27. An Old Timey “Affluenza” Kid
Maynard Smith was the son of a prosperous lawyer who became a judge, and the kid grew up as a rich spoiled brat. He made himself obnoxious to the locals with exploits like riding a horse through a drugstore, and crashing his dad’s car into a buggy. He was basically the “Affluenza Defense” Kid. To try and straighten him out, his father sent him to a military school. After graduation, Smith got married, and worked for the US Treasury and Michigan’s Banking Commission. Then his dad died in 1934 and left him a sizeable inheritance, so Smith promptly quit work to live the idle trust fund kid life.
Smith was a divorced father when America joined WWII, and the plot of his life’s trajectory changed. Smith had no intention to give up his easy life, with summers spent in Michigan and winters in Florida, and join the military. As he told a friend, he was not “particularly pugilistically inclined“. However, with the looming draft, or as some accounts have it, because a judge gave him a choice between jail for failure to pay child support or joining the Army, Smith enlisted in August, 1942. He did not like being a private and taking orders from everybody. So he volunteered for aerial gunnery school because it offered the quickest route to sergeant.