Anna Gustava Rautiainen

Anna Gustava Rautiainen was born 9 November 1885 in the city of Oulu, in the state of the same name in northwestern Finland. She was either the firstborn of the twelve children of Josef (nicknamed Juuso) Rautiainen (20 December 1859 - 23 June 1932) and his first wife Maria Henriika Perttunen (5 April 1863 - 9 August 1900), or she was the first child who survived past infancy. Upon immigrating to America, she was often known as Annie, especially among her children and by her nephews and nieces and their descendants. She is often therefore referred to as Annie in latter three-quarters of this biography, though Anna continued to be her formal name. Her middle name can also be spelled the Finnish way, as Kustaava.

Unlike the Smeds family that she and her sister Maria would marry into, Anna grew up speaking Finnish rather than Swedish, being a member of the ethnic majority in her mother country. Though the family was not wealthy, her father was a figure of some standing in society, being variously employed as a sheriff, prosecutor, and circuit judge over the course of the years when Anna was growing up. The family often moved as a result of his occupation. Anna’s childhood was spent in a series of homes in the westernmost section of the state of Oulu. This area immediately south of Lapland can be found on a map along the Finnish coast where the Gulf of Bothnia terminates in a muted “hook” shape. In addition to momentary lodgings, the household was located at various times in the communities of Oulu, Tyrnävä, Raahe, and Vihanti.

As Anna was reaching her late teens, more and more Finns were heading to America. One was a woman known to the family who had settled in San Francisco. This individual had assets back in Vihanti that she asked Juuso Rautiainen to sell for her. He did so, but then the problem was how to get the money to her. The woman did not trust bank transfers, perhaps due to the language issues. Juuso suggested Anna bring it as a courier, after which she could remain in the United States. Anna -- who perhaps appreciated the chance to get out from under the shadow of her stepmother and be freed of the challenges of helping care for a gaggle of younger siblings -- readily agreed to the plan. The woman agreed as well, and offered to pay for Anna’s passage. (According to family accounts, Anna paid some or all of this sum back after she obtained a job.) Anna made the big journey in 1903, entering through a port in Canada and then travelling by train across the continent. The latter trip was an ordeal. Only the first-class cars had meal service. Regular passengers were supposed to purchase portable meals during the stops at depots along the way. However, those interruptions of the journey were usually brief. Anna was terrified the train would leave without her while she was struggling to buy herself something to eat. That sort of disaster seemed all too likely to occur given her unfamiliarity with English, with American currency and prices, and even with the menu items. So she stayed aboard at all stops, and grew faint with hunger. For years afterward Anna said she only made it to the destination because a woman passenger noticed her plight and began sharing food with her.

San Francisco was home to a large Finnish community, particularly in the Mission District and in Bernal Heights. This was Anna’s milieu for the next dozen years. Early in that phase, in 1904, a young Finn named Jakob Herman Smeds came down from Eureka, where he had been working in the timber industry, in order to start a job as a silversmith at Shreve & Company Jewellers. He was an Ostrobothnian Finn. His native language was Swedish. His ethnicity and the language issue would have made him a less-than-ideal match for Anna had she been back in the mother country, but in California, their similar origins and shared social circle soon drew them together. A facet that helped them was that Jakob was becoming quite fluent in Finnish now that he was living in the Bay Area where the majority of his Finnish friends spoke that language. Back in Eureka, the proportion of Swedish-speaking Finns had been more substantial. Getting to know Anna was his reward for broadening his horizons. The pair were wed 27 May 1905 in San Francisco by Reverend O. Groensberg. In short order, Anna gave birth to first child Sylvia Alice Smeds.

Anna and Jakob -- or Annie and Jack as they were increasingly becoming known -- made San Francisco their home for the first ten years they were together, shifting through a series of rental accommodations in various neighborhoods of the city including the Mission, Bernal Heights, Noe Valley, the Castro, and Glen Park. They had no choice but to move from their first dwelling -- it was lost in the fire that consumed much of the city in the hours immediately following the great earthquake of 18 April 1906. Annie and Jack fled by ferry to the shelter of the home of friends across the bay in Berkeley, getting away with little more than what they carried on their persons or could tuck in baby Sylvia’s perambulator. One of the few items saved was a silver coffee pot that remains within the family today, passed down to the couple’s eldest daughter to her eldest daughter to her eldest daughter. The item had been a wedding gift to Jack and Annie from Shreve & Company. During these years, Annie gave birth twice more, to daughter Lillian Anna Smeds in early 1907, and to son Roy William Smeds in the summer of 1909. To the horror of the family, baby Roy suffered from a congenital condition that ultimately made it nearly impossible to keep milk down, and he died of the consequent malnutrition and dehydration at less than three months of age. Grief over this loss may well be why the couple avoided having children for the next eight years.

Even before the wedding, the prospect of reliable earnings as a silversmith had led Jack to invest in farmland three miles north of the small town of Reedley in Fresno County. He did so as part of an effort by dozens of households of recent immigrants from Finland to create a “New Finland” agricultural colony in American, an idea promoted by Axel Wahren, a famous exile Finnish politician. The opportunity was too good to pass up, even though it was not practical to use the land at first as a replacement source of income. Instead, Jack remained employed by Shreve & Company and he and Annie continued to make San Francisco their main home. He and Annie were absentee landowners, leaving it to neighbors to look after the then-uninhabited parcel. At the end of 1907, Jack hired his newly-arrived brother Vilhelm and father Herman to manage the property, onto which they moved in January, 1908. Vilhelm and Herman built a house and and began turning the place into a real farm, not just an alfalfa field. Vineyards were planted -- mostly or entirely in the Thompson seedless variety, the predominant type used for raisins, raisins being an extremely popular food commodity in America in the early Twentieth Century. For years, Annie and Jack visited the Reedley ranch on a frequent but limited-stay basis, for example when they came down to help with planting or harvesting. Finally in 1915, they decided to take the big step. A neighbor, Karl Nordell, decided to sell his parcel at the corner of Holbrook Avenue and Peter Avenue. Jack and Annie bought him out. While getting their new house built on that parcel, Jack and Annie and their two girls squeezed into the house on their original parcel, which was still occupied by Vilhelm (Billy) and his bride Maria Rautiainen -- Annie’s own little sister -- along with their two small boys, Roy and Alfred. (Herman had by then passed away.) As it happened, at this very point, Jack’s sister Amanda and her new husband Charles Strom moved to Reedley as well. They, too, had to get a house built on their farm, located a couple of miles to the east. Somehow the relatives managed to cope with the momentary tight quarters.

Once they were in place in the new house, they had “come home” in a sense. Jack had enjoyed the security of an upbringing on land that had been acquired by his father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s father in 1722, just after the close of the Great Northern War, but since leaving that estate in his teens, he had never truly put down new roots. Annie meanwhile had never known a truly permanent home in the first place. Now they had a spot to grow old upon and that would probably be the home of at least one of their children after they were gone -- as indeed became the case, that child being Lawrence Jakob Smeds, the last of their progeny, born in the summer of 1917. But Annie was also secure in a second and not insignificant way. While Reedley was not entirely made up of Finns, it was home to a great many of them, Wahren’s sales pitch in 1904 having spawned a serious amount of interest and participation, even if Wahren himself went on to live out his life back in the mother country, his exile having been rescinded. Even though a number of immediate neighbors were Finland Swedes like Jack and Billy, most of the Finns in Reedley were Finnish-Finns. Annie and her sister Maria (Mary) therefore were able to settle into a social context that brought them forward and let them step out of the shadows of their husbands. They were not hangers-on in a social world determined by Jack and Billy’s interests and affiliations, but more the reverse. Jack and Billy joined the local Finnish Brotherhood and mingled with the main group of Reedley Finns, unlike for example the Stroms, whose social life was centered around the activities of the local lodge of Swedish immigrants, the Order of Runeburg, which met ten miles away in Kingsburg.

A portion of this biography has yet to be written, and will be placed here when ready. In the meantime, the following paragraphs cover aspects of Annie’s life after the year 1915:

Sylvia and Lillian came of age. Both moved back to San Francisco to attend nursing school. While there, both became wives. Lillian was first to take this step, and thanks to her husband Harold Roberts Quinney’s training and career as a dentist, ended up remaining in the Bay Area, including a long tenure in the city of Vallejo. Sylvia married half a decade later. She and her new husband Daniel Joseph Heagerty became parents of a daughter, Diane, the following year (1932). That was a happy development, but also a fraught one, because it was not an easy thing to raise a child in the midst of the Great Depression, and Daniel’s earnings as a newpaper reporter could in no way be categorized as a breadwinner contribution to the family bank account. Fortunately Sylvia had not burned her bridges in terms of her nursing career, and when she managed to land the position of head nurse at Dinuba Hospital, a mere ten miles south of her parents’ farm, down to the San Joaquin Valley they came, moving in at first into the staff quarters of the hospital. For a brief juncture, it seemed like all might be well. Annie and Jack were delighted to have their eldest child back within their sphere. Unfortunately, the couple proceeded into what was unquestionably the saddest chapter of their lives, comparable in a certain way with the loss of their infant son Roy, but worse because the saga played out over a period of years instead of weeks.

The first crack in the wall came with the injection of Daniel Heagerty into their daily lives. Here was a son-in-law who needed a job. That had no easy solution. Daniel had only ever been employed at urban jobs. He was entirely unsuited to farmwork, and yet that was the only obvious role he could play as a Reedley man. There weren’t a lot of other jobs to be had. Those that existed -- be it retail clerk or postal carrier or sign-painter -- had already been snapped up by local men desperate for what they could get. Contributing to the management of Annie and Jack’s farm was the logical thing for Daniel to do. Unfortunately, he wasn’t good at it. Worse, he was stepping on the toes of Lawrence Smeds, who was just coming of age and was poised to be anointed as the young prince of the farm himself. Lawrence did not appreciate a brother-in-law suddenly showing up to steal his moment. Add to that the personality dynamics. Annie and Jack had little liking for anyone with a fondness for alcohol, and in Daniel, they had on their hands someone unable to set the bottle aside. Worse, he was argumentative and made excuses, while Annie and Jack preferred to be met with the quiet, stoic, reserved calm they themselves exhibited. Daniel had grown up without a role model; his father had died when he was four years old. His mother had never remarried. Daniel was the sort of person who due to his intrinsic character needed to be kept in harness. Instead he had grown up insufficiently acquainted with discipline and consequences.

Nevertheless, as said, the only obvious employment situation for Daniel in the Valley was to work for his parents-in-law, and so accomodations were made. Certain things could be made easier, and one of those was the commute from Dinuba Hospital to the farm. Sylvia and Daniel began renting a house at Peter Avenue and Reed Avenue, just a quarter mile due east of Annie and Jack’s home at the corner of Peter Avenue and Holbrook Avenue. Daniel didn’t even have to drive to get to work; instead Sylvia could take the car. Diane could easily be brought over for Annie to look after during Sylvia’s shifts. The rental house caught fire one night. Diane would be left nervous about fire for the rest of her life but in other respects everyone was unhurt. The incident stands, though, as a symbol of the Heagery household’s luck in general. Worse was to come. After a relatively quite interlude during which Sylvia was employed in Reedley as an office nurse at the small practice of doctors Deitrich Wiebe and Menno Gaede -- a considerably less stressful role than hospital head nurse -- she began exhibiting troubling symptoms. The cause turned out to be tuberculosis.

It was the late 1930s. By that point in the Twentieth Century, TB was an increasingly treatable disease, but it was not until the antibiotic era that there was a way to beat it. The best that Sylvia could do was buy herself some time, and to isolate herself from others so that she did not infect others. Accordingly, she checked into the Wish-I-Ah sanitarium in Auberry, in the foothills about thirty miles north of Reedley.

Diane could not stay with her mother. That would have put her in danger of becoming sick herself. Annie became the day-to-day maternal figure, now in the full sense instead of just during Sylvia’s shifts at the Wiebe-Gaede medical office. Annie did not view this as a burden. It was her privilege that she could take care of her granddaughter while her daughter was unable to. It was also a responsibility, and both Annie and Jack regarded it with profound seriousness. It was now up to them to judge “what was best for Diane.” And as far as they were concerned, one of those things was that Daniel Heagerty needed to leave.

What an extraordinary stance, wouldn’t you say, telling a father he had to remove himself from his daughter’s day-to-day upbringing? It shows what an awful person Daniel was. Annie and Jack were not the sort of people who would have acted out of judgmental self-importance. They saw what Diane needed. They knew they could provide it, and that if Daniel stuck around, his presence would be toxic.

Sylvia agreed with the assessment, and inasmuch as she was still alive, her wishes were determinative. Daniel did not like it, but in the face of a united front, he conceded. He returned to the Bay Area, resuming his reporting career, then working as a shipping clerk, and then when the war broke out, becoming a soldier. He saw Diane infrequently during the first part of his exile, and then of course while he was overseas, he did not see her at all.

Annie and Jack deserve immense credit for what they did for Diane, and she always revered them for it. But the final chapter of that story is tragic. On Midsummer’s Day, 1946, Sylvia finally perished of the disease. By then, Daniel Heagerty was back from overseas, and now was in a position to claim custody of Diane. And indeed, he asked Diane if she wanted to come live with him. Annie and Jack were caught in a quandary. They believed that at age thirteen-and-a-half years old, Diane had the right to decide for herself whether she would stay on the farm, or move in with her father. They chose not to argue too strongly against it, feeling that it was not their place to do so now that their daughter was dead, and now that their granddaughter was old enough to be capable of acting in her interests. The fact is, Annie and Jack failed to realize how differently Diane might interpret their behavior. The old couple loved her to pieces, but they had been brought up in a culture and within families where demonstrative shows of affection just didn’t happen. For them, it was enough to “be there” and provide nurturance in the form of food and security, structure and discipline. Diane came to the conclusion that the only reason they would consider letting her go was if they didn’t actually love her. By contrast, her father could have taken the “easy out” and just left her in place, and yet he was asking for her, which she felt must mean he wanted to have her in his life. Plus, Diane felt as though she was supposed to go with her father. And so she did, and in so doing, proceeded to be brought up in abusive circumstances that might well have left her broken had she not had the support of Annie and Jack during her formative years, and then the love of a good husband as an adult.

Aside from the sadness associated with the loss of Sylvia and the heartache of being without Diane, Annie and Jack enjoyed a good period of life during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Those decades were difficult economically for American small farmers, but Jack had purchased the first acreage at bargain rates, and had built up quite a nest egg thanks to his many years working for Shreve and Company, and the family enjoyed the security of that for quite some time.

Lawrence married another Reedley native, Opal Finster, in 1939. From then on, he stage by stage slid into his role as his father’s successor. Jack continued to steer the business in a senior-advisor, chairman-of-the-board sort of way, but as the post-World War II period gave way to the Eisenhower era, Jack scaled back to the level appropriate to a man in his seventies. Annie got to scale back somewhat as well, with her daughter-in-law shouldering some of the domestic responsibilities. However, when youngsters came over in order to have piano lessons with Opal, it was Annie’s cookies and cheerful presence that made them especially glad to be there. One of those students, Ann Schellbach -- a very good friend and classmate of the Smeds kids born in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and on her mother’s side part of the Madsen clan, one of Reedley’s Finnish families -- spoke in the mid-2010s with affection of taking the school bus not to her own home but to Annie and Jack’s, ostensibly for the piano lessons but also to enjoy the welcome feeling she always felt at their house.

As mentioned above, Annie and Jack were typical of many Finns and were reserved and modest in terms of attire, lifestyle, and public displays of affection. Even as a young couple, they had been active in the temperance movement, trying to get other immigrants in San Francisco to reject alcohol. Nevertheless their profound fondness for one another was obvious, and this remained true even when they had been together for half a century. A grand niece recalls a time in the mid-1950s when she, then a sophomore in high school and on a date at Reedley’s main theater -- located directly across the street from the Finnish Brotherhood social hall -- turned and noticed that Annie and Jack were also on a date for the same showing of the movie. The elderly couple were holding hands as they sat there.

Jack passed away 17 March 1957. During her widowhood, the main house was given over to Lawrence and Opal. A forty-foot long vacation trailer/mobile home (envision the sorts of domiciles so often seen in trailer parks) was placed on a concrete pad a few steps to the north of the main house. A simple shed with a roof of corrugated tin sheeting was built around it to give the unit extra shade -- always an important consideration given the heat of the summer sun in Fresno County. Annie nested in and called the place home for the final two decades of her life. The arrangement meant that the farm was soon home to four generations. Lawrence’s eldest son married and became a father early in his life, residing in a home that was added to the same yard to the south of the main house. To Annie’s great-grandchildren, as well as other relatives born in the late 1950s and the 1960s, she was the sweet old matriarch figure in the blue trailer. She didn’t make treats as often as she had before, but she was always ready to indulge the youngsters with store-bought caramels or peppermint lozenges. She always greeted visitors with her characteristic chuckling laugh, the mirth causing her double-chin to jiggle charmingly.

Annie never quite mastered all the intricacies of English as a second language, even after fifty, sixty, and then seventy years in America. On one occasion in the early 1970s, when the trend of long hair had laid its claim upon many of the younger generation of Smeds men, Annie was heard to exclaim, “Oh, doesn’t she have beautiful hair!” about the long, blond lengths flowing over the shoulders of one of her grand nephews. (Finnish does not have gender pronouns.)

Annie passed away 1 March 1975 in Reedley. After her trailer had stood unoccupied for a couple of years, it became the retirement sanctuary of Opal’s mother Arley Wooley Finster Plank, so once again -- at least until Arley passed away in 1983 -- the farm was the home of four generations at the same time.

Children of Anna Gustava Rautiainen with Jakob Herman Smeds

Sylvia Alice Smeds

Lillian Anna Smeds

Roy William Smeds

Lawrence Jakob Smeds

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