Hometown boy does good

Once upon a time, there was a boy named Shaffer Smith. He was interested in art and in music. Shaffer had dreams.

He loved his mom, so he did whatever she told him to do.

Loraine Smith told her son to capture his dreams.

"I am going to be famous," he told his mother.

"I know you are," she said.

Shaffer worked hard on his dreams. When he grew up, he left Las Vegas and traveled the world. He gained fame and fortune from his hard work.

Early Monday evening, in a cinder block building whose basketball courts the boy named Shaffer used to haunt, a crowd of children screamed for his arrival.

They weren't screaming for Shaffer Smith, little boy. They wanted 29-year-old Ne-Yo, superstar R&B singer, Grammy winner, Celebrity with a capital C.

Ne-Yo was home to give Christmas presents to nearly 1,000 children whose families might not have been able to afford them.

He did it through a charitable foundation he and his business partner started last year, the Compound Foundation. The event took place in the gym of the Doolittle Community Center in West Las Vegas.

Ne-Yo did this, he said, because it is the right thing to do.

"Las Vegas made me who I am," he said.

That is only partly true, and Ne-Yo said so himself. It was mostly his mother who made him who he is.

Loraine Smith is thin, with graying hair. Her straight talk reveals a woman who does not put up with pretense.

She struggled when her children were young. She worked as a keno runner. A pit clerk. She tried cosmetology school but had to quit because her children were alone too much. Ne-Yo's younger sister Nicole is also in the music industry.

Their father left when they were young, she said.

Loraine finished slot technician school but could find no work in that field.

So she worked for a collections agency, calling people whose situations weren't all that different from her own and bothering them for money. She did what she had to do to provide for her children.

The family spent a couple of years in Arkansas but mostly lived in places around Las Vegas, none of them ritzy: Smoke Ranch Road and Decatur Boulevard; near Nellis Air Force Base; housing projects in Henderson; weekly apartments down the road from a strip club.

"There were times when it was really hard," Smith said.

But along the way, she said, she knew there was something special about her boy.

He was always drawing, always writing things down. He took to music quickly, which was normal in her family. She sings, as did the children's father.

A young Shaffer joined Kids For a Better Society, a nonprofit group known as KFABS. It focused on the performing arts.

"We performed all over," said Ne-Yo's aunt, Fannie Mitchell, who still runs the group. "We opened stores. Rec centers. Everywhere."

She said her nephew was always driven.

"He always had that quality about himself," she said.

He went on to Rancho High School and the Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts.

Ne-Yo listed his musical influences as the stuff his mother listened to when he was young: Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, Prince, even Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr.

"I wanted to be Sammy Davis Jr.," he said.

Instead, he became Ne-Yo, so named, legend has it, because a friend said he could "see" music the same way the Keanu Reeves character, Neo, saw the Matrix in that movie.

Ne-Yo went on to win a Grammy last year, and found out last week that he is nominated for six this year.

He bought a house in Atlanta not long ago, and then he bought his mother a house there too. That is every boy's dream, he said.

The family spent Thanksgiving at his house, and will spend Christmas in hers.

He said he hopes he can serve as an example to the children he met Monday night. If he can come from here and succeed, so can they.

"They look at me," he said, "and they see possibility."

Which, if you think about it, is the kind of fairy-tale ending you never hear about in real life.

Contact reporter Richard Lake at rlake@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0307.