Rod and Dee Dee Smith: Rooted in the Community
By David Greenberg
Photography by David Johnston, Johnston Photography
Rod and Dee Dee Smith are about as close as you can get to a North Central Florida power couple.
He recently made a strong run to be Florida’s governor and is now a partner in a prestigious Gainesville law firm. She founded a well-known local agency that helps to change the lives of abused children.
Yet to know the Smiths, say many of their longtime friends, is to know one of the most grounded, caring partnerships around.
Both of them came from farming families. Dee Dee was born on a farm in Alachua just north of State Road 441. Rod was born in Oklahoma and grew up on a farm in Loxahatchee. When they talk about how they got to where they are today, it is clear that they believe those similar backgrounds are critical factors in who they are.
“We have both had a great journey,” said Rod. “Neither of our fathers graduated from high school. But in one generation, Dee Dee became a lawyer during a period when it was just becoming more common to have women in the field, and I became a credible candidate for governor. This is a great country.”
Dee Dee agreed that the journey has been incredible, but she added something to the description.
“It has been a wonderful, but exhausting, experience,” she said.
Their rise from humble beginnings has followed a path marked by hard work and dedication, peaks of personal achievement and quite a few twists of fate.
Rod moved to North Florida in 1972 to attend law school at the University of Florida. He lived on the 400-acre ranch his parents, Warren and Elda Lee, had just purchased with plans to live there in the near future. In fact, Rod’s parents sold their farm in South Florida and moved to the Alachua farm in 1975.
Upon graduation from law school, Rod worked in Tallahassee for about a year before moving back and opening his own practice in Gainesville. In 1981, he moved his firm to Alachua and concentrated on representing firefighters and law enforcement officers from all around the state. click here to read more>>