The Sprightly Adventure of Instructor Simpson, a Merry Tale of Baseball, a Not Too-Young Instructor, and the Laboratory Sink is how then-Secretary of the University Shirley Wheeler Smith, Class of 1897, '00 AM, '45 LLD (hon.), subtitled his story for a 1923 University Club festivity.

Twenty-five years later, another U-M grad, Valentine Davies '25, adapted Smith's skit into the screenplay of the 1949 baseball movie classic, It Happens Every Spring. The film starred Ray Milland as, in Hollywood movie poster-ese, "The guy who invented the ball nobody could hit," and Jean Peters as, "The girl with the curves nobody could miss."

In the movie version, an accident in the lab of a Missouri university leads to a compound that makes a baseball dodge a bat and encourages a bashful chemistry professor to take to the baseball diamond, where he becomes a great strike-out pitcher for the pennant-bound St. Louis team. And, of course, he eventually wins the hand of Peters, who was not only his student but also the college president's daughter.

The movie's plot elaborates on the broad outlines of Smith's earlier skit and subsequent short story in the Michigan Quarterly Review, especially adding the Hollywood staple–"romantic interest." Smith's hero was a 32-year-old married instructor with two children, and his family remained well offstage in the original.

Davies and Smith shared a writing credit for the screenplay and won an Oscar nomination for their efforts.

It Happens Every Spring was the hit of the World's First Author's Premiere at Ann Arbor's Michigan Theater. Reserve seats went on sale at the theater's box office for 55 cents each. Davies, who won two Oscars for 1947's Miracle on 34th Street, wrote to the theater's manager, Gerald Hoag, that "I am coming only to pay tribute to Mr. Smith. I think this definitely should be his night and that whatever arrangements you make because of my presence will not detract from it."

The whole city turned out to pay tribute to Smith, who was 74 at the time of the premiere and enjoying emeritus status after his retirement in 1945. The city declared it Shirley Smith Day, and some of his professor friends arranged for Smith to emulate Hollywood notables by putting his footprint in a cement slab for posterity. But Smith would have none of that, saying he "was willing to go along with the ballyhoo in the abstract but not in the concrete."

He added that he used to walk in wet cement as a boy, "but I'm too old for that now. I won't leave footprints on the sands of time, much less in a cement slab in a theater lobby." This quip appeared in local papers, prompting one reader to send the following to Smith:

Dear Mr Smith,
Hooray!! I thought everyone except myself had grew goofy. Now I find another. Perhaps if we knew it, there are many others if only all could get together. Anyway, my compliments to one with the courage to oppose Hollywood publicists. Or was it the fear that corns and bunions would show up in the soft cement?

The ballyhoo over, Smith sent a letter to Sid Blumenstock of 20th Century-Fox May 22, 1949, that read, "The shouting and the tumult have died and I am now just another Smith in our town. However, the memory will linger a long time. There was an embarrassing moment now and then, but nothing that even flyspecks the recollection as a whole. The movie itself, as Val [Davies] wrote it and as 20th Century-Fox put it on, seems to have pleased everybody.

"Plumbers are not ordinarily given to humor, but when I thanked one of them for coming so promptly and efficiently opening up a blocked sewer, he grinned and said, 'It wasn't anything. It happens every spring.'"

It would appear from an earlier letter from Davies that the Ann Arbor crowd was not the only one pleased with the movie. After a first sneak at Riverside, California, Davies wrote to Smith, "The audience response was everything that we had expected and then some. There was so much laughter that ... some of the funniest lines were completely drowned out. The preview cards were also most enthusiastic, and what pleased us most was that the women and girls seemed to be no less enthusiastic about the picture than the men."

Smith became even more of a celebrity in Ann Arbor than he had been, constantly recognized, stopped and complimented when he walked downtown. "The thing that makes me feel it is going to be more than usually popular," he wrote his younger cowriter, "is the wide range of people who enjoyed it. I have had echoes from all over, seeming from sneak previews. But the best result of all, I feel, is our friendship of which I am very proud."