Vilhelm Smeds

Vilhelm Smeds would gradually Americanize his name, starting out as Vilhelm in Finland, then using Wilhelm in America during his twenties and early thirties, then shifting to William. Those are the formal versions, though. He was often known to family and close friends as Bill Smeds (which would have been Vill back in Finland). His wife affectionately called him Billy. In the spirit of that affection he is called Billy in many instances throughout this family history website. He does not seem to have ever used a middle name except on his 1904 passport when, it would seem, the bureaucrats insisted he provide one, and so he described himself as Vilhelm Hermanpoika Smeds, Hermanpoika being “son of Herman” in Finnish. If his passport had been issued in Swedish instead of Finnish, he would have been identified as Vilhelm Hermansson Smeds.

A son of Jakob Herman Mattsson Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs, Vilhelm was born 17 September 1886 on Section 1 of the ancestral Smeds estate in Soklot, Finland. He was raised on that property in a house his father had constructed in 1880. When he was only four years old his mother died. In the wake of that tragedy, his paternal grandmother Lisa Jakobsdotter Pörkenäs Smeds moved into the home to help her widower son raise his six kids, who consisted of not only Vilhelm but his three older siblings and two younger ones. Lisa died in 1897. Herman chose not to have another mature female move in. Instead he was able to count on the help of his brother Erik’s wife Brita, who lived immediately next door. Vilhelm grew up to be at 5'11" the tallest member of his family, surpassing the stature of his eldest brother Jakob (Jack) and of their father, Herman. He was half a head taller than his little brother, Axel, and towered over his sisters, just as he would subsequently tower over his wife. As a young man, he was slender. Within a few years of becoming a married man, he broadened out, though it is accurate to say he carried his weight well whatever the number of pounds.

In early February, 1904, the territorial tensions between Russia and the Empire of Japan proceeded into open warfare. The Tsar’s minions began drafting young male citizens as soldiers. Inasmuch as Finland was controlled by Russia at that time, all too many young Finnish men found themselves being swept up in the recruitment against their will to fight a war that had nothing to do with Finland’s own interests. Many of those young men were shipped off to Siberia and their families never heard from them, or of them, ever again. Vilhelm, age seventeen-and-a-half, chose not to become entangled and got out of the country at once. Due to his height, he already looked like he might be eighteen, and the recruitment officers often didn’t bother confirming the actual ages of their targets. Vilhelm couldn’t afford to hesitate. Jack Smeds was by then based in California, so Vilhelm made arrangements as quickly as possible and set out to join his big brother. He sailed from Finland to England, then embarked from Southhampton aboard the vessel St. Louis, which arrived in New York harbor 23 April 1904. He probably travelled in the company of his older sister Augusta. The siblings immediately crossed the continent by train to Eureka, Humboldt County, CA, where Jack had established himself as a timber worker. The same year Vilhelm and Augusta arrived, Jack obtained a position as a silversmith at Shreve & Company in San Francisco, and in so doing, departed Eureka for good, but Vilhelm and Augusta stayed. A photograph of the two brothers taken in 1904 in San Francisco implies Jack had already left Eureka before Vilhelm and Augusta arrived in the United States. If so, there was never actually a time when all three siblings were based simultaneously in Eureka. The younger pair went north anyway. They had maternal-side relatives in Eureka and the immediate vicinity who had settled there as early as the early 1890s and perhaps even one or two who had come in the 1880s.

Vilhelm was like most young male immigrants to Eureka and ended up as a laborer in the redwoods, harvesting the giant trees and helping get them to the mills downtream. It was incredibly hard work. (Click here and scroll down to view an image of Vilhelm and other members of his timber crew in 1904 or 1905.) The only real advantage it provided other than a paycheck was that he ended up able to speak English by sheer immersion. While there were plenty of other men out in the woods who spoke his native tongue (Swedish, not Finnish), he had to adapt. This appears to have been harder for him than it was for Jack, but he did okay. Another positive legacy of those years was his friendship with Charles Strom, who would eventually become his brother-in-law. There is a chance he and Charlie may have known one another back in Finland (where Charlie had been known by his original name, Karl Johan Strömsnäs). They may even have been distant relatives. That said, it was up in the logging camps and in the lumber company cookhouses that their lasting bond was forged. (In the image at right, Vilhelm is on the left, his pal and future brother-in-law Charles Strom is on the right, and in the middle is Axel Smeds. This picture was taken in Eureka in 1907.)

Just before Christmas, 1906, Vilhelm’s two younger siblings, Axel and Amanda, along with their widower father, arrived in the United States. A family-reunion holiday season was spent at the home of Jack and his wife Anna (Annie) in San Francisco. Just after the turn of the year, the three new immigrants then proceeded on to Eureka. For the first time since early 1904, a full two-thirds of the members of Vilhelm’s original birth family were again able to be with one another on a regular basis. The situation would persist only through calendar year 1907, however, in part because that year brought new pressures to bear. Vilhelm and Charlie and other laborers had unionized. The lumbermen of Humboldt County were in fact the most organized lumbermen in the entire country, a somewhat logical development given that the county was the one place in the United States where the trees were so big and so numerous and the weather so mild, allowing production to continue all twelve months of the year at full steam ahead. The owners of the local companies were enjoying a bonanza, and the workers wanted their share. Their early efforts were largely successful. Vilhelm and Charlie and their comrades could command wage rates of $2.25 per day. (By comparison, in this era, a manager of a small retail establishment such as a drygoods store or a cigar shop would have considered himself competitively paid if his monthly salary worked out to two dollars a day.) Vilhelm and Charlie belonged to the International Brotherhood of Woodsmen and Sawmill Workers, and specifically were part of the chapter based in Fortuna, CA. Alas, a strike in 1907 was unsuccessful. By the end of the year, Vilhelm and Charley found themselves in the unenviable position of having been on the losing side, facing either the reality or the possibility of retaliatory punitive treatment on the part of their employer. It was, as the saying goes, “a good time to get away.” Charlie decided to go back to Finland, where he would make an eighteen-month visit with his mother and stepfather before coming back to Humboldt County. Vilhelm, meanwhile, was greeted with a new opportunity when he and his father, sisters, and his new brother-in-law Fred Malm travelled south to San Francisco to once again spend the winter holidays with Jack and Annie Smeds.

In 1905, Jack’s steady income as a skilled worker for a large company had given him the financial means to join in on a scheme by recent immigrants from Finland to establish “New Finland,” an agricultural colony in the San Joaquin Valley. Several dozen households were involved in the effort, making up several mini-colonies on the edges of the small town of Reedley in the southern part of Fresno County near the boundary with Tulare County. Jack and three other men -- Gustaf Laine, Frederick Tenhunen, and Karl Nordell -- had chosen to “set up shop” as their own mini-colony on sequential parcels along a short country lane known as Holbrook Avenue. The spot was located about three miles north of Reedley itself on land overlooking the Kings River. The acreage was cheap. It had been used for little more than pasture. The acquisitions by the four men had been made at the end of 1904 and beginning of 1905. Laine and Nordell had immediately taken up residence and had begun transforming their purchases into full-fledged farms. Jack, however, had adopted a different strategy, the same one employed by Fred Tenhunen. Both Jack and Fred worked for Shreve & Co. In fact, Fred was probably the very person who had recommended Jack be hired by the firm. For the time being, they kept their jobs as jewellers, using their steady wages to pay down the mortgages of their farms. Jack had planted some alfalfa on his parcel, which was a good way to fertilize the soil and get a little income from it, but now at the end of 1907 he needed to do more with what he had. His solution was to hire Vilhelm and his middle-aged father to develop the property. Vilhelm eagerly accepted, even though it meant he would be leaving behind the company of his sisters and his little brother. Once he and his father arrived at the beginning of 1908, Vilhelm would never again reside in a home that was more than a quarter mile from Jack’s original parcel.

In the early days, farm life was as arduous as the logging lifestyle had been. The land had no house. The electrical grid would not extend to that part of Fresno County for another six or seven years. There was no running water. Even just getting out of the frosty chill of the January 1908 nights was a luxury. In typical Finnish fashion, the first structure Vilhelm and his father erected -- even before the outhouse -- was a sauna. It was a simple shack with nothing but a firepit as the means of heating stones, but it was a dose of home. By setting up cots inside each night after they had completed their sweating and rinsing, they had the means to sleep on site and no longer had to impose on neighbors or, worse yet, pay for lodgings in town. Every penny saved mattered. This frugality also applied to business expenses. While teams of draft animals could be obtained for important tasks such as deep tilling and levelling of fields (at left, Vilhelm stands behind a four-horse team rigged to pull a cultivator) and motorized equipment could be rented for such major endeavors as drilling a well, no such conveniences could be afforded for day-to-day tasks. Pretty much everything of that sort had to be done by human muscle power. Vilhelm would learn what a challenge that was after he saw first-hand what a key role irrigation played in San Joaquin Valley agriculture. Where he had lived, be it Finland or Eureka, rainfall took care of the water needs of farms. But in Fresno County, the rains typically petered out completely by early May and did not return until late September or early October. (This is one of the factors that kept San Joaquin Valley land cheap all through the latter 1800s and into the early 1910s.) For years to come, Vilhelm dug furrow after furrow by himself with no more sophisticated tool than a shovel.

Callused as his hands became from all that digging, Vilhelm appreciated the chance to use his shovel. The only thing that made the acreage viable for vineyards -- the purpose to which he and his brother put most of their tillable acreage -- was the creation of the Wahtoke Canal. (Wahtoke Canal is a glorified name, implying it was a precision-engineered channel made of concrete and/or masonry. In fact, it was a ditch, and most locals called it Wahtoke Ditch or simply, The Ditch.) The canal was a component of on-going efforts throughout the Central Valley in that era to to set up irrigation infrastructure. The project happened to achieve fruition just as the Smedses were getting established. The ditch ran right through the farms between the Kings River bluff and Holbrook Avenue, reaching its end and draining into the natural channel of Wahtoke Creek at the southeastern corner of neighbor Gust Laine’s farm. Without that ditch and its water, there would not have been a viable reason for Vilhelm to put down his axe and leave Eureka.

At first, though, the ditch did not exist. A story lingers in family lore that epitomizes the ordeal Vilhelm endured before the project’s completion. The only source of water in the critical months of summer was the Kings River. Some of the farm was bottomland some twenty feet above the river’s usual seasonal height. The rest was up the bluff fifty feet higher still, at the main level of the local landscape where Vilhelm and Herman had built the house. A pump down in the bottomland portion carried water uphill through a makeshift pipeline. The problem was, the Smedses were hardly in a position to own a brand-new, state-of-the-industry pump. The rig, powered by kerosene, had a tendency to stall. If that happened, Vilhelm had to be near at hand to keep the momentum of the flywheel going while he quickly restarted the engine. The flywheel was so heavy it took at least two men to get it spinning from a dead stop. If the pump stopped during the day, Vilhelm could fetch a neighbor to help him deal with the cold-start challenge. But if the pump stopped during the night, he would have to wait until morning to enlist help -- his father was too frail to do serve that need. Stoppages lasting many hours meant water would not gush along through the furrows with enough assertiveness to soak the portion of the vineyard farthest from the river. That lack of watering could cause vines to suffer or even to die. So Vilhelm would set up a cot down by the pump and maintain a vigil, struggling to get to sleep at all due to the racket of the equipment, and yet not daring to slumber too deeply because he had to be ready to jump up at a moment’s notice and get the pump restarted if need be.

When the ditch was completed, the first thing Vilhelm did was kick over that pump. The flywheel was too heavy to haul away to sell as salvage metal, so he buried it in place. It is probably still there in the ground more than a hundred years after its last use. Vilhelm was known as a person who generally speaking kept his temper. One reason the flywheel-burial anecdote is recalled so well is that his spite toward that inanimate object was uncharacteristic. It was as deep a hatred as he ever expressed for anything.

At the beginning of 1912, Vilhelm -- now coming to be known as Billy -- married Maria (Mary) Rautiainen, the younger sister of Jack’s wife Annie. They soon became parents of two sons, Roy and Alfred, before a case of typhoid fever rendered Mary infertile. It was the only serious illness of her lifetime and was one she recovered from in other ways as completely as can be imagined, enjoying many decades of excellent health and surviving to age 108. However, though the couple’s own brood was thus kept small, they enjoyed the sense of a larger family because Jack and Annie Smeds came to Reedley in 1915 and the homes of the two Smeds/Rautianen couples were henceforth never more than a short walk from each other. The two sets of children, double first cousins genetically, grew up almost as siblings. Billy and Jack’s sister Amanda, having become the wife of Charlie Strom, also settled on a Reedley farm in 1915, and her three daughters were often part of the gaggle of youngsters.

One of the reasons Jack and Annie pressured Mary to wed Billy was that he was a “good man.” In part, they meant he was not a person to overindulge in vices such as alcohol. There is no question Billy was an extraordinarily good man. His moral code was as solid and strong as the huge redwoods he helped cut down. Probably the biggest difference in how he and Jack went about their “good behavior” is that Jack was at times outspoken about how others should conduct themselves, helping run the Finnish Temperance Hall in San Francisco and keeping up church involvement. Billy saw organized religion as oppressive, having experienced the example of the Finnish Lutheran Church back home. He preferred to be moral and good in his private, quiet way, according to his own principles. His innocuous dependability earned him the appreciation of his wife, his mortgage bankers, his neighbors, his family members. However, it is worth asking if he was happy. He held himself to such a strict standard that an objective third party might wonder if he ever let himself have fun. If you look at the photographs on this website, you will not find any views in which he is smiling. The closest exception is the photo shown slightly below right, which was placed here in part because while he isn’t actually grinning, he at least looks like he’s enjoying himself. In most other photographs, he doesn’t just look somber, he looks distressed, as if he has just learned his favorite dog has died. He even approached such routine matters as eating with seriousness. Mary would fill a plate for him and he would eat precisely that amount, never having seconds as if to do so would demonstrate greed, yet never failing to clean his plate as if leaving food uneaten would be disrespectful of her effort to cook the meal. Alfred told a tale in the years after Billy’s death of how when he and Roy were teenagers, they would hurry to finish up their assigned chores (of which there were many) so that they could head down to the river to swim in the late afternoons. Billy would get annoyed with them for being so frivolous. He would point out that even though they had done their work, there was other work that still could be done, and here they were off having fun.

This is not to say Billy was entirely unable to relax and enjoy himself. He could be relied upon to give his grandchildren warm hugs. He called neighbor children by pet names. While reminiscing in the early 1970s, Roy once described how thirty years earlier he had witnessed his father playing “This Little Piggie” with the toes of his toddler grandchildren, doing so in Swedish. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in “time off.” It was just that he believed in “work first.” His annoyance at his boys treating a trip to the river as a casual habit was that it was far from that for him. He regarded the river as a refuge, and his visits there as something to be earned and savored. A great many of the Finns of the Reedley area made the Kings River the center of their social life. For them, it was a taste of the mother country, a taste of childhood. Growing up, their homes had inevitably been near water, especially their summer homes. To bake in the ferocious heat of a Fresno County summer day, and then plunge into the Kings River -- which was made up of snow melt from the high elevations of the Sierra Nevada and was bracingly cold even in July -- must have echoed the experience of rushing out of a sauna in the Finnish woodlands and jumping into the nearby lake. On those occasions when Billy was satisfied his labor actually was done, he and Mary and the boys would venture down to the water. Often they would meet up with Jack and Annie and their kids, and nearly as often with neighbors such as the Laines, the Tenhunens, the Norths, the Panttajas, or bachelor A.A. Westerlund (known to Billy and Jack’s kids as “Uncle West”). Finns from the other side of the river, such as the Nelsons and Aaltos, might appear on the other bank. A cable and ferry car eased the crossing of the river, the nearest bridge being miles downstream. (At right is a photograph from the early 1920s of one of those get-togethers. From left to right starting at the top of the human pyramid: Hilma North, Sylvia Smeds, Irya Haanpaa, Karin Johnson, Mary Rautiainen Smeds, Ida Alanto, Alex Pulkkanen, Billy Smeds, Karl Alanto, and Axel (?). Karin and Hilma would be lifelong close friends of the Smeds clan. Irya and her stepfather Alex Pulkkanen were Berkeley-based Finns who happened to be visiting that weekend.)

If the festivities extended into evening, someone would build a fire of willow deadfall, perhaps tossing in a few eucalyptus leaves for aroma. A pot of coffee would be perched over the coals -- because after all no gathering of Finns was complete without coffee. Kids would roast wieners on willow strands. The smoke helped keep away the mosquitoes. Conversations in Finnish and sometimes Swedish were not uncommon, a letting-down of one’s “public face” allowed by the privacy of the setting. In those days, the river was for the most part the exclusive preserve of the owners of the properties along the banks. This no-trespassing aspect, taken for granted in those days, is no longer the way things are. By the 1960s the river began seeing increasing numbers of teenagers floating down the channel on inner tubs or rafts. The Kings River is now a major recreation destination, drawing hordes of people on weekends, some of them coming from as far away as Los Angeles.

One of Billy’s only indulgences was sugar with his coffee. He had a charming quirk in the way he approached this “vice.” Even today his grandchildren vividly recall how he would come in from the fields and sit at the kitchen table to have his mid-morning coffee. He had grown up in a frigid environment, so he liked to have the beverage as hot as possible -- so hot it would burn the tongue if he sipped it the normal way -- so he would pour the contents of his cup into the saucer. Taking two sugar cubes between his front teeth, he would slurp the searing hot liquid into his mouth. The air produced by the slurping action would cool the coffee down just enough. He would get a blast of heat, flavor, and sweetness. Even then he would not smile, but satisfaction would radiate from him.

One of the developments that shaped Jack and Annie’s relocation from San Francisco to Reedley was the purchase of more land. Karl Nordell decided to sell. (His participation in the New Finland venture had always been a bit of an oddity given that he was Norwegian, not Finnish.) Jack and Annie acquired his substantial holdings at the corner of Peter Avenue and Holbrook Avenue, making them adjacent neighbors of their good friends A.A. Westerlund and Gust Laine and his family. This meant Jack now had enough acreage to pin his household’s prosperity upon agricultural income. But Billy needed to establish himself to an equivalent degree. This led to the family moving from the house in which Roy and Alfred had spent their infancies -- on land that still belonged to Jack and Annie -- to a house and parcel just across Holbrook Avenue. Here they would stay for just a few years. (The photo of Roy and Al and their first cousin Agnes Strom as very small children included in Al’s biography on this website shows them on the stoop of that house.) It was the only time Billy and Mary would live on the eastern side of the road. All of their other homes were on the west side of Holbrook, and furthermore were situated right on the bluff that overlooked the bottomland through which the Kings River flowed.

The problem was, Billy had not been able to take advantage of the cheap prices Jack had enjoyed when he made his initial land purchase, nor had Billy been able to put together much of a nest egg to use for a down payment. By the mid-1910s, developed farmland was going for much steeper prices per acre than had been the case prior to the outbreak of the war in Europe. This was especially the case along Holbrook Avenue where everyone could see the value of the access to Wahtoke Ditch. Billy was committed to being a farmer and took the chance anyway. The timing was poor. Great swathes of the San Joaquin Valley had recently been converted to orchards and vineyards. As all that acreage came into production, prices for grapes, peaches, plums, oranges, and what-have-you, and even for such crops as hay and wheat, fell to levels that left farmers unable to earn enough to meet their mortgages. Billy and Mary fell behind on their payments. The saving grace was, they were not alone. The problem was so widespread many farmers simply gave up and “walked away.” Billy and Mary kept making partial payments. They stayed. So their mortgage banker, rather than foreclosing, agreed to lower the payments and allow more time. And then to top it off, asked if Billy would take over an adjacent parcel that had already been foreclosed on, because the economic climate was so bad the acreage was sitting there unused, and the bank preferred to have someone farm it and give them a little bit of a share, than get no income from it at all. Billy agreed. It would take nearly all of his working life to truly “get ahead” as the saying goes, thanks to the Great Depression and World War II, but during the post-war boom, with his sons as his partners, that day finally did come.

It was quite possibly the situation with the bank that led to Billy and Mary acquiring ten acres on the river side of Holbrook near its northern end, one driveway shy of the corner of Holbrook Avenue and Lincoln Avenue. Or it could be they bought it from the Tenhunens, who are known to have owned it at the time Billy first moved down to Reedley. It was the parcel immediately north of Jack and Annie’s original farm. For the Tenhunens, it was an “extra” parcel, their main -- and larger -- parcel lying immediately south of Jack and Annie’s original place. Billy and Mary took up residence in about 1920, though to do so, Billy had to first build a house. That structure, affectionately called The Little House in its mature years, would stay in the family through the generations, occupied variously by son Al and family (late 1930s into early 1940s), by a nephew and family (early 1960s), by a grandson and family (early 1980s), and by other relatives and Smeds-clan in-laws. Today the spot is the homesite of a granddaughter, but The Little House is gone now, demolished at the turn of the 21st Century so that said granddaughter and her husband could build a fine new dwelling in which to spend their retirement period. However, given the memories and the lingering affection for the home, it “lives on” in other forms. The water tower was preserved and refurbished, moved about a hundred feet to the south and now used as a spare bunkhouse. Some of the lumber of the main part of the house was saved and used by a grandson for his sauna. It was good lumber that had come from the Wahtoke School, a one-room schoolhouse a few miles north of the farm that was taken down just as Billy was seeking -- in his usual thrifty fashion -- some good salvaged lumber. Roy and Al were still small boys when The Little House was built. The brothers would be in high school when the family’s tenure there ended.

The reason for moving again was a happy one. In 1930, Billy and Mary had the opportunity to “upscale” their living quarters. Fred Tenhunen and his wife Katherine decided to sell their main farm, the one located just south of Jack and Annie’s original place. The Tenhunens had only actually lived there from 1913 to 1919. Fred had decided he could do far better at his original profession, so he and Katherine had returned to the Bay Area. Rather than resuming his wage-earning position at Shreve & Co., Fred had opened his own jewelry shop in Oakland. He and Katherine had rented out the farm throughout the 1920s. But now the Great Depression had arrived. Fred’s business had taken a terrible hit. Selling the farm was a means to make it through the tough times. Lots of other farms were going on the market at that point, but the Tenhunens could offer a sweeter deal than some. The house was a prize. It was the opposite of The Little House. Billy had thrown that up quickly and as mentioned, had cut corners wherever he could, such as when he used the salvaged schoolhouse lumber. But when Fred and Katherine had decided to finally move to Reedley in 1913, they had been doing well financially, and they had wanted the best for themselves, their son Lawrence, and their new baby Fred, Jr. Accordingly, Fred built a house meant to endure. He even installed wiring within the walls. His local friends shook their heads, wondering why he went to the trouble and expense when electricity would surely not be available for another decade or two. But no sooner had the Tenhunens occupied their domicile than the region became the beneficiary of one of the nation’s early Rural Electrification efforts. Fred was able to wear a big grin on his face as his neighbors scrambled to retrofit their houses, and then had to put up with the ugliness (not to mention danger) of wiring on the surfaces of their walls. Billy and Mary had long admired this house. Fred and Katherine were willing to sell at a bargain price, so the Smedses took advantage despite having to struggle to put the money together. Billy would never know any other home. When the time came, he would die within its walls. From 1930 onward, the house was never owned by anyone outside the Smeds clan, who in 2013 -- precisely one hundred years after its construction -- judged that it was at last unsuitable for further occupation, and began a slow process of salvage and demolition.

(At right, Billy and Mary in 1952 at the party celebrating the fortieth anniversary of their wedding.)

Despite his tendency to keep to the background, Billy did engage in the community life of Reedley in one particular way that must be mentioned. He was active in the United Finnish Kaleva Brothers and Sisters, or simply, the Finnish Brotherhood, the Finnish-immigrant equivalent of the sort of fraternal lodges seen so often in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century among Americans of British-Isles extraction. Though meetings were held in the basement of the Finnish Lutheran Church, it was not a religious organization per se, a difference that mattered to Billy. The social outlet loomed large in strengthening the bond between Billy and Mary. She enjoyed being social, particularly when it was interaction with other Finns, and he was willing to make an effort if they could do it within the context of Brotherhood activities. His willingness was not an insignificant gesture on his part as a husband. He was a Finland Swede, not a Finnish-Finn like Mary. When Brotherhood members fell into chit-chat in the “old tongue,” it was Finnish they were speaking, not Swedish. If Billy had been indifferent to his wife’s preferences, he would surely have chosen to belong to the Order of Runeburg, the equivalent lodge of immmigrant Swedes and Finland Swedes. Charlie and Amanda Strom belonged to that organization -- Charlie serving as one of the officers of the local chapter for many years. Other members included various close neighbors of the Smedses such as A.A. Westerlund. Billy and Jack were in fact nearly the only Finland Swedes of the Reedley area to devote themselves to the Brotherhood rather than to the Order of Runeburg. Mary and Annie did not fail to appreciate this.

(Billy’s biography is still a work-in-progress. The section above is nearing its ultimate form, but the final three decades of his life deserve a lot more coverage than the fragmentary glimpse you will find below. Eventually that material will be added.)

Billy lived out his life as a farmer. Roy and Alfred would follow in his footsteps. When the two boys came of age, they experimented with other vocations only briefly before joining their father as partner growers under the business name William Smeds & Sons. The main crop during Billy’s lifetime was grapes, usually grown for raisins. At various times quite a bit of acreage was alternately devoted to peaches.

Billy worked so hard over the years he wore himself out. Even in his forties his back gave him so much trouble he had to spend stretches laid up in bed while his teenaged sons did his work out in the fields. At only age fifty, he underwent surgery to remove urethral polyps. By the time he reached retirement age, he was slope-shouldered and spent, preferring to live the quietest of lives. For instance, when Mary and Annie took a trip back to Finland in 1959, he stayed in Reedley even though the excursion was the perfect chance for him to head to Soklot and see his original home. He may have already by then been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and if not by then, soon would be.

Billy’s death was as peaceful and easy as anyone ever gets. On the evening of 24 November 1964, he and Mary were at home, babysitting their youngest grandson, then age nine. Moments before his son Alfred and daughter-in-law Josephine arrived to pick up their boy, Billy went to take his bath. While the tub was still filling with water, his heart abruptly failed. His grandson was dispatched to fetch Roy from next door. Together Roy and Al tried to rescucitate their father while waiting for the doctor to come from Reedley. Billy never responded to the C.P.R. effort. The doctor arrived barely more than ten minutes after his collapse. There was no point in an ambulance or admittance to a hospital. He was simply gone. His remains were at Reedley Cemetery. Given how well-liked Billy and Mary were within the community, his funeral was heavily attended.

Billy is on the far right with his hand on the dog in this photo from the 1950s of two generations of Smeds Family farmers. His brother Jack is next to him. The young men are, from left to right, sons Alfred and Roy and nephew 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.

Children of Vilhelm Smeds with Maria Rautiainen

Roy William Smeds

Joseph Alfred Smeds

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