Editor's note: In honor of Father’s Day, the Deseret News talked to several noteworthy members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints about their fathers.
As a businessman, Milan Dale Smith was an innovator in the food industry. As a government official, he worked in the Eisenhower administration. And as a Latter-day Saint, he spent more than a decade presiding over a stake stretching from Wilmington, Delaware, down to Richmond, Virginia, and out as far as West Virginia.
“Before sunup every Sunday, Dad was off somewhere in the vast mid-Atlantic building the kingdom of God," said Elder Gordon H. Smith, a former U.S. senator, current Area Seventy for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and one of 10 children born to Milan and Jessica Smith. “He was a pioneer of the church in Washington, D.C.”
During those years, Elder Smith heard his father give "many great sermons."
"But the greatest sermon he gave was the Sunday after he was released," Elder Smith said. “He called down to the basement where his boys were and said, ‘Get up, boys. It’s time to go to priesthood meeting.'
“What he showed me (was), it isn’t where you sit in church, it’s how you serve in church and how you honor your priesthood, irrespective of the callings we may temporarily hold.”
Milan Smith moved to Washington, D.C., to become the executive assistant to Agriculture Secretary and future LDS Church President Ezra Taft Benson. He had been president of Smith Frozen Foods in Oregon and, according to his 1987 obituary in The Washington Post, was considered a "pioneer in the frozen food industry" — "among the first to develop the freezing process as a means of preserving fresh fruits and vegetables during World War II."
As a bishop and stake president in Pendleton, he was "instrumental in the Church's growth in eastern Oregon," according to a 1997 Church News article.
Milan Smith was sustained as president of the Washington D.C. Stake on Dec. 1, 1957, at age 38, succeeding President J. Willard Marriott.
“My dad’s great passion, whether it was business or the church, was growth," Elder Smith said. "And the kingdom of God flourished."
Another of his father's passions was to see a temple built east of the Mississippi River. Milan Smith was chairman of the committee for the Washington D.C. Temple, for which ground was broken in 1968.
Elder Smith has also served in many business, government and church capacities. He spent two terms in the U.S. Senate representing the state of Oregon, beginning in 1997. He is currently president of the National Association of Broadcasters.
Shortly before his father's death in 1987, Elder Smith was called to be the bishop of the same ward where his father served as the first bishop — the Pendleton 1st Ward.
To this day, the example his father set on a Sunday morning in 1970 following his release as stake president still resonates.
“It was his greatest sermon to me — that we serve wherever we’re called to sit, and we magnify it," Elder Smith said. "… We’re not released from the Melchizedek Priesthood, unless we do something to cause that. All these other callings, we hold on a temporary basis because we will be released from them all but not from the priesthood. That’s what he taught me.”
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