I was wondering if I was going to be in a liposuction article,” Greg says. “You never know,” his mom admits. “But, actually, they did a beautiful job.” Already the Smiths have been approached by graduate schools that hope to steer Greg into their specialty, even though he has repeatedly declared his intention
to get doctorates in aeronautical engineering, biomedical research and political science – a feat he figures he’ll complete by age 33. Along the way, he’d like to study at Oxford and Cambridge and the University of Paris.
Still, it can be hard to reconcile the 10-year-old with the emerging statesman, the little kid who wears Daffy Duck slippers with the erudite historian who can casually map the Holy Roman Empire in 1360 A.D. – from memory – or who uses the tiny soldiers in his play room to re-enact entire Civil War troop movements. During the summer, he went to camp – and read Physics: The Easy Way.
“I just want him to be fulfilled,” says Bob Smith, sounding a bit wistful as he reflects on his son’s extraordinary life. “And not all kids who are very smart very young are fulfilled. He wants to become president and ambassador and go to space, but it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t end up doing any of those things – as long as when it’s all over, he can be happy.”
Kate Santich is a writer for Florida magazine. Julie Fletcher is a photographer for The Orlando Sentinel. >
