Park Benjamin Smith was a New Jersey boy who worked hard at school and received acceptances at both Holy Cross and Notre Dame. He chose Holy Cross for the simple reason that it was closer to home.
“There was a Jebbie at each end of the corridor; it was all boys, and you went to Mass three days a week or got detention,” he remembers. “Everyone ate at one time, and you ate what they gave you, or you didn’t eat. We had three in a room; there were no private bathrooms. We didn’t know anything different. It was all part of the discipline. There was one way of doing it, and that was the Holy Cross way.”
Smith soon found himself admiring the discipline instilled into the students by the Jesuits. “One, we called J. Bryan God,” he says. “His name was J. Bryan Connors, and he always wore a black cape. He was also known as Batman.”
After graduation Smith served in the Marines, where a knee injured during maneuvers kept him stateside teaching servicemen in the Corps about atomic, biological and chemical warfare. In civilian life, he entered the New York School of Interior Design with an eye to a career in textiles, which had been his family’s business.
“I always loved color, which holds a fascination for me,” Smith says. “If I see a rainbow, I’ll stop the car and just look. I love the harmony there is in color. You never see colors in nature that don’t go together.”
His early efforts in the textile industry were influenced by a desire to help others. After learning that the highest unemployment rate in the country was among the Native Americans in South Dakota, Smith started a company there called Dakotah, which he discovered meant “friend” in the Lakota language. He shopped at J.C. Penney for material and put together a collection of hand-quilted items, including bedspreads that featured vivid, colorful Native American designs. Within five years, Smith said, Dakotah was the second largest employer of women in the state, the first being the phone company.
He then focused on building up the Park B. Smith Company. Fired by his love for color, he visited India, whose bright, hand-woven textiles he admired greatly. “Back then everything was ‘natural’ color,” he says. “There was every color of beige you could want.”
In India, with no contacts and no appointments, Smith picked up an English-language newspaper, saw an article that mentioned a textile factory in a nearby town and went there to meet the owner. That was the beginning of a long love affair with India and the East. “That year I made 13 trips to India, and those were the days the journey took 30 hours,” he says.
By offering bright colors and natural textiles in an era of vinyl and earth tones, Smith built “a decent company of 200-plus employees.”
Crediting his achievements in the business world in part to the discipline and willingness to work hard that he learned at Holy Cross, Smith notes that there are three other important ingredients to his success: “First, you take a chance—I was always a gambler. You look at a situation, make an assessment of your abilities and you act. That’s kind of a gamble. Taking a chance is part of life.
“Second,” he continues, “if you make a mistake, admit it and move on. People are afraid to make mistakes, and I have never been afraid to. I learn by making mistakes.
“The last one is decision-making,” he concludes. “I look at these CEOs who agonize when they make a decision. I’ve never had that problem. I’m not saying I’m always right. But if your batting average is pretty high in decision-making, you’ll do OK.”
Like most Americans of his generation, Smith had never been a wine-drinker as a young man. At Holy Cross he and his classmates would drink beer at the Southbridge Street “dimies,” bars that offered 10-cent beers. It was a few years later, during his days in the Marines, that he first noticed a liquor store display for a Beaujolais wine selling at less than a dollar a bottle. He was intrigued.
“I don’t know what made me pick it up,” he recalls, “but I did, and when I tried it I said, ‘This isn’t bad.’ Then I said, ‘This is pretty good.’ I didn’t know what I was doing. But one thing led to another, and I started experimenting. The inexpensive wines were all I could afford back then, but, as you advance in your career, your taste improves. And, of course, the price goes up.”
That’s for sure. Among the Park Smith wines to be offered by Sotheby’s are 50 cases of the famous 1982 Mouton-Rothschild Bordeaux, for which bids might well reach $1 million; Smith believes nobody else in the world has 50 cases. Just six bottles of the 1985 Romanée Conti could pull down a cool $70,000. And then there are the “large format” wines, the magnums, double magnums and imperials for which Smith has something approaching an obsession; often, winemakers have made wine in these large formats for Smith alone. A collection of 11 magnums of a cult wine made by Colgin—the only such collection in the world—could yield as much as $30,000.
In addition to the rarity of Smith’s collection, what sets it apart is its provenance. Smith buys wine directly from the vineyard and transports it immediately in refrigerated airplanes and trucks to his cellars. There are no gaps in the history of Smith’s wines, no periods when they might not have been as well preserved as possible. Wine-lovers are always prepared to pay a premium for what prominent wine authority Robert Parker calls “pristine provenance.”
Smith is unapologetically scrupulous regarding the keeping of wine. “Heat, light and motion are what destroys wine,” he says. “You see a lot of liquor stores with wine in the window. I would no more buy a bottle from those stores than fly to the moon. The sun kills wine. You can’t have a wine cellar next to a subway station, either, because the vibrations will ruin it.”
It is perhaps not surprising that Smith and other Holy Cross alumni have been drawn to the creation, collection and enjoyment of wine. Jesuit missionaries have carried grape vines to almost every continent. And, the phenomenon has been noted by Parker, publisher of The Wine Advocate: “It’s as if there’s something in the DNA of Jesuits and those who attend Jesuit-run schools,” he says.
Smith’s favorite wine is Chateauneuf du Pape, a wine from the region of France where the popes resided in the 14th century (the name means “the new residence of the Pope”). He keeps 500 bottles of vintage Chateauneuf du Pape in a temperature-controlled room immediately off his kitchen, and, in the second of his six underground cellars he has “more than they have in the region,” he jokes. The license plate of his BMW is, naturally, CNDP. Even his answering-machine message declares his undying fondness for the wine.
“I love this wine because it offers instantaneous gratification, a noble sweetness and a lingering aftertaste,” he says. “What other wine is so drinkable upon release and will be in another 25 years?”
And why Smith’s passion for magnums? “They’re good-looking,” he says. “I like to look at them. And, I like to have something left in the bottle—and when you have two bottles in one you never have that problem.”
For Smith, the drinking of wine is not only a physical and esthetic pleasure but also a kind of spiritual celebration. He warmly remembers an evening in early fall when a trio of Holy Cross classmates and their wives drove out to his home to spend a weekend together.
“There was Ronnie Perry and his wife, Pat, my old roommate Harry McElroy and his wife, Elena, and Joe and Alice Harrington,” he said. “Father McFarland came up, too, and he said Mass for us in the cellar, standing right before a statue of the Buddha, and as he spoke the candles in the candelabra shimmered—and it was just a wonderful evening with friends.”
“In every bottle of fine wine,” he says, “you find the love, energy, artistry, care and tradition of the winemakers in perfect harmony with the color, texture, sweetness and complexity of one of God’s great creations—the grape. The enjoyment that comes in drinking such wine is a celebration of life, a life only given meaning by our relationship to God.”
And so, with this landmark auction, Smith has found a way to bring together the two great passions of his life—wine and the College on the Hill. His friends on Mount St. James reciprocate the warmth and esteem.
“It is difficult for me to separate my friendship with, and love of, Park and Linda from my love of Holy Cross,” says Frank Vellaccio, senior vice president of the College. “They, like Holy Cross, have truly enriched my life. And they, like me, are relentless in their desire and drive to make Holy Cross the premier undergraduate liberal arts college in the country. Park, with a vitality energized by Linda’s support, counsel and love, has found a way to combine his passion for wine with his relentless drive to promote Holy Cross’ mission.”
“Park has lived his life dedicated to the principles of excellence, generosity, fellowship and hard work,” says Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., president of Holy Cross, summing up one of the College’s most loyal sons. “Just as his pursuit of quality has shaped his magnificent wine collection, his many contributions to the College—which range from Smith Hall housing the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, to the Wellness Center and the new soccer stadium—along with his challenge gift that propelled our recent Lift High the Cross campaign far beyond its original goal, have added immensely to the quality of our academic and campus lives.”
Read More:
A Q&A with wine expert Robert Parker
Alumni Vintners
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