The willingness to tackle intractable problems head-on exhibited in the early 1960s by the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation (GCAF), whose merger with the Cleveland Foundation in 1967 reinvigorated the staid, 53-year-old philanthropy, was in keeping with the spirit of Fred Goff’s surveys. But GCAF would have found it difficult to carry out its research-action agenda had it not been for the support of its chairman, Kent H. Smith, whose leadership of GCAF’s reformist mission lent it instant credibility with the Cleveland establishment. The city’s “men of money”—as GCAF’s inventor Harold Clark termed the white-male CEOs who constituted Cleveland’s most powerful civic leadership group—were not going to be dictated to by GCAF director James (Dolph) Norton, a 30ish former academician with horn-rimmed glasses, a lanky build and a country-boy manner that masked Norton’s shrewdness and creativity.

Kent Smith seemed an improbable supporter of the socioeconomic reforms that GCAF initiated. He was the eldest of three sons of Dr. Albert W. Smith, a founder and director of the Dow Chemical Company and longtime chairman of the chemical engineering and mining engineering departments at the Case School of Applied Science. (The elder Smith had roomed with Herbert Dow as a Case undergraduate.) Kent himself was a Case-trained chemical engineer. In 1928, he and his brothers helped to found the Cleveland Graphite Oil Products Company, a lubricant manufacturer that the brothers built into the Lubrizol Corporation, a diversified chemical concern listed today among the Fortune 500. Smith was president of the firm—which had mushroomed during World War II after developing a lubricant that could be added to oil to prevent truck breakdowns—until the early 1950s, and chairman until 1959, when he retired and devoted himself full-time to civic affairs.

A Cleveland Foundation board member, Smith accepted a leadership role at the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation at the recommendation of the Ford Foundation, which had helped to launch GCAF in 1961 to model for the field a “forward-looking” urban agenda. Smith came into the office that GCAF shared with the Cleveland Foundation from his home in suburban Gates Mills nearly every day. He immersed himself in the details of GCAF’s administration, even taking appointments with grant seekers and writing evaluations of their proposals. Scarcely a Sunday would pass without GCAF associate director Barbara Rawson’s fielding a telephone call from Smith, who wanted to check on new developments.

Although a staunch Republican at the ballot box, Smith (who died in 1980 at age 85) embraced no political philosophy more fervently than pragmatism. “If there was an organized way of doing something better, rather than shooting fish in a barrel, Kent would try to do it,” said Joseph D. Pigott, a member of the Case Institute of Technology’s administrative staff during Smith’s tenure as acting president. Smith regarded the GCAF as the most efficacious way to solve the city’s bewildering array of problems. In fact, Smith’s willingness to go to bat for Dolph Norton’s ideas may have saved the Greater Cleveland Associated Foundation from ending up as merely an interesting footnote in the annals of philanthropy.