Services for John Paul Smith are 2 p.m., Monday, March 14, 2022, at Riverwood Family, with interment in Clear Branch Baptist Church Cemetery. Visitation is from 1 p.m. until the time of the service.
Mr. Smith, 92, was born December 21, 1929, in Lincoln County, to John Emerson and Mamie Stanley Smith. He died March 12, 2022, at Veteran’s Memorial Retirement Home in Oxford, MS.
He was retired from Shippers Express in Jackson, having been employed through the years as a rate and traffic trainee with the I.C. Railroad in New Orleans, Traffic Manager for Higginbotham-Bailey Co. in downtown Dallas, and as a Rate Analyst with Red Ball Motor Freight and Shippers Express in Jackson.
He attended New Sight School as a boy and graduated from Copiah-Lincoln High School in 1948. He served in the United States Navy in Japan and later an icebreaker operating out of Boston. He was honorably discharged in 1952, at San Diego, after serving four- and one-half years in the Navy. He then earned an associate degree from Los Angeles City College in 1954 and attended the University of Southern Mississippi majoring in history. He also attended the evening divisions of Tulane and Southern Methodist Universities while employed in New Orleans and Dallas respectively. While at Southern Methodist he earned a Certificate in Traffic Management.
John Paul was always of a studious nature and a collector of books from youth. He was especially interested in history, geography, literature, and creative writing, winning several awards while in college. He read prodigiously and was keenly interested in everything and everyone around him. He enjoyed his roses and camellias, photography, nature, travel, and his family. His ability as a genealogist was widely recognized, but he was just as content while digging in his flower gardens as when digging through old records in libraries and courthouses. After retirement he compiles some ten books on the early records of the Brookhaven area which are in libraries throughout the country.
Mr. Smith had been a member of Clear Branch Baptist Church since 1943, and had previously served as teacher of the senior men’s Sunday School class. He also wrote the first history of Clear Branch Church for its centennial celebration in 1980. He is also a member of the Mississippi Historical Society and both the Brookhaven and the National Camellia Society.
In 2003, John Paul met the love of his life in the person of Bessie Rand Montgomery. They were married in 2008, when he was 78 years of age, at Pine Ridge Presbyterian Church near Natchez, Bessie’s childhood church. John Paul, a bachelor most of his life, would tell anyone that his happiest days began when he met Bessie.
Preceding him in death were his parents; two sisters, Edwina Smith Crouch (Leory), and Etta Smith Burke (Gerald Burke).
Survivors are his wife, Bessie Smith of Old Red Star; his brother, Russell Smith (Betty Jo) of Austin, TX; two stepdaughters, Linda Wade (Mike) of Collierville, TN, and Betsy Ann Montgomery of Brookhaven, MS.
