Richard Marcus Smaby
August 11, 1941 – August 10, 2025
Richard Marcus Smaby died on August 10, 2025, one day shy of his 84th birthday. He graduated from Bellevue High School 1959, Yale University in Philosophy 1963, and University of Pennsylvania in Mathematical Linguistics 1968. He was predeceased by his parents Marcus Edwin Smaby and Elsa Marie Hurrell Smaby. He is survived by his wife of 63 years Beverly Prior Smaby and by son Niels Smaby, daughter-in-law Kristine Hendrickson, daughter Kristin Smaby Latone, grandchildren Sophia Julia Latone, Kendra Ellen Smaby, Annelise Johanna Smaby, and Anthony Joseph Latone, siblings Stephen Edwin Smaby, Marcus Roland Smaby, and Ann Smaby Prince, and step-mother Nadine Calliham Smaby. He loved his family and was beloved by them.
Rich was a researcher and collaborative learner to his core, not only in his formal education but in his careers and his life. As a teacher he kept learning while preparing classes, and he not only taught his students but also learned with and from them. As a software engineer in the early days of computers, he teamed up with co-workers and helped develop that field from the ground up. He learned with his wife Beverly to nourish a long marriage, to create family, to build a house in the days before YouTube videos, to respectfully debate history, linguistics, philosophy, and mathematics, to play tennis, to cross-country ski, to camp in winter, to dance Norwegian Telespringar and Argentine Tango, to speak Norwegian and Spanish, to help political candidates win elections against the odds, and to cook delicious, nutritious meals from scratch. In later years he explored a great variety of books with his buddies in the Tacoma Retired Men’s Book Club.
Rich even used curiosity to approach his 13-year duel-dance with ALS, trying not only to hold it back, but to examine and understand it. And, though it robbed him of many things that had given him joy, he found new research passions to bring meaning to the life that remained to him. The most consuming of these was his book on the evolution of truth, an end-of-life project that combined his interests in philosophy, linguistics, psychology, genetics, anthropology, animal sciences, history, religion, and politics in order to work out why we created the concept of truth eons ago and how we have developed and used it ever since. By his last several months he was mostly done with writing and was checking citations. One truth-related question he’d been reading about was whether consciousness is part of the body or separate from it. He wrote that his final hope was to stay conscious through to the end and find the answer there – then write about it!
His family is planning a celebration of life in 2026 on June 13th, his and Beverly’s 64th wedding anniversary. More information will come later.