Agnes Margaret Strom

Agnes Margaret Strom, daughter of Anna Amanda Smeds and Charles John Strom, was born 25 July 1916 in Reedley, Fresno County, CA. Her middle name was in honor of her aunt Margaret Fagernäs, who had raised Amanda from infancy after the death of Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs Smeds.

Agnes was raised on a farm on Alta Avenue three miles north of Reedley with two younger sisters, Karin and Frances. It was a secure and loving environment, but it was also an isolated one. Given that the late 1910s was an era with no internet, no television, and not even radio, Agnes did not get exposed to outside society much for the first half-dozen years of life. It is not surprising that when she began attending school, she found it to be an intimidating experience. Not only did she have to cope with being surrounded by peers she did not know and be under the authority of adults with whom she was equally unfamiliar, she had the language issue to deal with. In the home, the Stroms tended to speak Swedish. Agnes’s first cousins -- those closest to her in age being Roy Smeds, Alfred Smeds, and Lawrence Smeds -- enjoyed a greater comfort with English despite having equally isolated farm-life situations. That is because Roy, Al, and Lawrence were being raised in homes where one parent’s native tongue was Swedish, but the other’s native tongue was Finnish, and English was the diplomatic solution. Agnes had no such advantage and was overwhelmed by her first weeks of school. She often feigned sickness or even simply wept until she was allowed to skip the class day. It wasn’t long until her teacher and her parents conferred and agreed Agnes would be better off if she had one more year at home before being thrust into student life. This inauspicious start to her formal education is ironic given that Agnes eventually thrived in an academic environment and made it her day-to-day milieu until she was elderly.

Agnes and her sisters attended Reedley High School. Agnes finished up there in the mid-1930s and proceeded on to Armstrong College in Berkeley, CA. This was a school designed for students heading into jobs in office settings. Earning a certificate as a private secretary, Agnes spent three years working for a number of employers in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her days were filled with typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, filing, teletype, switchboard operation, and receptionist duties. Agnes later stated this practical experience was an excellent grounding in teaching these same skills -- but she preferred dealing with students rather than bosses and heads of typing pools. Committing herself to a teaching career, she entered San Jose State University -- the same institution her younger sisters were attending. After a year there, Agnes transferred back to Armstrong, where she received a B.S. in Business Administration in 1941 and obtained a teaching credential. (Agnes is shown below right in her commencement cap and gown.) Twenty years after graduating, she would receive an Alumni Honor Award from that institution. During her undergrad years, she was a member of the Teacher Training Club and the Artemis Club, serving as president of the latter.

Her sisters would proceed to mix marriage with their careers, but Agnes chose to remain single, a relatively uncommon decision for a female of her era. Her first job after leaving Armstrong was a year teaching typing and business subjects at Weed High School in Weed, Siskiyou County, CA. Being so far from home and family wasn’t ideal, though, and soon Agnes was able to do something about that. She joined the faculty at Woodlake High School in Woodlake, Tulare County, CA. Once making it to Tulare County, the county immediately south of her childhood home and within a half-hour drive of her parents and other relatives, she never moved away again. At Woodlake her main occupation was classroom teacher, but she was also Dean of Girls for part of her tenure. During World War II, due to the shortage of manpower, she sometimes drove the school bus as well. In 1950, Agnes began what was to be a twenty-seven-year career as registrar at College of the Sequoias in Visalia, the largest town of Tulare County. She obtained a house in Visalia and rooted in for good. (Shown at the latter job in the image below left.)

As a bachelorette, Agnes was free to involve herself in multiple avocations and formal activities, and she took advantage of that liberty. She worked on projects for the Easter Seal Society and helped develop the Kaweah Oaks Preserve. She participated in many clubs, including Delta Kappa Gamma (she was president of the Beta Kappa Gamma chapter), the Visalia Garden Club, and the Visalia Business and Professional Women’s Club (for whom she served as chair of the finance committee). She served as president of the Tulare County chapter of the California Teachers Association -- and then in later years was active in the California Retired Teachers Association. Able to maintain her home at 2704 W. Laurel just the way she liked and not obliged to reserve her back yard as an activities venue for kids, the area instead brimmed with rose bushes and provided an ideal backdrop for the extended-family parties she enjoyed hosting. In the late 1960s Agnes had a sauna built, reviving a family tradition that had faded away after the immigrant years; her cousins Roy Smeds and Lawrence Smeds soon followed suit, both of them by converting spare garage space into saunas at their Reedley farms. Balancing such special touches were visible signs of Agnes’s pack-rat nature. Boxes of miscellaneous items inhabited her carport for years at a stretch. It was not often she couldn’t find whatever item she was looking for, though.

In 1966, Agnes added to her trophy case when she received a Golden Apple Award from the National Education Association. Accomplished as she was in her field, she did not let her career drag on to such a degree she had no time left for fun. She retired from C.O.S. in 1977 while only in her early sixties. She was already an experienced international traveller, having for example gone to Sweden in 1964 to represent the U.S. National Education Association at the World Conference of Organizations of the Teaching Profession. Now in her mature years travel became one of her mainstay pastimes. She visited Canada, Mexico, Finland, Sweden (again), Italy, Greece, and other counties in Europe. All of this was in addition to a great many trips within the United States from one coast to the other.

One other reason for her early retirement was to give herself the freedom to concentrate on the care and support of her aged father, who had become a widower in 1974. Charlie’s memory had started to slip even back in the 1960s. By the time Agnes retired, he was turning ninety-one, and was often confused and in need of a familiar face. Fortunately even in his dementia he always knew who Agnes was. Charlie finally perished in the summer of 1980 at age ninety-four.

Her father was not the only one Agnes looked after during the second half of the 1970s. Her sister Frances died in 1975, leaving a daughter and son only in their twenties. The pair still had their father (and eventually a stepmother) to turn to, but Agnes played surrogate mother from time to time. She was particularly helpful to her nephew when he decided to leave his first long-term employment situation in Detroit in favor of a return to the west coast.

Agnes was the long-lived one of the three Strom girls, demonstrating some of the longevity enjoyed by her father and reaching an age a bit greater than her mother had known. As might be expected, she struggled with health issues in her eighties, including a case of lymphoma for which she received a course of chemotherapy. The cancer was slow-growing, in part because of her age, and in the end it was not that but a stroke that claimed her life. She died Wednesday, 24 March 2004. She was one of the very last of her generation of the Smeds clan to pass away.

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