Charles “Chuck” Smith had a tough time accepting the news that he had been selected the Kenosha News’ 2009 Person of the Year.

“Absolute and total shock,” said Smith, the chief deputy of the Kenosha County Sheriff’s Department. “This came clear out of the blue.

“And my initial reaction is,” he said, raising his hands above his shoulders, “for what? I had a very difficult time receiving that information and digesting it to the fact I could accept it.”

Smith received two nominations for the award — from close friends James P. Farley, a retired Kenosha assistant police chief, and David E. Dryer, pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church. In all, 98 nominations were received.

Both men praised Smith as a modest man and recognized him for his charitable work with the Salvation Army Group, the Frank Neighborhood Project and the INNS program.

“This type of recognition is not within my personality, so it is a very difficult award to accept,” Smith said. “However, I do know that the people did act in sincerity, and I respect that. I just don’t know how to receive it graciously. In all humility, I’m extremely humbled by this. I honestly don’t feel I deserve this at all.”

Motivated to help

When talking about his charitable work, Smith thinks long and hard about his answers, and he occasionally holds back tears. He makes it clear he doesn’t want the attention, and he deflects any credit for his goodwill, but his quiet and gentle demeanor speaks volumes.

Smith has always been a very private man, a trait he thinks he inherited from his father. His motivation to give, he says, stems from his mother who witnessed social injustices happening in Louisiana during the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s.

But another part of Smith’s drive comes from his deep spiritual views and experiences teaching adult Sunday School classes at Immanuel Baptist Church for nearly 30 years.

“If you read the Scriptures enough and if you know the Gospels ... you can’t read that over and over and over and over, and not let it affect you,” he said. “The issue is that the more I read it and the more in-depth that I taught, I realized over the course of years, this stuff is not rocket science. It’s very plain and it’s very simple about what we’re really supposed to be doing.”

‘Totally a group effort’

As a member on the board of directors for the Frank Neighborhood Project, Smith influenced Immanuel Baptist to host Frank School movie nights each month. Church members prepare food for families and they auction prizes. This year, a holiday meal with prizes and gifts attracted about 350 people from the inner-city neighborhood.

For the INNS program, operated at Immanuel Baptist during the summer, Smith also recruited a small group to help provide homeless families with basic necessities and improve their quality of life. Among several improvements, Smith helped get a washer and dryer installed in the church so families could wash their clothes.

But Smith acknowleges his heart is largely devoted to the Salvation Army Group, or SAG, a concept he developed about two and a half years ago. It was born out of a small group study at Immanuel Baptist Church and what Smith called a driving motivation to reach out to people in need.

On a search for people and groups in need, Smith stopped at the Salvation Army food pantry and was struck by the dwindling supply of food on the shelves.

“The Salvation Army has a great little food pantry, but they don’t get a lot of help. Well, they really didn’t in 2007,” Smith said.

Smith returned to the study group with the idea of buying $25 of groceries each month for the food pantry. The group started with about five people from Immanuel Baptist and Kenosha County employees. Today, nearly 80 people contribute monthly to buy food and hygiene items for the Salvation Army.

In its two years, SAG has contributed almost $60,000 worth of food to the Salvation Army.

“It grew, and by word of mouth; we never publicized anything,” Smith said. “That’s the integrity of this group. It’s not publicly known.”

The group’s success, he said, is “absolutely, totally a group effort.” He added, “I may coordinate the effort, but if you coordinate nothing, you get nothing. Nobody belongs to this unless they really want to.”

Daily reminders

Smith’s office is one of the least cluttered in the Sheriff’s Department. But his window ledge holds reminders of the work to be done.

There’s a wood cutout of the words “kindness matters” and a Salvation Army cup where frequent visitors drop extra dollars and coins. The ledge also has three telling photographs of homeless, starving people.

“This burning desire for me came about after a few critical examples, I believe, personally by God himself, who motivated me to really do something about this as an individual,” Smith said “But I was on a personal mission. I was not on a quest to do this,” he said of his work with the Salvation Army Group. “This was just something that I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how to do it.”

Smith said he doesn’t always make the right decisions, and like any human he’s bound to fail at some point. But that’s another motivating factor.

“After all these years, why now, why at 57 years old did I start doing that? Why did it take this long to catch up and do stuff like this?” Smith asked himself. “Slow learner, maybe. But it took hold, and now it’s really solidified itself.”

Kenosha native

Like four generations of Smiths before him, Charles R. Smith was born and raised in Kenosha. His father owned and operated Smith Printing Co. “Seems like we get born here and we never leave,” Smith said with a smile.

Smith graduated from Bradford High School in 1968 and attended the University of Wisconsin-Parkside when it was two-year university. But after one year of college, he enlisted in the Army in 1969. After graduating from the military police, he went to Vietnam for a tour that lasted one year.

After two years of working at his father’s printing company, Smith’s break with the Sheriff’s Department came in July 1974, and he’s been there ever since. He’s been the department’s chief deputy since July 1993.