Lorrie Smith Retires from SFSC on Aug. 4

Lorrie Smith, Cultural Programs coordinator, officially retires from SFSC on Friday, Aug. 4, after serving the College for 14 years. Join us in wishing her “Au Revoir,” and learn more about her plans going forward into retirement.

Where are you originally from?
I’m originally from southeastern Ohio — a little coal mining town called Cadiz. It was a one-stoplight town when I grew up and it’s still a one-stoplight town.

How did you first come to Highlands County?
My husband, David, and I moved to Port St. Lucie, Fla., from Ohio. We lived there for about 11 years. David had been in construction, then in the early ‘90s, the market took a big downturn in construction. So, he decided to make a career change and become a nursing home administrator. We knew we’d have to relocate when he finished his training. That’s when we came to Highlands County.

When did you begin working at SFSC?
I started part-time in November 2007, working in Hospitality Artist Services in the Cultural Programs Department (formerly Cultural Affairs). It was a seasonal position, working with Mary Hoskins, who was the Cultural Affairs assistant. I learned a lot from Mary. She was a pioneer in this department. And I loved it.

At the time, Doug Andrews was the chairman of Cultural Affairs. I let him know that I would be interested if a full-time position became available. Then the Box Office manager position came open and I moved into that in August 2009.

What do you do in your job at SFSC now?
I handle all box office and ticketing details. I also work with artist contracts, so when Cindy Garren [Cultural Programs director] plans the lineup of the artists, we make them an offer. If they’re interested, the paperwork starts to flow.

We get 30- to 40-page artist contracts and go through them carefully to make sure they don’t contain anything that we prefer not to agree to. Or we may discover that they’d like to have red M&Ms rather than green M&Ms in the Green Room. Of course, we are a no alcohol campus. But most of the high-profile artists want alcohol, so you have to dig through the contract to make sure that they aren’t asking for things we cannot or will not provide them.

I’ve worked in every aspect of our department, except for the technical side. I’ve worked in Artist Services, picked artists up at the airport, driven them around. I’ve even made a run to the drugstore because an artist lost her false eyelashes, and she had to go on stage in 30 minutes. It’s like that on day of show. You do whatever needs to be done.

What has changed since you began working in Cultural Programs?
Our marketing in this department. It used to be newspaper-driven. We’d place a newspaper ad and Boom! Our phones would ring off the hook. Now, we rarely run ads. Everything is social media.

The biggest change that I’ve seen is in ticketing. Patrons used to come to the box office and mail in forms with checks. Now they order tickets online. It was a hard push for our audience, just by the nature of the demographic. I would say 80% of our audience is over 50 years old. Getting them to switch to online – it was great to see that happen.

What do you enjoy most about your job?
I really like the day of show. There’s a lot of excitement in the air, you hear the soundcheck going on, you see all the work that you’ve been doing for months and months finally coming to fruition. You can actually see an end result and you feel a sense of accomplishment. We’ve got this great artist and we can see the audience having a good time. It’s a good feeling to bring something like that to this community.

What will you miss most about the college?
My coworkers. We have a great team in my department and I’ll miss that the most … and the very inexpensive health insurance.

What do you plan to do in retirement?
As soon as we’re done here, we’ll go up to North Carolina to unpack a lot of boxes. We built a house in Franklin, N.C. We bought property in the mountains 20 years ago with the intent of retiring there. We finished building the house in August 2022. We plan to live there six months of the year and live in our condo in Bradenton for six months.

Although I’ll be moving out of Highlands County, I have a lot of friends here and I’m going to come back for some shows.

In retirement, I would like to make use of my bookkeeping and financial background and get back into tax preparation.

We have two grandchildren who live in Melbourne. Our granddaughter just turned 3 years old and our grandson will turn 1 year old in September. We’re looking forward to being grandparents and spoiling and having fun with them.

We also spent a year planning a retirement trip to Scotland, Ireland, and Iceland in October. We’re doing a three-day stopover in Iceland on the way back.