From the New York Times obituary section:
Marion Smith, the World’s Most Prolific Cave Explorer, Dies at 80
That’s interesting that the world’s greatest caver is a woman named Marion. It’s kind of like the movie I reviewed this week, Tár with Cate Blanchett as the world’s greatest conductor. (I knew a lady named “Marion Smith” but she wasn’t into exploring caves.)
He was particularly fond of vertical caving, often dangling freely in a hundred-foot abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.
Oh, I guess, he’s a John Wayne-type Marion.
By Clay Risen
Dec. 16, 2022, 7:13 p.m. ETMarion Smith, a relentless, irascible subterranean explorer who was believed to have visited more caves than anyone else in human history, died on Nov. 30 at his home in Rock Island, Tenn. He was 80. …
His fellow cavers called Mr. Smith “the Goat,” and he certainly looked the part, with a compact, wiry body and a wispy caprine beard dangling below a well-cragged face.
Probably they also called him “the GOAT” for “Greatest Of All Time.”
He was likewise goatish in his implacable determination to keep going through mud and cold and scraped shins, with little patience for those who couldn’t keep up. He was still caving long past the age when most people would decide to hang up their head lamps: His personal record for most cave visits in a year — 335 — came in 2013, when he turned 71.
But mostly he was the Goat because he was roundly considered the Greatest of All Time. He explored 8,291 separate caves — far more than anyone on record, ever. He climbed up and down some two million feet of rope.
He was especially taken with vertical caving: He descended more than 3,000 underground pits deeper than 30 feet, often dangling freely in the abyss on a rope no thicker than a thumb.
“If caving were a professional sport, Smith would possess the lifetime stats of a Wilt Chamberlain or Ted Williams,” Michael Ray Taylor wrote in a 2003 profile of Mr. Smith in Sports Illustrated.
Humans have been going into caves since the origin of the species, but it was only in the 1960s that cave exploration took off as an organized activity in the United States.
Mr. Smith developed a reputation as the guy who seemed to be everywhere, every weekend, constantly announcing new finds, pushing into unknown spaces without a whiff of fear. In 2014 he was pinned under a boulder for nine hours. Three years later he was hit in the temple by a fist-size rock that fell from 40 feet. In both cases he went to the hospital, and in both cases he was back underground within days.
For some reason, cavers don’t like being called “spelunkers.”
Caving is less widely followed than mountaineering. Everybody in the world knew the name of Sir Edmund Hillary. And Reinhold Messner made a nice living as the top big mountain climber of the later 20th Century. In contrast, I’d never heard of Marion Smith.
That I’m too scared of heights to be a mountaineer strikes me as my weakness, but that I’m too scared of depths to be a caver strikes me as simple common sense on my part.
Anyway, my confusion about Marion Smith got me thinking about male-dominated fields where the single top individual is a woman.
Offhand, there was Pauline Kael in weekly magazine film criticism. She was extremely good. The gap between her and whichever guy was #2 was likely bigger than between Roger Ebert and whoever was #2 in daily newspaper movie reviewing.
Janet Marie Smith is likely the most important figure in the development of turn-of-the-century retro baseball fields as the Baltimore Oriole executive in charge of the development of the wonderful Camden Yards ballpark, which opened in 1992 and was a wildly better fan experience than the modernist stadiums of the 1960s-1980s.
Any others you can think of?
[Comment at Unz – this piece yielded some interesting comments!]
Originally published in The Unz Review on December 16, 2022.