‘She loved people’; Glennie Smith, Rock Hill mayor candidate, walking fixture, dies

Glennie Smith walked. She walked around Rock Hill, pushing a buggy or shopping cart, almost every day. Heat, cold, didn’t matter.

Smith always carried a Bible in her cart, her son said. And in that buggy often were two dolls, to remember two of her children who died, her son said.

“So many people knew her in Rock Hill from walking with the cart,” said Sherman Marshall, Smith’s son. ‘She loved to walk.”

But Glennie Marshall Smith, who once ran for mayor of Rock Hill to try and help the poor, has taken her last steps. Smith died Dec. 21 at her Hagins Street home.

Smith died of natural causes, York County Coroner officials said. She was 60.

“My mom spent her life trying to help people who had nothing,” Marshall said. “She loved people.”

In life Smith was a barber, worked in restaurants and manufacturing plants. She also was the manager of the former Red Coach Inn in downtown Rock Hill that catered to transients and people in poverty. The motel was torn down more than a decade ago.

The motel was razed soon after Smith made an unsuccessful run for mayor in 2005.

“I get sick and tired of seeing how people are suffering and staying in their car and nobody is stepping up to the plate,” Smith told The Herald in a 2005 story before the election.

Smith wore a black sash during that 2005 campaign that proclaimed, “Vote for Glennie Smith for Mayor.” Her campaign headquarters was at the Red Coach Inn -- a motel the city wanted to tear down.

In that election, Smith came in a distant third in a three-way race. She got 88 votes.

But Smith believed she had tried to put the plight of the poor in front of voters, her son and daughter-in-law said. Rosa Marshall, Smith’s daughter-in-law, said Smith cared deeply about the condition of people in poverty.

“She was the sweetest person who always worried about others,” Rosa Marshall said.

Many days in recent years, Smith would eat her lunch at the Dorothy Day Soup Kitchen on Crawford Road in Rock Hill. She always walked there and back. She pushed her cart. Some days she would sing at the soup kitchen.

Funeral arrangements are incomplete but will be announced by Parker Funeral Home.

In 2005, she said in an interview with The Herald that she lost two other children in a fire in 1984 when her son Sherman, now 36, was a toddler.

“The dolls were in memory of her kids who died,” Sherman Marshall said. “My brother and sister. She was always hurting on the inside.”

He said his mother’s walking was a part of Rock Hill for years. She loved the city and its people and walked because she wanted to be a part of it, he said.

“She always wanted Rock Hill to be a better place for everybody,” Marshall said.