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The bronze statue of Samantha Smith in Augusta.
On June 29, 1972, Arthur and Jane Smith of Houlton had a baby girl. They named her Samantha.
When she was ten, living in Manchester now, she wrote a letter to Yuri Andropov, the new Soviet Premier, telling him she had been worrying about nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union, a.k.a. "The Evil Empire." She wanted to know "why you want to conquer the world or at least our country. God made the world for us to live together in peace and not to fight."
Let's watch and listen to Ted Koppel and Samantha as they explain what happened next.
Two things surprised me about this clip - I hadn't known that she wrote the Soviet embassy asking where her reply was (persistence is important, gang), and she left out the best part of Andropov's response.
"I invite you, if your parents will let you, to come to our country, the best time being this summer," he said. "You will find out about our country, meet with your contemporaries, visit an international children's camp – 'Artek' – on the sea. And see for yourself: in the Soviet Union, everyone is for peace and friendship among peoples."
And that's just what she did, as this Russian news report shows.
She spent two weeks of July 1983 in the Soviet Union, seeing the best the country had to offer. There were those who griped that she was an unwitting pawn in Soviet propaganda, but the fact remained that a preteen girl had made a connection that two nations deeply enmeshed in a Cold War couldn't. When she returned, she was asked if she still believed the Soviets wanted war. She smiled and said, "Oh, no."
Bigger things beckoned. Samantha interviewed presidential candidates for the Disney Channel. She appeared on the TV show "Charles in Charge."
Then she became a member of the cast of "Lime Street," a Robert Wagner vehicle with a part written specifically for her.
On August 25, 1985, Samantha and her father were flying back to Maine after filming for "Lime Street" when their plane went down a mile short of the Auburn runway, killing all eight people on board. Her funeral was held in Augusta.
Since her death, there have been streets, schools, and an asteroid named after her; she's appeared on a Russian stamp, and the first Monday of June is designated by Maine state law as Samantha Smith Day. She would have been 37 years old today.
