Ex-state editor, senatorial aide dies

Chester H. Smith, a former Nevada newspaper editor and aide to several prominent Nevada political leaders, died Feb. 17 in Alexandria, Va.

He was 85.

Smith's career stretched from the mid-1940s, when he worked on the U.S. Senatorial campaign of E.P. Carville. Over the years, he served as an aide to political figures including U.S. Sens. Pat McCarran and Alan Bible as well as Gov. Charles Russell.

Smith managed all four of Bible's successful senatorial campaigns and held influential staff positions in Congress including staff director and counsel to the Senate Rules Committee and the Select Committee on Small Business.

"Sen. Carville, for whom I originally worked in his office starting in January 1946 - was defeated and I secured a temporary job as a policeman - I had a revolver with a holster but never fired it nor did any of the other several hundred policemen," Smith wrote before his death.

"I had a uniform, a badge, etc., and the job gave me enough money on which to eat plus a rooming-house bed.

"My police days were not very exciting and after a month or so I 'graduated' to operating an elevator in the old Senate office building for several months before I was asked to join Sen. McCarran's office as a press secretary. I was still attending George Washington University, taking a pre-legal course 'til I received my A.B. degree in 1948. I immediately started to George Washington University College of Law."

Smith became the youngest Nevada newspaper editor in 1939 at the Humboldt Star.

Smith died at Mount Vernon Hospital after undergoing brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.

Smith was born in Oregon and grew up in Winnemucca, where he became editor of the Humboldt Star newspaper in 1939.

He served in the U.S. Marine Corps in WWII as a combat correspondent and saw action in the Pacific including on Iwo Jima, earning the Purple Heart, Navy Commendation and Presidential Unit Citation.

His longtime wife, Elizabeth, died in 1974, after which, he married Miriam Fox, who died in 2000. Chet Smith is survived by his daughters Anne Elizabeth Ponsen of Alexandria and Andy Harrison Hilburn of Greenville, S.C.; and grandchildren Johan Ponsen of Arlington, Va., Bryan Hilburn of Clemson University, S.C., and Laurie Hilburn of Greenville.

n Contact reporter Geoff Dornan at gdornan@nevadaappeal.com or at 687-8750.