I have a theory that almost everybody starts life with the same amount of stuff. The aggregate result is a function of how that stuff is apportioned. A corollary might be that nobody is perfect. If a person excels in one area of their lives, there’s most likely something else bad lurking out there to make up for it. If ever you meet somebody who seems to be great at everything, that guy is probably a closet child molester or gun control lobbyist or some such.

I admit that I have no real basis for that theory beyond 58 years spent observing my fellow humans on this big blue spinning rock. Such stuff leads to the potentially-false assumption that jocks are stupid and nerds lack upper-body strength. And then somebody like William Smith comes along who turns my stupid hypothesis on its ear.

The William Smith Origin Story

William Emmett Smith was born in March 1933 in Columbia, Missouri. He died in 2021 at 88. His Hollywood career spanned 79 years. Smith appeared in nearly 300 film and TV roles alongside some of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars. His forte was the hulking villain, and he played that to perfection. Friends knew him as Big Bill.

Smith’s filmography includes such epics as Any Which Way You Can alongside Clint Eastwood, Conan the Barbarian opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish. However, most of us would likely recognize him as the flint-eyed Spetsnaz commander Colonel Strelnikov brought in to deal with the upstart high school student resistance fighters in the John Milius classic Red Dawn.

Smith got started early. He came of age on a working cattle ranch before moving with his family to Southern California. He landed his first proper show business gig at age eight. By the time he finished High School, Smith had already been featured in The Ghost of Frankenstein, The Song of Bernadette, and Meet Me in St. Louis.

The Young Actor Goes to War

William Smith turned 18 in 1951. Like most young American males of his era, he entered the military. In short order he found himself serving in the US Air Force.

Smith had always been a big guy, and he took care of his body. While in uniform, Smith won the USAF service-wide powerlifting championship. He was also the world champion arm wrestler for his 200-pound weight class several years running. His record as an amateur boxer stood at 31-1. Smith set a weightlifting record by reverse curling his own body weight. At his best, his biceps measured 19.5 inches around.

In addition to being an absolute physical beast, Smith was also exceptionally smart. He had a gift for languages. He spoke fluent Russian and earned a master’s degree in this subject from UCLA. Smith also spoke German, French, and Serbo-Croatian. While serving in the Air Force, Smith’s proclivity with languages led him over to the Dark Side.

Given his linguistic proficiency, the big beefy airman was assigned as a Russian Intercept Interrogator. Most of that was fairly tedious—listening to Russians jabbering on the radio and transcribing what they were saying. However, that exceptional skill also took him to some fairly rarefied places.

Paranoia, Bellicosity, and World-Ending Weapons

In the early 1950s, the Cold War was getting serious. The US and the USSR churned out weapons both nuclear and conventional like there was no tomorrow. War planners schemed and planned about the best ways to deliver thermonuclear bombs that would obliterate millions in an afternoon. Weapons and counter-weapons were the order of the day.

Building upon the successes of the B29 Superfortress as the world’s premier strategic bomber during World War 2, the Air Force fielded the breathtaking Convair B36 Peacemaker. The Peacemaker was one of the largest combat aircraft ever produced.

The Aluminum Overcast

The B36 Peacemaker was first fielded in 1948. The big plane was retired eleven years later in 1959. We built 384 copies. Think of the B36 like a B29 Superfortress on steroids.

No kidding, this thing was a monster of a warplane. Maximum takeoff weight was an eye-popping 410,000 pounds. The machine was powered by a combination of six Pratt and Whitney R-4630-53 Wasp 28-cylinder radial pusher engines as well as four GE J47 turbojets. The big plane carried a combat crew of thirteen and had a maximum speed of 435 miles per hour.

The wingspan of the B36 was 230 feet. To put that in perspective, the first flight of the Wright Flyer in 1903 was only 120 feet. The wings on this massive warplane were nearly twice as long as the distance traversed in the world’s first powered aircraft flight.

The B36 in full combat configuration could deliver 86,000 pounds’ worth of ordnance. The plane was designed from the outset to be a dedicated delivery vehicle for the massive thermonuclear weapons in service in the early 1950’s. However, 36 of these 384 airplanes were outfitted with powerful cameras and used for photo reconnaissance. This was the plane that William Smith crewed.

Sneaky Pete

In the early 1950s, we had plenty of nuclear delivery vehicles and enough atomic throw weight to pave all the major Russian population centers. However, getting all that ordnance onto Soviet targets was a sticky challenge. The Russians were understandably reticent to stand idly by and let us transform their cultural and industrial areas into fields of radioactive glass.

As a result, the Commies invested vast amounts of effort and treasure in building fighter interceptors as well as surface-to-air missile defense systems in depth. If we had any hope of successfully prosecuting World War 3, we needed to know the details of those defensive arrays. The 91st Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron based out of Yokota Air Force Base in Japan was tasked with figuring that out.

The 91st SRR operated six RB36 recon Peacemakers. In late 1952, their mission priorities included high-altitude bomb damage assessment over Manchuria, targeting and aerial photography in support of the Far East Air Forces, and ELINT (Electronic Signals Intelligence) operations against the Russian and Chinese militaries. Additionally, these enormous ten-engine bombers were deployed on ferret missions to probe Russian defenses and determine the best way to circumvent them.

Ferret Missions

Flying operational ferret missions sucked, a lot. This involved climbing to high altitudes and then gingerly poking into enemy territory to see what happened, all the while meticulously documenting radar signatures and monitoring enemy radio communications. That’s where William Smith came in. His job was to listen to the Russian air defense nets in real time and help determine if he and his crew were about to die or not.

The first ferret mission was flown by an RAF Wellington crew out of Cambridgeshire in 1942. The Germans attacked the plane eleven times and shot it absolutely to pieces. Though several members were grievously injured, the entire crew miraculously survived. During the 1960s, some 100 Allied aircrew perished or were otherwise declared lost on these dangerous reconnaissance forays into hostile territory.

Smith Goes Back to the World

Once out of uniform, William Smith went back to school to pursue his doctorate. While in grad school, he was offered a contract with MGM. Smith then proceeded to work his butt off.

Smith secured guest spots in a bewildering array of TV shows to include I Dream of Jeannie, Hawaii 5-0, Batman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Six Million Dollar Man, and many, many more. In a 1972 episode of Gunsmoke, Smith’s character kidnaps, sexually assaults, and then shoots Miss Kitty. Smith was described in his heyday as “the greatest bad-guy character actor of our time.”

Quite a few of Smith’s movie efforts were legendary. Some, well, maybe not. One in particular, Invasion of the Bee Girls, warrants further exploration.

Filmmakers Needed Some Proper Real-Life Girlfriends

Invasion of the Bee Girls was a 1973 tour de force that orbited around the compelling tale of a mad scientist who used radiation-mutated bee serum to create an army of sex-crazed hot babes who seduce men to death. The tagline was, “They’ll Love the Very Life Out of Your Body!” The same movie was re-released in 1981 as Graveyard Tramps. Here’s the trailer.

William Smith played the lead, a special agent with the State Department named Neil Agar. Agar is sent to Peckham, California, to investigate the deaths of a bunch of government research nerds who all apparently succumbed to congestive heart failure due to sexual exhaustion. I honestly had no idea the State Department even investigated deaths by sexual exhaustion, yet here we are.

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Smith’s character eventually uncovers a sinister web of amazing hot chicks with black compound eyes who have been infected with honeybee DNA that causes them to fornicate men to death. Eventually, Smith’s character shoots the bee mutating equipment with his revolver, rescues the heroin before she can be radiated into a lethal man-killing sex machine, and locks the remaining hot bee chicks in with the exploding machinery to die horrible deaths.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not technically watch Invasion of the Bee Girls while preparing this article. I got the high points from Wikipedia. I’m dedicated to my art, but that would be asking a lot.

Ruminations On William Smith

William Smith was representative of his generation. He came up in a family of modest means and then worked himself silly finding success in Hollywood. He served his country honorably, mastered multiple languages, maintained himself as an absolute physical beast, and rubbed shoulders with moviemaking royalty. Along the way, he even saved the world from sex-crazed bee babes. By any reasonable metric, that seems like a rich life richly lived.

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