116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Curiosity key to Harry Smith’s Central College classroom
’73 alum and retired TV journalist returning to Pella as instructor this fall
Curiosity is bringing Harry Smith full circle.
The veteran television journalist’s curiosity was piqued during his undergraduate days at Central College in Pella. And after recently wrapping up a four-decade career reporting the news from all seven continents, he’s returning to his alma mater to teach a fall class with curiosity at its core.
The course continues to evolve as it takes shape.
“The initial idea was ‘Commencement,’ because everybody thinks of commencement as the end, but this is really about the beginning,” Smith, 72, told The Gazette by phone from the New York City apartment where he and his wife, sportscaster Andrea Joyce, raised their two sons.
“And so curiosity ends up driving the heart of this (class). My whole thought is as these young people get ready to leave, starting with curiosity and listening, and empathy, and mindfulness without meditation, and resilience and adaptability — those are the things we’re going to be talking about for eight weeks.”
And students won’t have their cellphone and other electronic devices within reach.
“There's going to be a cardboard box,” Smith said. “They're all going to go in the cardboard box for every class.”
His background work also is evolving. He’s already started a deep dive into studies about curiosity, discovering conflicting ideas swirling through the subject. Is curiosity fueled by nature or nurture? It’s been observed in both kids and animals, he said.
“What I know for sure is that if you want to be successful in just about anything, you need to be curious,” he said. “Part of the motivation of this is, I have observed college students becoming more and more narrowly focused, thinking, ‘This is what I want to do, and this is the field I want to work in, and this is how much money I want to make.’
“What I think a lot of kids don't realize, at least from what I’ve been reading, you could work in as many as three different fields by the time they retire, let alone as many as a dozen different jobs.”
So he sees his upcoming course as a way to add adaptability, resilience, listening and empathy to the students’ tool kit as they go out the door. “All that will serve you unbelievably well,” he said.
Conveying these concepts isn’t unfamiliar territory. He worked with new junior hires in a longtime NBC writing class, stressing the importance of homework.
“There’s no such thing as enough,” he noted. “Unless you’ve got an engine of curiosity running in your in your system, you’re likely in the wrong business.”
Finding his path
College was one long series of “aha moments” for Smith, who studied at Central from 1969 to 1973. Even though he was a communications major, he took such a wide variety of classes that he considers his years there as a liberal arts education.
Before he got there, he contemplated being a long-haul truck driver so he could see the country. Or maybe a driver’s ed teacher and high school football coach.
“I was a sort of like a Roman candle, waiting for somebody to light my fuse,” he said. “And I got to Central College, and that was it. It was all over. I just went crazy, in the best possible way, because I really fell in love with learning and all that kind of real life, liberal arts education. It’s incomparable. …
“And then, I just kept discovering things and discovering. I said, ‘Oh my gosh, I got to figure out how to turn all this into a career.’”
He managed to do just that.
Beginning in radio in Pella, he wrote commercials and added the color commentary while a local veterinarian did the play-by-play action for local high school girls’ basketball games. Shortly after, he worked in radio in Cincinnati and Denver, where he got his big break co-hosting a public affairs show on public television.
“That ended up being a game changer, because that opened the door to my getting a job at the CBS affiliate,” he said. “And once I once I got there, things really, really fell into place pretty quickly.”
He would spend the bulk of his career at CBS and NBC, interviewing presidents and rock stars, going into war zones and natural disaster sites — and interviewing people saving elephants in Kenya and others counting penguins in Antarctica.
But he found just as much satisfaction, if not more, in spending the past few years at NBC elevating little-known slices of life, like telling “the story of the kid that was a Kid Captain that ends up on the Iowa football team. I would do that for the rest of my life,” he said, speaking of his 2023 spotlight on Kelby Telander and the Iowa Wave.
“I think the audience also really responds to it. Never in all the years on national television have I had the kind of response that I’ve had in the last half dozen years or so.”
His wife is the sportscaster, heading to Paris this summer to cover the Olympics for NBC. But Smith was at Carver-Hawkeye Arena on Feb. 15, the night Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA women’s basketball career scoring record, reporting that for the NBC Nightly News and the Today show. That wasn’t his first — or last — trip to Iowa City.
On his “fantasy list” is returning to the University of Iowa for a Hawkeye football game and to sit in on an Iowa Writers’ Workshop class, “just to see how that works,” he said, “because I’ve been wondering about that forever and ever.”
In the meantime, he’s enjoyed making recent spring trips to Pella for college engagements, something he’s been doing “for years,” thanks to the various boards on which he’s served. He’s not sure where he’ll be living during his teaching assignment in the Executive-in-Residence program at Central, but he enjoys being out and about on campus and in the community.
Heading to Central
Growing up in the Chicago suburb of Lansing, Ill., settled by Dutch and German immigrants, Smith said he “couldn’t be any more Dutch.” Both his grandfather and grandmother came from the northern provinces of the Netherlands, and when his grandfather came to America, he added an “h” to the family’s last name, taking it from Smit to Smith.
He grew up in the Reformed Church of America, with roots in the Netherlands, and Central’s history with that Protestant denomination dates to 1916. Pella has several Reformed churches, and the community is widely known for celebrating its Dutch heritage with the annual Tulip Festival and through Old World architecture and traditional Dutch food and wares.
Those Dutch ties, as well as his desire to play for Central’s legendary football coach Ron Schipper, led Smith to attend college in Pella.
A multisport athlete, he also played basketball until his senior year, when he quit the varsity team to join the speech team. While preparing for a rigorous radio speaking competition, he realized he was working harder at speech practice than in basketball. He also sang bass in Central’s A Cappella Choir, an auditioned ensemble that now travels at home and abroad.
His ties to the school continue to run deep, with fond memories of poring over morning coffee and newspapers with other students and faculty, sparking fascinating conversations in the union.
He still keeps in touch with retired communications professor Charles Roberts, and recalls the motto of the late communications professor Bette Brunsting: “Go forth and do great things.”
He managed to do just that.
Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com
Daily Newsletters