Sam Smith was born in the community of Paradise (yes, that Paradise) in 1947. He subsequently lived in Lyman Springs, Redding, Shingletown, and Chico, where he resides today. In Lyman Springs, about forty miles east of Red Bluff, he started first grade in the cookhouse of the Diamond Match lumber mill while his father worked as a timber faller. His next seven years of schooling were spent in a nearby one-room schoolhouse.
After graduating from Red Bluff High School, Smith obtained a BA in civil engineering from Chico State University in 1970 and an MA in environmental engineering from Oregon State University the next year. Over the ensuing 38 years, he worked for two engineering consulting firms, designing domestic water and wastewater systems. Thirty-one of those years, he spent at PACE Engineering of Redding, where he served as president for nine years before retiring. By this time, Sam and his wife, Linda, had moved to nearby Shingletown, residing there for 16 years. They moved to Chico in 2018.
Fishing played an important part of his life growing up. As he reports: “In the summer, my dad would haul me and my two brothers out of bed at two a.m. and take us on a 20-mile jeep-ride to Mill Creek, where we would hike with flashlights down a rattlesnake-infested canyon so we could begin fishing at daybreak. He always said, ‘The early bird gets the worm.’ We caught rainbow trout and spring-run Chinook salmon. When I was about six or seven years old, I remember my dad hooking a 30-inch salmon and asking me to stab it with his pocket knife and hold it on the sand bar.” (Chinook salmon is a protected species in Mill Creek today.)
After Smith got married, he and his older brother, Bob, took their families to Lake Almanor to camp and fish for rainbow trout and German browns and to Eagle Lake for Eagle Lake rainbows.
Smith got interested in wood carving when he discovered old pine knots left on the forest floor after dead trees had fallen and rotted away in the forests around Shingletown. He started carving faces in them to make “knot heads” or “wood fellows.” He also sculpted Indian heads from old cedar stumps left over from logging operations.
During these years, he drove to Alaska multiple times to fish for sockeye salmon. There, he noted that the color of spawning sockeye salmon is similar to the all-heart wood of the Western red cedar stumps. This connection inspired him to join his love of sockeyes with his love of cedar wood by replicating this magnificent creature once back home. He states: “I started using a chain saw to cut slabs from the stumps and root systems, then rough them out into the salmon form with curves to simulate movement. Cedar is a very soft wood, so it is easy to carve and sand to a smooth surface by using various wood grinders, carving tools, and sanders. If the cedar wood was not quite red enough, I stained the body with red Sedona stain. I then highlighted the fins with streaks of black paint, spray-painted the salmon head a dark forest green, and coated the entire carving with multiple layers of spray lacquer.”
He says, “sometimes cracks develop as the wood shrinks, some large enough to distract from the carving’s appearance. So I take slivers of wood from the waste material and whittle it so it can be fitted and glued into the cracks to restore the surface.” A spawning sockeye salmon continues to be Smith’s favorite subject to carve today.
