LP Gas Hall of Fame profile: Walter Smith

The 2025 LP Gas Hall of Fame dinner and induction ceremony will take place April 3 at the JW Marriott Charlotte in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. This year’s inductees are Tom Knauff of EDP, Rita Pecilunas of Otodata, Walter Smith of Smith Pumps and Full-Circle, and Ken Taylor of White Mountain Oil & Propane. Visit the LP Gas Hall of Fame website.

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A “perfect storm” of events at the 1991 Western Propane Trade Show & Convention in Palm Springs, California, led Walter Smith to envision and ultimately design the first UL-listed, hose-end swivel for the propane industry.

Smith, an engineer whose grandfather founded Smith Precision Products (Smith Pumps) in 1938 and whose father developed many of the company’s original products, used his own engineering expertise to forge his own path and found the company Full-Circle. His new product allowed for a 360-degree rotation of the filler valve at the end of a delivery hose, and it became a standardized piece of equipment on bobtails in North America and in other markets around the world.

While Smith led Smith Pumps as president and CEO from 1986-2022 and designed several of its products, his ability to foresee the opportunities ahead with the swivel – to design and patent a product that would add safety, efficiency and convenience to propane deliveries – became his most significant contribution to the industry. It’s also the reason for his selection into the 2025 class of the LP Gas Hall of Fame.

“I don’t think at the time I even knew what a swivel was,” says Smith of those early days. “It’s hard to believe, looking back, what we’ve accomplished.”

Path to a new product

Smith recalls the series of events, involving persistence, humor, and design experience, that unfolded in Palm Springs.

He and his colleague, sales manager John Ives, were setting up the Smith Pumps booth for the show. The display included a mechanical shaft seal assembly used in the pumps.

Retired Teeco Products President and CEO Bob Bailey, working at Pacific Carburetion Assemblies Inc. at the time, saw Smith and expressed an interest in a listed hose-end swivel designed specifically for the propane industry.

“I remember saying, ‘Bob, our DNA involves pumps, and there have to be quite a few swivel manufacturers solely in the United States. Have you tried contacting one of them?’” Smith says.

According to Smith, Bailey had done his research, discovering the product he sought was only designed and manufactured for refined fuels. He needed a propane industry solution.

Bailey invited Smith outside to view a delivery truck and discuss how the application would work with propane. Ives, listening to the conversation, walked outside with the men while holding a mechanical shaft seal assembly.

“After about 10 minutes, John said to Bob, standing about 8 feet away, ‘Here, Bob. Here’s a swivel.’ He tossed him the shaft seal assembly,” Smith recalls. “He was making a joke.

“As that seal was still in the air, a bolt of lightning hit me like I have never experienced before,” Smith says. “It was as if the heavens opened up, and the light was shining down. In that millisecond, I saw the design.”

Bailey caught the seal, and the group, after enjoying the lighthearted moment, finished the conversation.

“I said to Bob, ‘Let me think about this for a while, and I’ll get back to you.’ I knew what my mission was,” Smith says.

That night, Smith was eager to get back to his hotel room and think more about the swivel idea. He sketched a crude design on hotel stationary. Five days later, he was back in the office, on track to develop a prototype for testing.

“If that perfect storm had not occurred,” Smith says, “Full-Circle never would have been born. The product never would have been developed. It just would not have happened.”

Thirst for knowledge

As a California kid growing up in the 1950s, Smith remembers peering over the sofa and listening to his father’s conversations. He had a yearning to understand them and to learn from Lawrence Smith, “the smartest man I ever met,” he says.

At a young age, Walter Smith had an interest in new engineering and numbers. He developed a mantra: Learn something new every day. He gained an education by working at Smith Pumps, first doing menial jobs before taking on a larger role while attending college in the 1970s. He earned bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry (from Cal Poly SLO) and mechanical engineering (from Cal State Los Angeles), which he felt would provide the foundation he needed to become a third-generation contributor to the company – and eventually its leader.

“My early years with the company, I’m trying to become familiar with the product line to the point where I understood it like the back of my hand,” Smith says. “It was not easy to do from a design or marketing standpoint. It took me about 10 years before I fully understood things.”

While his father developed many of the company’s products, Smith spent those early years also exploring other types of equipment that it could offer alongside the pumps. This included his designs of external bypass valves and flexible drive couplings, as well as a small series pump line and MCAT truck pumps.

But that trip to Palm Springs would change the course of his career.

Test of endurance

After the trade show, Smith didn’t waste any time putting the process to develop a swivel in motion. He called Underwriters Laboratories (UL) and discovered that it had published a standard for LP gas swivels (UL-57). But no product had passed the endurance test, in which a swivel had to reach 100,000 cycles under maximum allowable working pressure (350 psi).

Smith assigned two employees to the task – one to mechanically crank the swivel back and forth 100,000 times and another to count the number of cycles. Weeks later, Smith checked with his employees and learned the test had reached into the millions.

“I about fell over backwards because I knew right then and there that we had something extremely special,” he says.

Full-Circle was born, becoming the first swivel manufacturer to have a UL listing for LP gas service. It would develop a series of listed hose-end and hose-reel swivels (various SMAC and JO models) for the propane industry.

In 1998, the company moved manufacturing to Yucca Valley, California, where the Smith family built a cabin in the 1950s, as it continued to grow its product line and market share.

“I was so immersed in the product – not just in the design of it and how to market it, but how to test it,” Smith says. “There was no time to stop and smell the roses right up until the day I retired.”

Smith, 72, a quiet and humble leader for his company and the industry, retired in 2022 but still works as a consultant for both Smith Pumps and Full-Circle. His son, C.J., is now the fourth-generation president of the companies.