Philanthropist, Eileen Walton Smith, leaves RIC a generous gift. (Photo: Eileen with her husband Tom Smith)
The late Eileen Walton Smith has entrusted a gift of $27,000 to Rhode Island College through the RIC Foundation to benefit RIC students, particularly theatre majors who are pursuing careers in performance.
Scholarship applicants must be enrolled full time and have a minimum GPA of 2.0. Applicants are required to present a monologue from a play or a reading from a work of literature and submit a critical essay about the monologue or reading. Emphasis is on the quality of the essay over the quality of the performance.
Eileen was a native of New Jersey, who wanted to set up an essay prize at a liberal arts college in New England. According to her husband, Tom Smith, Rhode Island College was “an excellent fit.”
“I liked the fact that Rhode Island College was a public college, strong in the liberal arts, and that it had a large, ambitious and successful theatre program,” Tom says.
Literature, writing, wordplay and puns were at the core of Eileen’s being. As a child, she was a voracious reader, and as an adult, she was always beginning, in the middle of or finishing a book.
She majored in English and education at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, where she won a Fulbright scholarship to study for a master's degree in English at the University of Leeds, UK. There, she wrote a thesis on several of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning and met Tom, another American in the English master's program.
Upon returning to New Jersey, Smith first worked as a proofreader and soon became an editor for the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company. She and Tom were married in 1975, and by 1977 she was working as an editor for Princeton University. In 1980 she became university editor for Boston University. Later, in the 1980s she embarked on a career as a freelance writer and editor, first in Georgia, later in Pennsylvania and finally in suburban Philadelphia.
Smith was among the first freelance editors to work on manuscripts electronically. She also devised ways to edit copy long before Microsoft Word's Track Changes. She was a meticulous, considerate and tactful editor, balancing the demands of correctness and clarity with an appreciation for the author's style and quirks. She is author of two novels, “The Secret Life” and “The Light at the Rim of the World” and taught writing at various universities in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
“Eileen Walton Smith’s love of language – and particularly the performance of language – was evident in both her life and work. We are grateful that she has chosen to nurture that love in others through this scholarship,” says Rhode Island College President Frank D. Sánchez. “The fact that her family sought out our college as a place to establish her legacy is a testament to the incredible talent of both our theater faculty and our students.”
Eileen will live on in her writings, in the memory of all who knew her and in the lives of the students who will earn the award given in her name. As she would say with ‘grabbity’ – an ingenious word she and her brother made up as children – "Any work you put your hand to will be as good as the care you give it.” Eileen put much care into everything she did.