And to think he didn't even plan to go to college.

This was 1957 and Earl Smith, who would eventually become the first and thus far only dean of the college at Colby, was three days from graduation from Waterville High School. No one in his family had a college degree and Smith entertained no notion of being the first. So when a vocational teacher at the high school told him of a job working nights in the mechanical department at the Morning Sentinel, Smith thought about it.

"He said, 'It's nights,'" Smith said. "I'm not working nights. I had a high school diploma. He said, 'It pays forty bucks a week.' I said, 'I'll take it.'"

And so began the career of the small-town boy who would become an advisor to and confidante of three Colby presidents, who would help guide the College through four decades of change, who had a hand in everything from negotiations with Vietnam War-era protestors to the disbanding of fraternities to two presidential searches, who salvaged students others were ready to send packing, who was a mentor to so many international students that doors remain open to him from Africa to Asia and beyond.

"Earl was like a treasure," said Peter Angwenyi '00, who now works in a bank in his native Nairobi. "Those who discovered him at Colby, I think they were very happy people."

Future Colbians won't have the chance.

Smith retired at the end of June, trading his deanship for the part-time post of college historian. He is writing the second volume of the history of Colby, the sequel to Ernest Marriner's History of Colby College. This raises an interesting question: how will Earl Smith write about Colby without writing about himself?

Self-effacing, wary of the spotlight, a soft-spoken but witty observer who retained many of the qualities of the journalist he once hoped to become, Smith is as intertwined with what Colby was and what it has become as anyone in recent memory. Some say he embodies Colby's reputation as an institution that not only educates but guides and develops students. "What really sets Colby apart and makes me wax poetic when I'm talking about my college, particularly out here where people have never heard of it before," said Carol Lockwood '90, an attorney in Honolulu, "is just the difference people like Earl make."