Born in Tucson in 1943, he was the first child of Justin Gardner 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 is from 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, Robert Rodgers and Anna, moved to Arizona in the early 1900s from Pennsylvania with their two young daughters, Pauline and Helen, and homesteaded in the Huachuca Reserve, eventually at Canelo; 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.

 His parents and he moved to Ogden, Utah when he was three, and then to Boise, Idaho for late elementary school through the first half of his sophomore year in high school, and then to Wenatchee, Washington where he graduated from high school. He got a B.A.in Psychology from Stanford in 1965, and an Ed.M. in Guidance and Counseling from Harvard in 1969. He married Laurie Dunbar in 1965; he met her 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. The 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.

  Although he didn't live in Tucson long after he was born, all his famly vacations were to visit his grandmother, Pauline Rodgers Young there (and to visit his namesake grandfather who lived in Mesa). It was on those visits, to Tucson in particular, that he developed a strong connection to the Sonoran Desert and its flora and fauna, and to the Native American arts of that area, a connection that was at least part of the motivation for his 2025 move with Paul to live there.

 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. 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. For a good friend who died, he organized and produced a memoir which was published posthumously. 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 9/2/25