had destroyed most of the winter crops in the area, stranding the workers, about 4000 in all, in shantytowns "mired in filth." His reporting "brought in $100,000 in contributions and prompted official action" and "gave national attention to the problem of migratory laborers." In particular, his articles were said to have stirred the feelings of Florida Governor LeRoy Collins, who saw to it that conditions for the workers were improved. The series also "resulted in vastly improved conditions" for agricultural migrant laborers and "tightened state regulations" governing their working conditions. He won an award of merit from the Florida Public Health Association in 1959 and the Service to Mankind award in 1961. He was named to the Horticultural Hall of Fame in 1976 and selected as foremost gardening writer by the American Association of Nurserymen in 1978. He was also a New York State Center for Migrant Studies fellow at the State University of New York at Geneseo. He reportedly also won "several awards as a garden writer and columnist." Personal life He married Anne McCarron on June 21, 1938. They had four children, Garrett, Parris, Antony, and William. He married Micheline Mathews on November 26, 1965. Micheline was formerly married to John F. Mathews, with whom she had a daughter, Van Smith's stepdaughter, Micheline Mary Mathews. The stepdaughter taught bacteriology at Harvard Medical School and married Dr. Robert Steele Roth in 1966. Death He died in a four-vehicle auto accident in Jacksonville, Florida, which also injured his wife, Micheline. He was driving his 1986 Honda Accord when it struck two other cars on the Trout River Bridge, then hit the rear end of a flatbed truck that was approaching a toll plaza in a northbound lane of Interstate 95. Investigators speculated that Van Smith had blacked out at the wheel. He and his wife were taken by air ambulance to University Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Tributes After his death, an editor of the Sun-Sentinel, Barc Bowman, described Van Smith as a man who "really had a genuine sense of compassion for the poor people and the people who, not from their own fault, led tough lives....Anyone can write about those things, but Howard was someone who really felt for the people he wrote about." Vern Williams, an assistant editor at the Miami News, called the series of articles "a work of the heart," adding that "Howard was