Part of causeway named for author

BY RAY OSBORNE
FOR FLORIDA TODAY

MERRITT ISLAND� — A crowd of about 60 people gathered this week along a stretch of State Road 520 to honor author Patrick Smith and the causeway that had just been named for him.

Signs alerting drivers and passers-by to the Patrick D. Smith Causeway were unveiled at the roadside ceremony on Tuesday, which attracted Florida’s Secretary of State Sue Cobb, Sen. Bill Posey, R-Rockledge, County Commissioner Ron Pritchard and plenty of well-wishers.

“We don’t normally name roads after people while they are alive, because if they do something off the track, it will make us look bad, but with Patrick Smith, we felt safe,” said Posey, who sponsored a bill in the Florida Senate last session to honor the author with the two-mile stretch of State Road 520 west of Cape Canaveral Hospital.

Smith, who lives on Merritt Island with his wife Iris, is one of Florida’s most renowned authors. In 2002, he received the Fay Schweim Award from the Florida Historical Society, a one-time award emblematic of the “Greatest Living Floridian.”

His seven novels — The River Is Home, The Beginning, Forever Island, Angel City, Allapattah, A Land Remembered and The Seas That Mourn — remain critically acclaimed today and have drawn three nominations for Pulitzer Prizes.

He was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 1985 for his lifetime achievement.
Smith was born in 1927 in Mississippi and came to Florida in 1966,
In joking with the crowd about the honor, Smith said he would immediately install a 25 cent toll on his new bridge, which draw laughs from the gathered crowd.

Organizers chose Aug. 1 as the ceremony’s date to coincide with Smith’s 58th wedding anniversary.

“We thought it would be cooler on an August day,” Posey said.

To close the event, sheriff’s deputy Steve Reeves gave Smith a ride past the shiny new commemorative causeway sign and over the bridge, marking the author’s first official trip on his road.