An ending worthy of cheers: heaven can wait. First, there's one more Steelers game to watch!

Sporting News, The, July 22, 2005 by Dave Kindred

In a rainstorm on a Tuesday night, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter Ervin Dyer went to a funeral home. He didn't much feel like going. But the dead man's widow had invited him. She thought Dyer might write a little story. The reporter thought not. Gloomy, morose, morbid, hokey--that's what Ervin Dyer thought. "I was not in the mood to write anything," he says.

First room he came to at the funeral home, the reporter saw a young man in a coffin. "Twenty-four years old, been shot," Dyer says. "Laid out in a black suit, stiff, no viewers."

But Ervin Dyer wasn't there for the gunshot victim. He had come to see James Henry Smith, a lifelong Pittsburgh resident, a Vietnam War veteran (an Army cook) who attended Robert Morris College and worked at U.S. Steel before prostate cancer disabled him and finally caused his death at age 55. So Dyer left the young man's coffin and walked around a corner into another room.

There he saw James Henry Smith.

Smiling.

In his Steelers pajamas.

And to his surprise, the reporter decided the scene was not hokey at all--certainly not morose. "That shocked me," Dyer says. "It was engaging. Quite pleasant, not at all sort of blue."

Early in his life, just back from Vietnam, in the time of Mean Joe Greene, the Steel Curtain and Terry Bradshaw throwing it up for Lynn Swann and John Stallworth to bring it down, James Henry Smith had been imprinted with the idea that the Steelers were the Alpha and Omega of football and of Life Its Ownself. In death, then, Smith wanted to be remembered for what he was, a Steelers fan.

The idea took embryonic form maybe seven years ago. His widow, Denise Finn Smith, says she and her man went to the viewing of a close friend. It was an early example of what now is called a "thematic funeral," his wife says. "They set her up in a chair, reading a book, with coffee or tea on the table next to her. We talked about that some. James said, 'I want people to remember me like that, the way I was.' And I said, 'OK, baby.' Then I didn't pay it no mind."

But Smith kept saying it. And with her husband in a coma two weeks ago, Denise Smith decided to make his life and death memorable. She went to Roland Criswell, the funeral director at the Samuel E. Coston Funeral Home in suburban Pittsburgh.

The more they talked, the more obvious it was what they needed to do.

So there was James Henry Smith, smiling. Leaning back in a recliner. In his hand, a TV remote. Black slippers on his crossed feet. Black-and-gold silk pajamas under a velvety black robe. A Steelers blanket on his lap. Cigarettes and a beer within reach. Steelers highlights on a high-definition television. Steelers paraphernalia everywhere. It was a "living room" setting with photographs of his wife, her three children and nine grandchildren along with pictures of the dashing James Henry Smith dancing at cabarets.

"Oh, my, Roland just did excellent," Denise Smith says. "James was my buddy, my partner, the love of my life from Day 1 when we met 15 years ago till the day they dropped him in the grave. For the viewing, I wanted him to look at home doing the things he liked. Not cleaning, not cooking--that chili he made, that hot sauce, who could eat that? Good Lord!--not cussing me out because I don't know football, like when I don't know how to do a touchdown, or when I say, 'What the hell is the Big Bus?' and he says, 'Girl, shut up.' He was down-home Steelers!"

His men friends knew the Bus was the bull-shouldered running back Jerome Bettis. They'd come to the house to watch games. His sister, MaryAnn Nalls, knew to keep a distance. "Something would happen in a game, I'd call him, and he'd explain it. Or, if the game was real good, he'd shout out, 'I seen it!' And hang up on me."

Nalls has multiple sclerosis. "He taught me to walk again, to use my hands again. I want him to be in heaven, happy the way he deserves to be. When I saw him there with the Steelers blanket, I couldn't stop crying. The way he looked was the way he lived."

Ervin Dyer, who first thought it was not a story, wrote a lovely little story. It ran in the Post-Gazette under the headline: "A Fan's Farewell: Steelers fan celebrates 'final road game.'"

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com