Joseph Alfred Smeds

Joseph Alfred Smeds, son of Vilhelm Smeds and Maria Rautiainen, was born 12 September 1914 on his parents’ farm north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. His first name was in honor of his maternal grandfather Josef Rautiainen and was used only in the most formal circumstances. To the world in general he was Alfred Smeds, familiarly known as Al.

Al’s birth household consisted of himself, his parents, and one brother, Roy, who was one year his elder. (When Al was still a toddler, his mother suffered a case of typhoid fever that rendered her sterile, accounting for the lack of other children.) The family lived in a few different houses, all on farms along Holbrook Avenue. These parcels were in the midst of a series of properties for the most part owned by recent immigrants from Finland. It was thanks to the presence of these neighbors that Al ended up with fluency in Finnish. His father’s native language was Swedish, while his mother’s was Finnish, so given that the couple had to resort to English even between themselves, Al and Roy used English as their primary language from infancy onward. But in the late 1910s, Finnish-speaking boys their own age moved next door. The boys all played together day after day. In the process, Al and Roy naturally picked up Finnish even as the newcomers were picking up English. Roy ultimately did not become as fluent, probably because he soon became old enough to enroll in school, where he was surrounded by English-speaking peers. Al had an extra year hanging out with the neighbor boys. His command of Finnish never faded away. Half a century later when Rautiainen-clan uncles, aunts, and cousins would journey to Reedley to spend vacations with the American branch of the family, Al would immediately and fearlessly launch into animated conversations with them, even though years and years had passed during which he had gone without any practice in Finnish at all. (One of those Finnish relatives confessed that Al spoke the language like an articulate five-year-old, but said it was part of what made Al so charming.)

Though the farm was only three miles north of Reedley, it was far enough away in that era that the boys could not easily participate in organized activities in town, so they made up their own pastimes. One of the most popular in the warm months was to go swimming in the Kings River, which ran north to south along the western boundary of the farm. The family home was located a good hundred yards away from the stream itself atop a bluff. This meant that while swimming, the boys were near enough to summon by shouting to them or by ringing a cow bell, but were too far for direct supervision. Al and Roy were bold and active, so they would clamber forty feet up into the riparian oak trees and plunge from there into the water. Had their mother ever seen them, she would have been frantic.

(Shown at right are Roy Smeds and Alfred Smeds on either side of their first cousin Agnes Strom when the three of them were preschoolers in the late 1910s. They are sitting on the stoop of a home on the east side of Holbrook Avenue which the Smeds family only occupied for a few years -- all their other dwelling places were on the west side of Holbrook Avenue.) When Al was in his mid-teens, the owners of a neighboring parcel, Fred and Katherine Tenhunen, who had been renting their land and its house for over a decade, were hard hit by the onset of the Great Depression and decided to sell their property. As a result, the Smedses not only added to their acreage, but took over a a well-built home at 6469 S. Holbrook Avenue. This was where Al finished growing up. The house remained in family hands for the rest of Al’s long lifetime. (And for all of the house’s lifetime. It was still family-owned when the decision was made to demolish the hundred-year-old structure in the summer of 2013.) It was his home until he was on the brink of turning twenty years old, i.e. until he had finished high school and a year at Reedley College.

As described by one of his female classmates at his funeral in 2001, Al was regarded by the girls of Reedley High as the fellow they all wanted to end up having as a husband -- an easily understood attitude given Al’s good looks and amiable personality. None of those local gals succeeded in reeling him in. Perhaps they were all too familiar to him, not different enough to seem exotic. But in 1934, he saw a lovely young woman smile at him from across a dance hall in Sanger, ten miles northwest of Reedley, and he went over to ask her to dance. It was the beginning of a relationship that would last until his dying breath. It happened somewhat by accident. The young lady, Josephine Alberta Warner, wasn’t able to make out Al’s face clearly across the room and had mistaken him for an acquaintance she had already decided she wanted to dance with. She was too shy to smile so directly at a complete stranger.

Josephine Alberta Warner is profiled on this website in the sections devoted to the Branson Family, Warner Family, and Martin Family. To read a biography focussed upon her, click here.

Al and Josephine -- then known as Josie and soon to become known as Jo -- liked each other immediately but chose to “take it slow.” Jo needed to finish high school, and then she tried out nursing school. Given that the country was still immersed in the Great Depression and given that Jo came from a background of financial security, Al was conscious of the need to prove himself a breadwinner. Not long after that first dance, Al took a job with Standard Oil and moved into rental quarters in Taft, Kern County, CA. He came back nearly every weekend to see Jo and their mutual friends, as well of course as to see his parents. This long-distance courtship got old. He grew eager to do something about it. When his wages reached a high enough level that he was making more than his friend Doug Hunter, who had married Jo’s best friend Harriet Mead, Al felt he could honestly claim to be able to support a wife, and he proposed to Jo. The pair were married 12 September 1936 -- Al’s twenty-second birthday -- in the garden of the Warners’ next-door neighbors on N Street in Sanger.

Al kept the job with Standard Oil for another year and a half, but Taft was not an appealing place. With their first child on the way -- which would mean the end of the extra household income generated by Jo’s job at a haberdashery -- the couple returned to Fresno County and moved into a small house that had been one of Al’s homes during his childhood, on land that still belonged to his parents. They remained there until the end of 1941, an interval during which the first two of their four children were born. Al went back to working for his father. However, now he was an adult and a married man, so the business arrangement was formalized by the launching of William Smeds and Sons, a partnership consisting of Billy and both of his sons.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the price for farmland dropped precipitously, allowing the Smeds family business to expand. Just after Christmas, a 67-acre parcel at 7185 Reed Avenue, less than a mile from Al’s parents’ farm, was bought for only $11,000. The partnership provided the ten percent down payment, with the understanding that Al would be responsible for paying off the mortgage. The couple and their two small girls moved into the property’s large farmhouse in January, 1942. Not counting his stay at a convalescent home, it would be Al’s home for the rest of his long life.

As head of a farm household, Al was exempt from the military draft. He and Josie weathered these years of rationing and shortages as they had the Great Depression, working hard and stretching what little money they had as far as they could. Their big indulgences were trips into the nearby Sierra Nevada range. Every summer the family spent three or four weeks camping at Dinkey Creek, living in tents, cooking over firepits, scrubbing pots and clothes in the creek, and pitching many games of horseshoes. These were extended-family excursions that included Roy Smeds, his wife Mildred, and their two children, along with Al and Roy’s double first cousin Lawrence Smeds and his wife Opal, and also other family members, neighbors, and friends. The women and children would spend the entire vacation in the mountains. The menfolk stayed as much as possible, but sometimes needed to linger in the valley during the week to tend their fields. Gas rationing and the rigors of driving up the narrow, winding, steep grade of Tollhouse Road meant that frequent commuting was not a practical option.

In the autumn, after the harvest, the men were able to turn the tables and get away to the forest on their own to hunt deer. The group, known as the Buckpot Gang, included not only family members but old high school friends and neighbors. Al and Jo maintained close friendships throughout their lives with the people they bonded with in their teens and/or in childhood.

The post-war years brought the arrival of a third child and increasing prosperity as the farm, which had been neglected by its previous owners, began to be productive. Alfred had begun his tenure by replacing the parcel’s grain fields with a vineyard of muscat grapes. Later he pulled out the run-down fig orchard and planted that section with Thompson Seedless, a variety used at that time chiefly for raisins.

The habit of camping in the mountains and the changes made in the farm set the stage for a financial windfall. By 1950, the muscat vineyard had reached a prime level of production -- young but fully established vines, capable of bearing a high yield. The variety was more in demand than any other white grape for table use. That year, the price skyrocketed due to a wave of heat so intense and prolonged that vineyard after vineyard suffered heavy sunburn damage, in some instances literally ruining the grapes, in milder cases causing cosmetic damage that prompted growers to divert most of their crop to wineries, knowing that grocery-store customers would not want to buy ugly fruit.

By a twist of fate, Al’s grapes, and those of his extended family, had not suffered the same catastrophe. Because he had wanted to be up at Dinkey Creek for an extended period -- two weekends plus the whole week between -- he had irrigated his fields heavily and not according to the timing followed by most of his neighbors. As a result, when the heatwave struck, not only was he personally able to enjoy the cooler temperatures of the higher elevations, but his vines had plenty of water to help them resist the stress they were under. Most of the grapes came through the ordeal unscathed. At that point Theron Hooker, a largescale fruit broker from southern California, desperate to find good muscats for his customers, discovered William Smeds and Sons. The Smedses had the goods; Hooker knew who would pay the best prices. It was the beginning of a business association that would get Al’s fruit to customers all over the nation.

The money flowed so well that year Jo and Al took advantage of another bit of remarkable timing. The U.S. Forest Service had just opened up lots along Huntington Lake reservoir, about a two-hour drive from Reedley into the mountains. Al and Jo acquired one of the leases and built a cabin, as did Roy and Mildred Smeds, Lawrence and Opal Smeds, and friends such as Doug and Harriet Hunter and Harriet’s brother Jim Mead and his wife Gladys. The Dinkey Creek campers/Buckpot Gang now had a new and more civilized venue for their vacation trips. The camping and the pack trips into the back country had been much loved by the family, but the convenience and comfort of cabins became the rule as the generation entered middle age.

In 1955, Al decided to try his hand at not only growing grapes, but serving as a shipper. A small shipping office was built in the yard, attached to the carport. The farm’s old barn, the loft of which had hosted many a neighborhood square dance, was torn down and replaced with a packing shed and two cold storage rooms with a loading dock outside its eastern doors. Theron Hooker’s young account executive Allan Corrin was assigned as the on-site sales manager. The work of managing both a farm and a distribution business proved to be exhausting. Al gave it his best, but then a day came when he started work with his grape-picking crews in the field at 6:30am, worked through the night loading trucks and getting them on the road during the coolness of the darkness (these were the days before refrigerated trucks became common), and was still at work when the crews went back out to the fields at 6:30am. Al made the decision that morning that he would not go through any more seasons of such craziness. For the rest of his career, he functioned as a grower first and foremost. The one lasting effect of his experiment, aside from the fact that the office, shed, and cold-storage rooms remained part of Jo and Al’s yard for the rest of their days, was Allan Corrin’s association with the Smeds family. Over the years, Allan would work his way into ownership of his own produce brokerage, and during those decades he would sell pallet after truckload after railroad car of Smeds fruit.

In the late 1950s, Al acquired a sailboat, a 17-ft. type known as a Thistle. Sailing would become his favorite pastime, one he would continue as long as his body allowed him to be active. Inasmuch as the Thistle class requires a fair amount of strength and agility to operate, Al traded up to the more substantial 25-ft. San Juan class in the 1970s. The latter type of vessel possessed a keel rather than a centerboard, which made it more stable and manageable. Jo was the main and sometimes sole member of Al’s crew. The couple spent many an afternoon and evening racing or pleasure-sailing on Lake Millerton, a reservoir northeast of Fresno, where Friant Dam traps the flow of the San Joaquin River. They also took their boat up to Huntington Lake, a prime sailing lake due to its long configuration and steady canyon winds. Huntington was the venue for the annual High Sierra Regatta, which Al competed in for many years and at times helped organize. A great many of Jo and Al’s friends in their middle age and twilight years were the people they met in the Fresno Yacht Club.

Jo and Al’s life continued to grow more comfortable financially as time went on, though for different reasons. By the late 1950s, muscats ceased to be the prime white table grape because supermarkets came into vogue. Before supermarkets, grocers tended to bag produce themselves and gently hand the result to the customer after purchase. Supermarket logistics meant customers could paw through bins on their own, and therefore muscats became a liability. When muscats are ripe, the berries tended to come loose from their stems shortly after picking unless handled gently. This tendency meant grocers ended up with a great deal of unsellable fruit they had to throw away. By the early 1960s Al’s muscats could only be sold to wineries for the juice. The crops were still somewhat valuable, but not to the degree they had been when the fruit could be sold to the fresh-produce trade. The prime white table grape became Thompson Seedless, which innovators had discovered could be made to grow large by a practice known as girdling.

Jo and Al remained in their farmhouse in retirement, handing off the active management of the business to their eldest son, who built his own house on the land in 1981. It was a happy time. The first grandchild arrived in 1960, when Jo was only forty-two. The last was born in 1993. By then, the first two of their great-grandchildren had been born. The couple’s senior citizen years were quiet and their activities mostly extensions of those they had involved themselves in for decades. Even when they no longer hiked in the mountains, they still visited their cabin. They sailed less and less, but still had barbecues and dinner parties with their yacht club colleagues. They joined in many family gatherings -- though Jo let the younger wives do more of the cooking. They travelled a little, even going to the Caribbean in their late seventies with sailing friends (earlier in life they had visited Finland and made several trips to Mexico). They also tended to their parents. Jo’s father Bert Warner lived to age 104. He resided at the farmhouse for six years during his nineties, and then and after, until his death in 1988, when Jo was seventy-one, he relied on her for the things he was too old to do for himself. Al looked in on his widowed mother as long as he was able; she lived to age 108 and actually survived him by about five weeks.

By the mid-1990s, Jo and Al usually stayed at home. Al developed Parkinson’s Disease and grew more and more limited by it, especially after his difficulty moving led to a car accident on the farm in May, 1997, which resulted in a long period of physical therapy. By the time Al had his strength back, the Parkinson’s left him unable to travel if the trip required more than an hour or so to get to his destination, and he no longer did any of the driving.

Jo suffered from high blood pressure from her forties onward. In her eighties, this factor contributed to a series of strokes. In late 1999, she was hit by her first significant one, perhaps exacerbated by the ordeal of caring for Al. She would make nearly a full recovery, but in the immediate aftermath of the event, Al was admitted to the convalescent wing of a Reedley retirement complex, Palm Village, and Jo took a room in the assisted-care section. Within a few months her health had improved. Though Al had to remain at the facility, Jo returned home to the farm.

Al continued to decline, and in February, 2001, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He passed away at Palm Village 16 May 2001. Jo survived him. She was able to live at home on the farm until Thanksgiving, 2003, and then she, too, ended up spending the final portion of her life at Palm Village, where she perished 13 June 2004. Al and Jo share a grave at Reedley Cemetery near the grave of his parents.

Al is on the far left in this photo from the 1950s of Smeds menfolk. The elders are his father Billy (with his hand on the German shepherd) and uncle Jack. Next to him is his brother Roy. In the middle of the group is his double first cousin Lawrence. This photograph was taken for the local newspaper, the Reedley Exponent, for an installment of their “Farmer of the Month” feature. The selection committee could not decide which member of the Smeds clan they should honor, so the award went to all five as a group.

Descendants of Joseph Alfred Smeds with Josephine Alberta Warner

Click here to go back to Al’s father's page, and here to go back to his mother’s page. To return to the Smeds Family History main page, click here.