Beverly B. Smith of Amagansett and Manhattan died at Lenox Hill Hospital there on May 23. She was 86 and had taken ill with pancreatitis two and a half weeks prior to her death.
A summer resident of Amagansett since 1958, Mrs. Smith had been coming to the East End for many years to visit family members in Southampton. She married Roger Smith in 1956 and in 1960 they bought the same house they had first rented in 1958. Mr. Smith died in 1980.
She had a career as an executive assistant in publishing, at Pocket Books, a Simon and Schuster subsidiary, and then at Modern Bride magazine. She had majored in English at Vassar College.
Her son William Smith of Manhattan said that in Amagansett she played tennis at the Devon Yacht Club when she was younger and more recently would spend time reading on her back deck or sitting on a bench on the dune looking out at the ocean and beach, sometimes watching him surf in his kayak. She was an enthusiastic reader and loved reading “everything,” Mr. Smith said.
Beverly Bates Smith was born on Aug. 13, 1933, in Manhattan, one of three children of William B. Bates and Theodora Barstow Bates. She attended school in Bar Harbor, Me., where her family had moved, and graduated from the Masters School, a boarding school in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., after which she attended and graduated from Vassar. She also lived in Oakland, Calif., for a time while growing up.
In addition to her son, Mrs. Smith is survived by two brothers, Frank B. Bates of Rossmoor, Calif., and William B. Bates of New York City, as well as nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews. Another son, Roger H. Smith Jr., died before her.
She was a “loving mother, sister, sister-in-law, aunt, and great-aunt, and wonderful friend,” her son said.
Mrs. Smith also worked and later volunteered at the Caring Community-Greenwich House senior citizens center in Greenwich Village in the city. She was a member of St. Luke in the Fields Episcopal Church, also in the Village, which is where a service will be held when it is feasible. Mrs. Smith was cremated. The family is planning a small, private memorial in Amagansett.
Memorial donations have been suggested for the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson Street, New York 10014, or the Caring Community-Greenwich House senior citizens center, 20 Washington Square North, New York 10011.
