"Fast Eddie:" A world of trouble ... a sad ending

     He was one of those kids we knew in the late 1950s -- a rough-edged, tough young guy. And then, where did he go?
     It is a sad story, a horrible one, really. Ended tragically.   Two weeks ago, we got a reminder.
     Someone contacted me looking for information on this man, provided some background (not all of it correct), sent a photo, and asked, "Is this 'Fast' Eddie Smith?"
     Instant recognition. Yes. Yes, it is/was Eddie Smith.
     The photo -- from a Woodlawn High School yearbook -- was the kid we remembered ... from our neighborhood and our schools (Sunset Acres Elementary, Oak Terrace Junior High and Woodlawn). 
     We had been on the same kids' baseball team one year, I was certain of that. Read on, you'll see why I remember.
     The information sent said he was a 1965 graduate of Woodlawn, but, no, actually he was in the Class of '66. So a year behind us in school -- for eight years. 
     What was correct was this: In 1983, a man named Willie Eddie Smith was murdered in Shreveport.
     Intriguing. And, of course, I thought: This might make for an interesting blog. Time to do some research.
     Did not remember this happening, although it must have been in the papers. To find out, to be reminded 35 years later, was a bit of a shock.  
     We were in Shreveport in 1983, working as part of a terrific, talented, fun-loving sports department at the Journal. The big story in sports for us that year was second-year pro Hal Sutton's emergence as the top money winner on the PGA Tour and the PGA Championship wire-to-wire winner that August. 
     By then, Eddie Smith -- from Sunset Acres -- had been dead for 2 1/2 months. 
     Shot to death May 23 in an argument related to a card game (poker).   
     The "Fast Eddie" nickname, referenced in a newspaper story a week after Willie Edward Smith's obituary in The Shreveport Times, was a hint to the fast, wild, sordid life of the victim.
     Just how wild we learned by tracking down two people: (1) a Smith family member -- Eddie's nephew, a son of his oldest brother -- and (2) one of our school buddies.
     "Eddie stayed in trouble," said the nephew, R. Lewis  Smith. "Some people just find trouble wherever they go, and that was Eddie. And the trouble got worse and worse through his life."
     Until he met a fast death.
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     Details of the end (taken from stories in The Times): Shot three times, in the head and the abdomen, and also beaten in the face.
     He had been the lone white man in a group of five at 2911 Portland, Apartment A, located in the Queensborough area (close to the State Fairgrounds).
      Much like Sunset Acres, Queensborough had been a comfortable, working-class, almost all-white residential neighborhood, but by 1983, it had become more mixed-race, lower-income, and the streets were meaner.
     The shooting, said the July 6 story which reported that the triggerman -- Jack King, then 34 -- had pleaded guilty, followed an argument over (what else?) money.
     King was allowed to take a lesser plea of manslaughter -- rather than second-degree murder -- in agreement to a maximum sentence of 21 years in prison.
     After the Shreveport police investigation, King was arrested within two days after the shooting. 
     That day and over the next week, four people -- three men (one King's roommate) and one 20-year-old woman -- also were arrested and charged as accessories after the fact, meaning they witnessed the act, then helped clean blood from the apartment and dispose of the body. (Two of the "accessories" lived in the apartment.
      Early the next morning after the shooting, Eddie's body was found in the rear seat of his compact foreign car [a red Plymouth Barracuda] on Hardy Street (some nine blocks from the Portland apartment).
       At the time of the murder, King also had been charged with armed robbery and aggravated burglary in another case. But that was dismissed in September 1983.
       The four "accessories" cases ultimately were dismissed, one by that July, the others late the next year.
       Guess the murder sentence was enough for the courts, and that with King in prison, the "accessories" were given leniency.
      No leniency for Eddie. But while his death "was a hard time for all of us," said nephew Lewis Smith, "it wasn't surprising.
     "He always ran with the wrong crowd. It was a downward spiral that Eddie went through for years and years."
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     In the stories in The Times, Eddie is listed as living in Keithville -- just south of Shreveport. But his obituary said he lived in Shreveport and his nephew said he resided at the  home that had been the family's for years -- 2867 Hollywood, the northeast part of Sunset Acres (the "other" side of the canal from us, about 11 blocks from our house, 10 blocks from the elementary school).
     That is where we remember him from the late 1950s.
     Willie Edward was born late in 1947, the "baby" of his family -- with a much older father (Robert Calhoun "Shorty" Smith) and mother Margaret Gould Smith, and two brothers who were almost a generation older -- Robert by 17 years, Jerry by 14. 
     The family dynamics were problematic.
     "He never got along with his father, my grandfather," said  Lewis Smith. 
     There was little connection with the brothers, who had long moved away from home by Eddie's teenage years.
     The tie with the mother was stronger, for many years. But the relationship soured as trouble mounted, and finally fell  apart.  
     Dennis Storey was a Sunset Acres friend, in the same grade as Eddie throughout school days, also a Woodlawn '66 graduate. He was a frequent visitor to the Smith home, and felt that Eddie "was an 'accident' child.
     "He was a spoiled kid," Storey remembered. "The way he talked to his Dad ... If I had talked to my Dad that way, he'd have whooped my ass." 
     "Shorty" Smith was a painter, and Eddie worked with his father some in those years. "I thought he would end up as a painter, too," said Storey. Did not happen; the obituary listed him as a plumber.
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     Our brief tie with Eddie Smith was on a St. James Episcopal Church-sponsored Midget League baseball team (ages 10-12) in either the summer of 1959 or 1960. He was a compact-built kid, a catcher, one of the better players on a team with little talent and few victories. 
     But here is the distinct memory ...
     Late in the season, on a game-ending play, an opposing runner crashed into Eddie at home plate and flattened him. He was hurt.
      In fact, he was hurt badly enough that the coach and concerned parents took him to a hospital. Internal injuries caused swelling and shock, and the vivid memory is that Eddie's body overnight had to be packed in ice.
     That incident perhaps was a sign of woes to come.
     He recovered, but he did not play again that summer. Don't recall him playing baseball again.
     But Storey said he remembered Eddie playing running back for our junior-high team: "He was a helluva football player ... he'd just as soon run over you as look at you." Another friend recalled Eddie running track one junior-high year. (I don't recall him in either sport, but I don't doubt it.)
     By high school, he was a different guy. He had the look, frankly, of a hood, a thug. The hair was slicked back, not a total ducktail -- so hood-looking in those days of the crewcut or flattop that our faculty much preferred -- but close.
     A memory from school: Eddie swaggered his way around.
     "His demeanor was that he wanted to be the tough guy," said Storey. "I did not run around with him by then. I thought he would eventually run into trouble. 
     "He was hanging around the wrong people, riding motorcycles. And I think he got in a gang."
    Storey, retired after 32 years of working in traffic engineering for the City of Shreveport and now living in Blanchard, recalled a chance meeting many years later at a convenience-store stop in Bossier City. In the parking lot, he noticed a familiar -- but changed -- figure.
     "He looked like a gang member," he said of Eddie. "Black leather jacket, the motorcycle ('choppers' they called them), beard, mustache, he was -- as they called it -- 'flying the colors' for the gang.
      "I talked to him, but I knew I didn't want to stay around long. It was obvious he was gang-related and dope-related."
     Mike Flores (Woodlawn Class of '65) was another neighborhood resident who lived closeby and said, "I remember Eddie Smith's name better than I remember Eddie the person. As I recall, he was on the periphery of all my groups."
     Flores said it had been decades and he had no knowledge of Eddie after high school.
     "My memory is that he ran with a rougher crowd," Mike said. "Maybe his associates caught up with him in the end."
     For sure, Eddie Smith was a black-cloud person, accidents waiting to happen. 
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     Lewis Smith, 63, a Shreveport resident who is a certified public accountant and registered financial advisor, said that writing about Eddie now would not be a problem for the family. "We all know the story," he said.
     The trail of trouble was long, and Lewis offered some details. So did our check with the Caddo Parish Clerk of Courts office.
     • An altercation with the Shreveport police in which he was a holdout inside a house, then was shot and had a severe stomach wound.              
     • A conviction for possession/distribution of methamphetamines Dec. 7, 1972, and a sentence of two years hard labor at the federal prison in Oakdale, La.
     • A couple of motorcycle wrecks. On one, he hit a median curve going 70-80 miles an hour ("he was totally reckless," said Lewis), causing a shattered jawbone and a total reconstruction of his jaw. Lewis: "He kind of mumbled after that." 
      • A conviction for receiving stolen goods, Jan. 10, 1983, a guilty plea, a fine of $500 and costs or 50 days in the Caddo Parish jail.
       A little more than four months later, the end.
       Lewis, who had been a funeral director for Rose-Neath before becoming a CPA, knew some of the people who made the arrangements for Eddie's service and burial (Lewis was one of the pallbearers).
     For the final decade of his life, family members occasionally would see Eddie. Lewis said his younger brother Charles Wayne also was a plumber and at times crossed paths with Eddie at work.
     ."He [Eddie] was always on the fringe of the family," Lewis said. "He might show up for holidays, but he was not really part of it."
     And even the mother, who had tried to maintain a relationship, gave up.
     "She settled up with Eddie several years before [his death," Lewis said, "and did not have much to do with him. She was tired of financially bailing him out and supporting him."
      The death "was hard to Memaw to accept, it was a grueling time for her. But it also put her at peace. It put a lot of things to rest."
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      There is no redeeming message in Eddie Smith's story. It is an example that even in an idyllic neighborhood and schools of our youth not everything turned out well in our Camelot. 
       It is, though, a heartbreaking story -- one of several from our area.
       "It wasn't that Eddie did not have good examples in his household," Lewis Smith said, recalling his grandparents' efforts. "Memaw could not understand what happened to him.
       "He could not change, or he didn't want to. Other people go through rehab, and some make changes. Some don't. He didn't even try."