Smock

SHEPHERDSTOWN — As 2024 was ushered in on Monday morning, some changes in the Shepherdstown community were also beginning, including the permanent retirement of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History & Education’s founding director, Ray Smock.

Smock, who was director of the center from 2002-2018 and 2021-2023, will be entering a new phase of life in this new year — one focused on spending time with his family, taking traveling and devoting more time to his hobbies, which include nature photography and writing.

“I feel confident about the future of the Byrd Center. The staff we have, I couldn’t be happier [with],” Smock said, referring to staff on all levels, including his replacement, James Broomall. “I’m just delighted to see that, as I leave, there’s good people here. [The Byrd Center] is going to be theirs to shape. I think they’ll maintain and maybe add some new wrinkles that I never thought of — and I think that’s the way each new generation should do it.

“It’s time to pass the torch!” Smock said. “I’m not just passing it to a new director, but to a new generation of scholars and practitioners. They’re much more savvy with electronics than I am. I’m not ignorant of it, but the future of archives — the future of how we disseminate information around here — is going to be more online and even maybe expanding more into social media than we already have.”

Currently, the Byrd Center has a website, a YouTube account, a Facebook page and a blog, which has frequently published articles and opinion pieces written by Smock. Even after his retirement from the Byrd Center, Smock said that he will continue to write some posts for the blog, as well as participating with various projects.

“I’m leaving my day job — I’m not leaving my career,” Smock said. “I will still continue to be with the center as a resident scholar.

“I won’t be here involved with the day-to-day operations,” Smock said. “But no one else has been the first House historian. No one else has worked for three different Speakers of the House. I knew Senator Byrd for 30 years. So, I still have a lot of institutional memory and Congressional history and personal history that will be of use to the center, from time-to-time.”

Smock noted that, through his work from 1983-1995 as the historian of the U.S. House of Representatives, he became well versed in Congressional history, in a way that few other scholars have.

“I love the institution! I love everything about it. I love it, warts and all, so I’ll continue to be involved in the study of Congress. There’s not too many Congressional experts out there — there’s a lot of presidential scholars, because those books sell,” Smock said. “As long as I am able, I’m going to be a student of Congress. I’m going to be paying attention to the institution, and I’m going to be writing and talking about it, whenever I’m asked to.”

With Broomall moving into the Byrd Center director’s position on Monday, Smock said he was looking forward to having time to complete a few projects he’s had simmering on the back burner for a while.

“Retirement gives me a chance, now, to reflect and do my own writing on other subjects. I want to do a memoir that’s basically about the town I grew up in — I’ve got several drafts of that, but I never really finished it,” Smock said. “I’ve got my own papers that I need to get in order — eventually, some of them will be archived here. I kept my own journal over the last 10 years when I was working with the House of Representatives — there were a lot of things that put me right at the center of things in Washington, D.C., including planning the national commemorations of the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution and the bicentennial of Congress. That journal has a lot of that in it.”