Wilburn Clary was one of the top officials in college football in the mid-1900s and was assigned to the Orange Bowl on Jan. 2, 1956, which pitted Bud Wilkinson’s Oklahoma Sooners against Jim Tatum’s Maryland Terrapins. Both were unbeaten and ranked in the top three in the nation, and scalpers were commanding top dollar on a day that saw Miami’s Orange Bowl stuffed with 76,561 fans. Clary arrived at the stadium with his 13-year-old daughter, Jo Allison, a frequent companion on officiating trips around the Atlantic Coast Conference from their home in Winston-Salem. Clary was approached walking into the stadium and offered $300 for the girl’s ticket.

“Mister Clary had probably never seen three hundred dollars together in his life, but he said, ‘No way, this little girl is going to this ball game,'” remembers Eddie Smith Jr., who would marry Jo seven years later. “So football and athletics were deeply engrained in her from the beginning.”

Eddie was an undergraduate at Carolina in the early 1960s when he met Jo, who was studying at Greensboro College. He took her to a game in Kenan Stadium on one of their early dates and was surprised to learn of her knowledge of football.

“The only girls I had ever dated were more interested in what the women were wearing than the game,” he says. “She leaned over at one point and said, ‘They’re going to kick an onside kick.’ It wasn’t an obvious time in the game when you kick an onside kick. And darned if they didn’t. And then there was a penalty that made no sense to me, and I said, ‘Well that’s wrong, that can’t be right.’ And she just looked at me and she said, ‘Oh, it’s right. It happened after the play. That’s a dead-ball foul.’ And I looked at her and I thought, ‘Good gracious.'”

And thus the die was cast for Eddie and Jo to spend nearly six decades together and become fixtures around the Carolina athletics scene. Jo and Eddie were married in 1963, and she transferred to Chapel Hill from Greensboro and they graduated in 1965. The Smiths had one son, Chris (a 1987 Carolina graduate), and Eddie turned a near-bankrupt boating concern in Greenville, N.C., into an incredibly successful company. Today, Grady-White Boats is one of the most renowned saltwater boat manufacturers in the world.

Over the years, Jo would give Bill Dooley advice on managing the play clock during games her father officiated. “Bill, you’re too slow getting the plays in,” she told the Tar Heel head coach from 1966-77. “I’ve told you a hundred times, if he looks at his watch a second time, you’re dead, the flag’s coming out.”

She would be the one woman among a half dozen men invited to hear Butch Davis present his strategic plan for Carolina football during the first month of Davis’s tenure in early 2007. Davis spoke of facility needs and said that installing a nutrition center in the Kenan Football Center would come down the road when funds were available, but Jo took him aside after the meeting and said, “Go ahead and do that now. That’s important for the kids. We’ll write you a check.”

She would commiserate with Mack Brown during his first stint at Carolina in the 1990s over lousy officiating calls and give Brown coaching points: “The offensive line’s not coming off the ball, they’re not stepping with the right feet. We’ve got some work to do.” Jo’s knowledge of the game was Brown’s inspiration in creating the first “Women’s Coaching Clinic” to give ladies some insight into the nuances of the game beyond tailgating recipes and game apparel.

And she marched to a different drummer in an era when the ladies’ place was generally in the home. Sue Walsh, a former All-America swimmer at Carolina, joined the Rams Club staff in 1986 and developed relationship with the Smith family—Eddie Sr. as well as Eddie Jr. and Jo.

“Jo had significant ownership of any decisions the family was making. That was refreshing,” Walsh says. “That was a generation where the women typically sat quietly in the background. The conversations were more with the husbands. Jo was unique at that time. As a development staff, we would talk about the fact that if we wanted to have a conversation with the Smith family, we needed to make sure Jo was involved.”

She became one of the noted and popular women around the University and the athletics scene, once singing the national anthem before a Tar Heel football game and insisting to Eddie that they attend every NCAA basketball tournament game, even one low on the pulse meter like facing Iona in Tallahassee in the first round.

“I am not going to Tallahassee,” said Eddie, an avid hunter who’s traveled the world on expeditions.

“Edward, this is my hunting season. We’re going,” Jo shot back, invoking her husband’s full name to underscore her serious intent. Eddie says friends would joke to him that if any given social or game outing “wasn’t a ‘three-Edward’ night, it wasn’t any fun.”

“Even though she was a force and had strong opinions, she carried herself in a very quiet, gracious, distinguished way,” says Sally Brown. “She never wanted to ruffle anybody, always wanted to calm everybody. She was able to be a force but did in the most Southern, genteel way you could do it. She was fun to be around and always had a twinkle in her eye.”

Adds Dawn McPherson, a longtime Rams Club administrative staff member: “The word that pops into my head is gracious. If anyone ever fit the ‘I’m a Tar Heel’ mode, she was definitely it.”

James Spurling, who owned and operated Eastgate BP in Chapel Hill before selling it and joining the Athletic Department staff to manage Kenan Stadium in 2005, remembers Jo driving her blue Lincoln Continental up to the pump in the 1990s and watching as his young shop attendants jockeyed for position to fill her tank.

“This was before self-service and you pumped their gas, cleaned their windshield, checked their oil,” Spurling says. “She always gave them a five-dollar tip. That was a lot of money to those boys.”

The Smith Family name looms large over all of Carolina athletics. Three elements of Kenan Stadium have a cord running to Jo Allison. The men’s basketball program has a scholarship endowed in Eddie Jr.’s name. And the track and field program operates its indoor season in the Eddie Smith Sr. Field House. The family’s largesse extends beyond Chapel Hill and the sports world. Sally Brown had an “I should have known” moment one summer when she visited a family member at the hospital in Greenville. She drove up and saw signage for the Eddie and Jo Allison Smith Tower, a cancer treatment facility.

“The family is generous in so many ways,” she says. “They’re among the most well-liked people I’ve ever known.”

“They’ve given so many anonymous gifts,” Mack adds. “As gracious as they are, they’re even more humble.”

Today in Kenan Stadium, the officials’ locker room in the east end of the stadium is named for Wilburn Clary, who was inducted into the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame in 1989 along with former Clemson football coach Frank Howard, Ole Miss quarterback Archie Manning and Miami Dolphins fullback Larry Csonka. He’s also in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, and the N.C. High School Athletic Association annually presents The Clary Medal to a pair of male and female athletes participating in at least two sports and is based on excellence in athletic participation, extra-curricular activities and community service.

“He didn’t like publicity at all and never wanted any recognition, but he was known back in the day as probably as knowledgeable or more knowledgeable about college football rules than anybody in the country,” Smith says. “I had many, many younger officials tell me that he was their teacher, their mentor, that they wouldn’t be officiating if it wasn’t for him.”

The weight room in the Kenan Football Center is named for Jo Allison, who died of Parkinson’s disease in February 2020. And the playing field was named for Chris Smith in 2020 after a “transformational gift” to the University by the Smith Family Foundation. Chris died in May 2021 after a two-year battle with ALS.

“All of us just loved how much she cared,” Mack says. “No one has given more than the Smith family. I am so proud to have Chris’s name on the stadium, her name on the weight room and Mr. Clary’s name on the officials’ locker room.”

Chapel Hill based writer Lee Pace (Carolina ’79) has written “Extra Points” since 1990, is the author of “Football in a Forest” and has been part of the Tar Heel Sports Network broadcast crew since 2004. Write him at leepace7@gmail.com and follow him @LeePaceTweet.