Story #89: A Tribute to PBHA, Lee Smith, and Yo-Yo Ma

By Doug Schmidt ‘76

For over four decades spanning the end of the second millennium and the beginning of the third, Lee Smith was the Administrative Assistant of Phillips Brooks House. Phillips Brooks House, or “PBH” to its inhabitants, is a singularly unique and peculiar three-storied brick breadbox building in Georgian Revival style in a far corner of Harvard Yard. The “House” is actually several floors of offices and a wood-paneled common room with a fireplace. A larger-than-life painting of the dark-robed Right Reverend Phillips Brooks presides over one of the best crafted rooms in all of Harvard.

For a hundred years, the House has seen the traffic of students who were volunteers in everything from relief efforts for the War to End All Wars to religious organizations to programs for tutoring in local schools and advocating for prisoners and the poor and oppressed. It also housed protests to overturn out-of-touch university policies, change the social injustices of America, and/or foment socialist revolutions and the like. For most of that century, Phillips Brooks House Association, a student-run social service/social change agency with faculty-type trustees and a little endowment occupied the Phillips Brooks House building—a distinction that few of the thousands of yearly volunteers cared about, but one that institutional, patriarchic Harvard was forced to live with.

When the great and famous preacher Phillips Brooks died suddenly in 1893, his ardent admirers had a grand funeral and paraded through the streets. Hundreds of his many friends and admirers contributed funds for the establishment of a perpetual “house” in Harvard Yard that would be home for religious organizations as well as provide for benevolent endeavors. It was a deal that the university would surely never cut again—a trust obligation that created this usually praiseworthy but sometimes troublesome redoubt of unharnessed student power. Over the century the university has at various times and sometimes concurrently ignored, supported, forgotten about, taken credit for, and tried to rein in Phillips Brooks House Association. Deans come and go, but Phillips Brooks House is still standing and PBHA remains its stubborn and principal occupant.

Meet Lee Smith

Lee Smith was inaptly titled “administrative assistant,” a salaried University category. In the Navy, everyone knows that the real knowledge and power of how to run a ship is found in the “chiefs,” the non-commissioned officers who spend lifetimes knowing how the engines work while young sailors and older captains transfer in and out. So it was with Lee Smith, a tall, stately dark-haired woman who each year let her swept-back hair show a few more strands of grey until those who knew her in her last years only knew the grey. Her shoulders were very square from years of practicing daily yoga yet eventually bowed by age and genetics. Her hand and arm gestures could be somewhat uncontrolled yet flowing, as she swept the room like a diva. She had a longish face with distinct angles and a prominent angular nose, as well. She spoke in a sonorous, loud and pleasingly pleasant New England tone—almost patrician, although she would be the last to claim false status. You knew you were in a room with Lee, even when she sat back quietly to watch the students run the show.

The magic of Lee Smith was in her love for her work. It would be a terrible mistake to say that all the hundreds of PBHA officers and committee heads from 40 years were like her children. She was their friend and their confidante. Yes, she guided them through the complexities of Harvard rules and regs and administering programs and parking vans and such. Behind her in giant file cabinets and somewhere in storage were 100 years of paper records that she kept filed or knew how to recover. But her joy was in knowing and listening to everyone with total equanimity—their love lives, their struggles with families, their struggles with the pressures of an intense academic little planet, and, piling up over the years, their many personal tragedies that she comforted. You can count in the hundreds if not thousands those who remember her kind counsel and willing ear. In our transition from adolescence to adulthood, Lee was a guide and a steady arm, never condescending and always uplifting. As one of her PBHA officers said about what he learned from Lee, “You stay young by having young people in your life.”

A Student's Arrival—An Unexpected Encounter

One ordinary day, a slender young student, a junior, entered sheepishly into Lee’s domain. In those days, you walked up the several stone steps and pried open the heavy forever clunking front doors. Then you turned right into the large, 19 th century tall-ceilinged front office room. Across the fading and worn oriental carpet was Lee’s huge desk which somehow seemed an average size with her behind it. Alongside her many administrative duties, she was the chief phone answerer and chief greeter for the many daily visitors and solicitors. They were undergrad volunteers returning the van keys, grad students looking for the upstairs counselors, Brother Blue parking himself for a rest and conversation after a day of performing in Harvard Square, or the university plumber come to fix a leak. Lee was used to all manner of students, lost souls, and occasional troublemakers wandering through those doors.

From the very beginning, Lee sensed that there was something different about this young man. After the usual friendly greeting, she asked him how she could help. “I’d like to volunteer,” he replied. That was, of course, one of Lee’s specialties. She knew all the programs better than the student leaders did. She could rattle them off and describe what made each one interesting. But first, she had to ask some questions.

“You are a student—yes. Where do you live?”

“Radcliffe.”

Then came the historic question. “Do you know what program you want to volunteer for?”

“Not really. I want to volunteer for Phillips Brooks House with what I do…”

“That’s nice. And what do you do?”

“I play cello.”

A Moment of Discovery

On one level, this encounter was just another one in Lee’s long list of improbable and quirky ones over many years—a small tale that she might repeat and then let disappear, a moment when she had to be her polite and curious self in the face of absurdity.

But no—not this time. There was something about this obviously sensitive and serious young man that alerted her senses, senses that were finely tuned to the frequencies of eighteen to twenty-two year-olds.

Lee took down his name, promised to follow up, and sent him on his way.

As soon as he left, Lee called my room phone (there were only landlines in those days). She was somewhat concerned and a little unsure of herself. I was not yet president of PBHA, but I was a junior like this young man and very involved as a committee head. Lee was troubled by the encounter, and this was not going to wait until one of us came into the office the next day. She relived the episode for me and then repeated the exclamation “I play cello.”

“Oh my God, Lee. That was Yo-Yo Ma. He’s my classmate. He is famous—I mean really famous.”

From Humbled Beginnings

That is how the famed and memorable Phillips Brooks House Yo-Yo Ma benefit concerts began. Yo-Yo wanted to do something for others in the best way that he knew how. With his immense sincerity and ever-present humor, he walked through the PBH front door and volunteered.

Yo-Yo was famous even before and as he entered Harvard to study music and musicology. He came not so much to learn how to play the cello better but more to learn as much as he could about the history, theories, and evolution of music and to be at Harvard and in Cambridge among some of the most renowned professors of music and related fields. And I know he came to Harvard to be regular student, because I witnessed and know of many of his associations that made him a good classmate and a good friend to many.

A Concert to Remember

I hesitate to write this because it pains me to this day. The first benefit concert was a bust. We blew it. I remember some involvement and may be purposely forgetting my role. Yo-Yo asked several older and also famous musicians to come up from New York and play chamber music with him. It was held in a large room at Radcliffe Yard. The concert was glorious, but it was sparsely attended. No one knew it was happening. Producing concerts and publicity were not essential PBHA skills, and we proved it conclusively. Why Yo-Yo gave us a second chance, I do not know. He was starting a career of being big-hearted and forgiving, and we surely were early recipients.

Because I come from a family of musicians and am a bit of an organizer by nature. I took over full command of the second concert. Or should I say that Lee Smith and I took command. We reserved Sanders Theater and all the details that go with that. We printed tickets. Lee ran sales from a shoebox on her desk. There had to be advertising and janitors and ushers and a piano tuner and a host of details. But the main goal was sales—and sales there were. Done the right way, selling tickets for an early Yo-Yo Ma concert was like falling off a log.

This second concert became a campus-wide event! It was a trio with undergraduate friends Richie Kogan pianist and Lynn Chang violinist, great musicians in their own right. Yet, Yo-Yo was the draw as he always has been. I look back on that concert as something of a coming out for Yo-Yo to express himself to his friends and the Harvard community. And boy was it reciprocated. Sell-out would be an understatement. Though Yo-Yo had played in various ensembles on campus and was already playing selectively with top orchestras in the world, this was a special bonding event between Yo-Yo and his university family.

It was a thrilling atmosphere at that first Sanders Theater concert, full of raucous and heartfelt applause. Pure anticipation and excitement. So many students. This was not an adult concert given for students. This was one of our own of whom we were already proud and who we wished great success. His success was our future success. His accomplishments were ours to be attained.

I am at a loss for how to explain the majesty, the serenity, the electricity of the atmosphere of those early Yo-Yo Ma student concerts. Despite suffering all the trials and tribulations of childhood and adolescence that most of us experience, Yo-Yo was infused early on with a great love of the music he studied and played. He had the rarest of abilities to project all the complexities of that love onto his audience. The early rocking and swaying and tilting back of his head as if he were listening to his own performance and fine-tuning each note—this was not what we knew of classical musicians. It was so innate and authentic, almost primal. It was an essential part of that visual and aural connection between audience and performer. Yo-Yo was never a solo instrumental musician; he has always been more of a great opera singer, dissolving the divide between audience and the stage, establishing an unforgettable link and lasting memory between the music and us.

Thank you, PBHA, Yo-Yo, and Lee

Yo-Yo performed a series of yearly benefit concerts for PBHA as he remained connected to the university even after graduation. Eventually this direct connection with the Harvard Community gave way to the life of an international concert artist. Yo-Yo became a citizen of the world, a U.N. ambassador, a Sesame Street favorite, a performer for presidents, a dean of requiems for our heroes and the fallen. Yet, he is as complex as his music, and he has beat back the label of icon by continually reinventing himself and evolving his music, challenging himself with new projects and plans. As Yo-Yo approaches seventy, his performances are still as skilled, dynamic, and engaging as ever. His body can no longer register those high scores on the rocking and swaying meter, but his lyrical communication has no equal. Like all true love, Yo-Yo’s music seems to have only increased in feeling and depth over time.

Those of us who saw Yo-Yo in those college years were given a gift enjoyed by few over the centuries. We witnessed the bursting forth of the youthful, raw energy of the musician of his generation. A young Yo-Yo loved his music as only a young lover can, and he was excited to share it with us, his peers, teachers, and friends. As he has done ever since, he has donated and “volunteered” his music in hundreds of ways so that it will last more than the hour that he bows the strings for us.

Lee Smith was the constant for those many Yo-Yo Ma PBHA benefit concerts. She went on to become one of Yo-Yo’s greatest fans and admirers. Lee was exceptionally cultured and attended more monthly events of the arts than did we students. She loved everything Yo-Yo and never missed an opportunity to see him and say hello. We all are obsessed with our little associations with celebrities, but Yo-Yo was so much more for Lee. We were all special to Lee. She did not necessarily play favorites, but she saw something special in Yo-Yo from that first day he walked into her office. Lee loved Yo-Yo for the genuine, thoughtful and kind young man that he was when she first met him–and then she loved his music.