Smith W Bagley

Smith Walker Bagley was born on April 1, 1935, in Manhattan and grew up in Greenwich, Conn., the son of Henry and Nancy Reynolds Bagley. His grandfather Richard Joshua Reynolds founded the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company in 1875. Mr. Bagley graduated from Washington and Lee University and served as a captain in the United States Army Reserve. Mr. Bagley, an heir to the R. J. Reynolds tobacco fortune, was chief executive of SBI, a cellular telephone company in Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado that he started in 1989. But much of his time was spent in philanthropic and public affairs work. Mr. Bagley joined the Democratic Party when he was 17 and made an unsuccessful bid for a North Carolina seat in the House of Representatives in 1968. He later served as vice chairman of finance for the Democratic National Committee. Among his civic activities, he was president of the Arca Foundation, which focuses on social equity in developing countries, served on the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and was chairman of the board of regents of Catholic University. In a well-publicized case in 1979, Mr. Bagley and four co-defendants were indicted on charges of conspiring to manipulate the stock of a food and textile conglomerate, the Washington Group, to inflate its price artificially. A federal district court jury in Richmond, Va., acquitted them of the charges. Besides his wife of 26 years, Mr. Bagley is survived by three sons, Walker, Brett and Conor; three daughters, Nancy Reynolds Bagley, Nicole Ladmer Bagley and Vaughan Elizabeth Bagley; a sister, Susan Bagley Bloom; and five grandchildren.