AVRIL KING
Social Media Manager and Assistant Sports Editor
It was 8 a.m. in a town just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, and Sir David Frost was nowhere to be found.
Working on one of her big projects at the time, Roslin Smith had been up since 3 a.m., making sure that everything was in order.
She had rented a castle-like estate and a luxury vehicle in order to match the grandeur of Frost and to set the tone for her program.
Yet, after hours of waiting, the famous journalist could not be reached.
“I’m calling him and his [personal assistant] eventually comes to the phone, and she says, ‘So, David doesn’t even get up for the Sultan of Brunei. Why did you think he was going to be up at your place for 8?’” said Smith.
At 2 p.m., Frost finally showed up in a silver Rolls Royce “drunk as a skunk,” according to Smith.
“Every shot that I had to think about, everything I had planned, I was like, ‘I can’t do any of them because he’s drunk’,” she said. “He’s staggering out of the Rolls Royce.”
As Frost continued drinking his wine, Smith recalled having to shout at him in order to get anything done, since Frost had started to go deaf.
His poor eyesight prevented him from being able to read the auto-cue but did not stop him from looking down the front of the makeup artist’s shirt.
“And then once we were rolling, he kind of got into this mode, and I was like, ‘you’ve been drunk all your life. You probably were drunk when you were [interviewing] Nixon,’” Smith said, reflecting on Frost’s famous series of interviews with the former American president.
This was Smith’s life prior to assuming her current position as assistant professor at SUNY Fredonia.
Originally from a town outside of Glasgow, Scotland, she got her start in filmmaking in a three-week summer class at Stirling University.
After finding out that she could take film courses at the college, she worked in Saudi Arabia as a journalist to earn money for school.
Upon graduating, and with little idea of where she was going to go next, Smith received a letter of recommendation from one of her professors and got a job working at the BBC documentary unit.
From there, she had the opportunity to work as a video journalist for Sky News Medical Channel.
“I was kind of the video journalist for all of Scotland and Northern England,” she said.
While in the United Kingdom, she worked as the managing director of Fierce Films, located in Scotland and also co-founded the Film School of Scotland.
In 2003, her work brought her to Charleston, S.C.
After being drawn north by a potential job in western Michigan, Smith came for an interview at Fredonia.
Within two months, she had a job as a professor, and that is where she and her son have stayed for almost four years.
The impression that she has made on students is significant.
Angelina Dohre, a sophomore journalism and public relations major, admires Smith’s spirit in the classroom.
“What Roslin has that a lot of other professors lack is a fun, engaging personality,” she said. “She makes any topic she teaches fun and interesting . . . not to mention her accent is wonderful.”
Indeed, if her short stature and fiery nature did not give away her Scottish background, her thick accent is one of her most distinctive features to students.
Due to her background in media platforms, junior journalism major Victoria Barnes said that Smith uses many examples of videos to support her lectures.
“Ros likes using multimedia to show examples of topics that we’re covering in class,” she said. “When we were learning about code-switching for our critical analysis journalism class, she showed us a video of a cat barking like a dog as an example.”
Smith has not forgotten about her background in making documentaries.
Still going strong at 56 years old, in early February, she finished up a three-part artist documentary.
Working with artists from the North Shore Artists Alliance, of which Smith is a member, she wanted to capture the works of three local talents in the Fredonia area: landscape painter Tom Annear; former Fredonia English professor Carolyn Grady who has a recent interest in painting, sculpture and acrylics; and Marcia Merrins, pottery artists specializing in footed bowls.
The whole project took about two and a half years to put together, and each piece has been shown publicly.
The last piece recently made its debut at the Fredonia Opera House but has yet to be sent on the “festival circuit,” as Smith referred to it.
Now she is participating on the project: “Among the Hemlocks: Fantastic Stories from Fredonia, New York.”
The project was made possible by money from a decentralization grant from New York State.
She will be showing the history of Fredonia in about 30 minutes, starting with the indigenous people from the area and moving on to topics of how Fredonia got its name, the Women’s Temperance Movement and the Marx Brothers.
Despite all of the experiences she has had and the success she has seen, Smith admitted that she fell into a lot of the opportunities she has had.
“I don’t usually actively search, it kind of evolves,” she said. “If the opportunity is there, I’ll take it.”
After her project on Fredonia, only time will tell what she will fall into next.