Queer Places:
Princeton University (Ivy League), 110 West College, Princeton, NJ 08544
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
2 E 86th St, New York, NY 10028
Woodlawn Cemetery
Elmira, Chemung County, New York, USA
Parker Lloyd Smith (July 10, 1902 - September 16, 1931) was son of the late
Supreme Court Justice Walter Lloyd-Smith, a graduate of Princeton and a Rhodes
scholar at Oxford. He worked on the Knickerbocker Press and the Albany Evening
News from 1926 to 1928. First assigned the obituaries, within six months he
was covering City Hall, where he was well-liked, and a little later he was
editor of the Sunday magazine section. A forward thinker and local activist,
he was Secretary of the Albany Air Board, lobbying hard for what would become
Albany Airport; he also spearheaded the effort to install a carillon atop
Albany’s City Hall. Russell Wheeler "Mitch" Davenport
and Max Foster were immortalized in
Phelps Putnam’s poetry (and in a painting
by Russell Cheney) as “Les Enfants
Pendus,” which the poet translated as “the hung-up children.” The number of
suicides in Putnam’s circle is striking:
Farwell Knapp put a gun to his
head; Parker Lloyd-Smith, boon companion of Mitch Davenport, leaped from the
twenty-third floor of a building. Even
F.O. Matthiessen, the most
grounded of the whole group, plunged from the twelfth floor of a Boston hotel
in 1950, depressed over Cheney’s death and weary of being hounded for both his
homosexuality and his political views. Mitch Davenport professed to be in love
with Laura Barney Harding
and probably would have divorced his wife if Laura had given the nod. But
Mitch’s anguish over the suicide of his friend Parker Lloyd-Smith, with whom
he admitted he’d been “more than intimate,” seems to have given Laura pause.
Parker Lloyd Smith was the son of Judge Walter Lloyd Smith (1856–1928)
and Jessie E. Gonzales (1865-1932).
In 1928, Time Magazine offered Parker a job as Associate Editor, and in 1930, as Managing Editor, he helped Henry Luce launch Fortune Magazine.
Thomas Maitland Cleland, was one of America's foremost authorities on both type and design. While drinking with Parker Lloyd-Smith one night at Bruno's, a speakeasy on East 12th Street, Cleland sketched on the tablecloth his vision of the first cover of Fortune Magazine, right down to the serifs on the logotype. The illustration was remarkably close to the cover that would appear on the inaugural issue in February 1930. What the
remaining fragment of linen doesn't show is that Cleland drew it upside down--so that Lloyd-Smith, sitting across the table, wouldn't have to turn his head or rise from his chair to appreciate it.
Late at night on September 16, 1931, Parker Lloyd-Smith jumped naked to his death from the 23rd floor of his fashionable apartment house at Adams Apartment Hotel, 2 E. 86th Street, just off Fifth Avenue,
New York, where he lived with his widowed mother. He left her this note:
“Mother Charm: The heat is frightful – but this is a farewell – if this is waiting – I will wait for you.
My love and gratitude always. Parker.”
He was 29. Largely forgotten today, the classicist writer left behind a modest legacy of poems, magazine articles, and newspaper pieces.
The gift to the Nassau Library of Parker Lloyd-Smith, together with a fund to increase the University collection in the English drama, reflected his undergraduate enthusiasms for the drama and the theatre and
gave evidence of his own excellent literary tastes. Sometime before his death he had begun to collect rare items, so the University
came in possession of such treasures as the 1853 "Poems of Arnold" and some important first editions of Emerson. The more general works in the collection provided duplicates of books that
were always in demand for general reading.
My published books:
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