Newspaper legacy, journalist Barbara DeWitt Smith returns to Wyoming Valley

When I was a young girl, I used to walk the four-mile round trip from our house on Shrine View to the library on Main Street in Dallas to get my Nancy Drew books. After reading the first one, I remember standing in my bedroom and saying out loud: “I’m going to write a book!”

And so all these years later, I have.

In May, my first book was published. “Home At Last” is a memoir that tells all the family secrets of growing up in a privileged but nutty, colorful household. My father used to write the Little Studies column in the Times Leader about his trials and tribulations of dealing with his five daughters and their antics. And everyone would say, “Oh, that Smith family is so colorful!”

My four sisters and I all went to the Day School and then went away to boarding school (where I used my middle name and became known as DeWitt Smith because there were four other Barbaras in my class). I was the only Smith sister who returned to the Back Mountain to live, back in 1979, for a year, before moving to Washington, D.C. to work for the Washington Star.

Attribution:Barbara DeWitt Smith - For Times Leader

Full Story: Home At Last