Born in Tucson, Arizona in 1943, he was the first child of Justin and Virginia Eason Young Smith; he didn't see his dad until he was two and a half years old when Justin returned home from his Army Air Force service during WWII in England. His first name, Sig, is after his mother's brother Sig Rodgers Young. His middle name, Corbin, which has been his preferred name all of his life (in sometimes abbreviated form) is after his paternal grandfather Lygon Corbin Smith who was named after his mother Francis Blackwell Corbin. She was a descendant of Henry Corbin who arrived in the Virginia Colony in 1654 from England. His maternal great grandparents on one side, Robert Andrew and Anna Eason Rodgers, moved to Arizona in the early 1900s from Pennsylvania with their two young daughters and homesteaded in the Huachuca Reserve; Robert became one of the first forest rangers and he and Anna were the first postmasters at the new Canelo post office. His other maternal great grandparents, Benjamin Ljung (Young) and Kirsten Svensdottir immigrated to the West Coast of the United States from Sweden in the mid 1800s and established themselves and a thriving salmon canning business in Astoria, Oregon. He has two younger brothers Scott Gardner and Craig Eason Smith.

 Corbin grew up in Ogden, Utah (where he moved when he was three), Boise, Idaho (for late elementary school through the first half of his sophomore year in high school), and Wenatchee, Washington (where he graduated from high school). He got a B.A. from Stanford in 1965, and an Ed.M. from Harvard in 1969. His first marriage was to Laurie Dunbar who he met in 1962 when they were students together at Stanford's program in Florence, Italy. They returned to Florence from 1965 to 1967 as assistants to the directors of the Stanford program. Their marriage ended amicably in 1971; in 1973 he embraced the fact that he is gay, and from 1977 to 1999 was partnered with Michael Meyers, eleven years his junior, who was an attorney specializing in international transactional law. Their life together was full and fortunate, and included living several years in London, England in the early 1980s, three years in New York City in the late 1990s, and a five-year period toward the end when they were joined by Chad Labenz in a menage-a-trois which came apart, again amicably, in 2000. In 2007, he met Paul Desany, thirty-six years his junior; they were married in 2016.

 He has a keen eye for architecture and design, and has been an avid amateur photographer since getting his first Brownie Starflash camera in 1957. After he retired in 2007, he organized fifty of his photographs (abstractions of architecture and signage in Los Angeles) into exhibitions in 2008 in Culver City, California and in Boston, Massachusetts, and in 2012, in Florence Italy. Since then he produced and helped write a history of the first fifty years of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome where he serves on the Advisory Board. He also organized and produced a memoir which was published posthumously for a good friend. He is an accomplished cook and he and Paul are avid travelers: Myanmar, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Japan, Bhutan, Thailand, Mozambique, The Netherlands, the UK, Paris, Berlin, and South Africa; they spent about three months total in Italy in 2023 to celebrate Corbin's 80th birthday.

  Since July 2024 he has managed the Black Oak Cemetery website.

Written by Sig Corbin Smith.

For a more complete biography with sources, click here.

Click below to return to:
History
A-D
E-H
I-P
Q-Z

SCS 2/8/25