Frances Amanda Strom

Frances Amanda Strom, daughter of Anna Amanda Smeds and Charles John Strom, was born 27 June 1920 in Reedley, Fresno County, CA. She was the youngest of the grandchildren of Herman Smeds with the exception of two Malm cousins born in the early 1920s, each of whom died within hours of birth.

Frances was raised on her parents’ farm north of Reedley along with two older sisters, Agnes and Karin. As a child of immigrants, being the youngest was to her benefit. Her parents had tended to speak to one another in Swedish in the home during the early years of their marriage. Because of this, Agnes had found it hard to adjust to start school in the company of peers who spoke English. Amanda and Charlie took this to heart and began using English in the home to a greater degree. By the time Frances was old enough to go to school, she did not have to endure the same sort of ordeal.

Like her sisters, Frances attended Reedley High School. In 1939, she went on to San Jose State College in San Jose, Santa Clara County, CA. Because Frances came of age during the Great Depression, she was prepared to have to work to get the funding for her academic ambitions -- and pay for the lodgings she would need while she was a student. She killed two birds with one stone by becoming a live-in maid in Piedmont, Alameda County, CA for Charles and Anna Kroft and their four kids.

It was while Frances was in college that a romance blossomed with a classmate, Erwin Walter Jost, who would become her husband. She was the first of the three Strom girls to become a wife.

Erwin, born 13 March 1918 in Hooker, Texas County, OK, was the eldest of three children of Abram Regehr Jost and Katharina Willems, Mennonite pioneers of Kansas and Oklahoma. While he had still been in diapers, he and his parents had moved to Clairmont, a remote and lightly settled spot in Alberta, Canada, where the family soon expanded to include Erwin’s siblings Blondine and Levi. However, the Josts did not linger in the North. For the most part, Erwin was “from” the same place as his father, namely rural Hillsboro, Marion County, KS. Erwin graduated from Hillsboro High School in the summer of 1936. In July, 1937, the family relocated to a farm just south of Reedley in Dinuba Township, Tulare County, CA, probably having been lured west by the substantial Mennonite presence in Reedley. The newfound geographic proximity of the Stroms and Josts surely accounts for the meeting of Frances and Erwin -- perhaps through Blondine Jost, who was only nine months older than Frances. Some such intermediary is likely because Erwin did not have much opportunity to mingle with residents of Reedley of his own accord. From the autumn of 1937 onward, he was usually off at college. He attended Tabor College back in Hillsboro, where he received his A.A. degree in 1939, and then went on to San Jose State, from which he received his Bachelor’s in 1941. He and Frances were wed 13 September 1941 in San Jose just a few months after his graduation.

(At right, Frances and Erwin in the 1940s.) Frances and Erwin waited to have offspring until they settled into circumstances suitable for family life, which thanks to World War II took some time to develop. First, Frances need to finish her own degree. She graduated from SJSC in 1942 with an A.B., along with a credential to teach at the elementary-school level. Meanwhile Erwin looked for a job with the sort of wages that would help a young couple get a good start. At this point in time, the United States was gearing up for its fight with the Empire of Japan. A key national-security vulnerability was that Alaska was so underdeveloped in terms of harbor infrastructure, military bases, and air fields. One of the places that received a big chunk of development attention and money was Sitka. Erwin obtained a position there as a shoreboat operator. These days Sitka shoreboat operators spend a lot of their time ferrying tourists from cruiseships to the wharf and its row of giftshops, but in 1942, Erwin drove a craft carrying load after load of material, equipment, and personnel destined to end up at the construction site of the new base.

No newlywed husband wants to be away from his bride. Erwin came up with a partial solution by nabbing a position for Frances as a maid in the governor’s mansion, which though it was in Juneau, allowed the couple to be together at regular intervals. Their next separation was more profound. In 1943, Erwin went to work for the Counter Intelligence Corps of the U.S. Army, and proceeded to serve as a special agent in the European Theater. His fluency in German was of high value. He had spoken Plautdietsch at home as a child, and learned High German in school. Erwin was among the servicemen who, in the wake of the defeat of Germany, debriefed newly-liberated prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Though the point of his job was to gather information for intelligence purposes, the fact was many of the people he interviewed were ordinary folk greatly in need of help reintegrating themselves into civilian life after months or even years spent imprisoned. In the end, some of Erwin’s energies were diverted to the Allied Forces humanitarian effort to assist these victims to return home or, if their homes no longer existed, arrange for them to find sustainable circumstances.

While Erwin was overseas, Frances returned to Reedley. She taught sixth grade at Lincoln Elementary School -- while this had not been her school as a child, it was familiar to her -- and in fact she would pass by the campus quite often in years to come because it was located not far from the home on Linden Avenue that her parents acquired in the mid-1950s after her father retired from farming. After the war was over, Frances and Erwin briefly dwelled on the San Francisco peninsula while Erwin attended Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, where in 1947 he earned a Master’s Degree in Philosophy and obtained a credential to teach at the community-college level. Frances meanwhile taught fifth grade at Mountain View School in Mountain View, a few miles southeast of Palo Alto.

Finally the stable domestic situation Frances and Erwin had been awaiting came within their grasp. With the couple’s first baby on the way, they moved to Visalia, Tulare County, CA, half an hour’s drive south of Reedley. Erwin became a teacher of English, German, and Philosophy at College of the Sequoias. Frances also worked outside the home, teaching third grade at Carrie Barnett School. She and Erwin were, after all, going to need more money, and though Frances would give up that job after a couple of years to concentrate on the domestic side of her existence, it was prudent to to have a second wage-earner in the household if possible. The nearby presence of her parents and Erwin’s parents -- not to mention other relatives -- made the logistics of childcare manageable. Things worked out. After a few years, child number two arrived.

In 1950, Agnes Strom became the registrar at College of the Sequoias, which among other things meant she became a workplace colleague of Erwin. Because her home was so close, she got to know Frances’s kids well when they were tots. Her bond with the youngsters remained strong for the rest of her long life -- very much so given that Agnes never had children of her own.

In 1955, Frances and Erwin moved to San Mateo, San Mateo County, CA. Erwin would spend the rest of his career teaching within the San Mateo Community College District. First, from 1955 to 1968, he taught English and German at College of San Mateo. He got a breather midway through this stretch when he spent an academic year as a Fulbright Exchange teacher in Schweinfurt, Germany. He of course was already familiar with Germany, but for that one year, from the summer of 1961 to the summer of 1962, the whole family got in on the experience. Naturally they took advantage of the opportunity to see other parts of Europe while they were there. In 1968, Erwin joined the faculty of Cañada College in Redwood City. He remained there until his retirement from teaching in 1977. A bonus of the Cañada College gig was that he was not limited to German and English classes as he had been at San Mateo; he was able to add back his specialty subject, Philosophy.

Once she became a mother, Frances was largely a stay-at-home mom and housewife, but she did engage in a certain amount of substitute teaching and tutoring. In addition -- very much in the mode of her sisters -- she contributed in a major way to charitable efforts and community projects, particularly once both kids were in school and she had more time available. She organized the San Mateo chapter of the California Association for Neurologically Handicapped Children. She served as president of the chapter from 1958 to 1972. She organized and supervised eleven seminars for teachers of neurologically handicapped children under the auspices of College of San Mateo and College of Notre Dame, the Catholic university in nearby Belmont, CA. (The latter institution now goes by the name Notre Dame de Namur University.)

Frances was blessed with a sense of humor and would invariably emit a hearty chuckle upon greeting someone or upon initiating conversations. This stood out amid the clan, most of whose members had inherited the classic Finnish tendency toward reserved -- even bashful -- behavior.

Frances contracted lymphoma in middle age. Chemotherapy was successful at staving off the initial onslaught of the cancer, but the treatment only bought her a respite. She was one of the first of her generation to perish. She died 28 September 1975 at Kaiser Hospital in Redwood City, San Mateo County, CA.

Erwin survived Frances by nearly forty years. He retired somewhat young -- at only fifty-nine -- and came back to Reedley in time to be able to look in on his parents, both of whom passed away in the early 1980s. This had the fringe benefit of keeping him within the sphere of the Strom and Smeds in-laws, with whom he had spent many a holiday gathering. His elderly father-in-law Charlie Strom was one of the people he was “there for.” Erwin even hosted one or two of the Smeds-clan gatherings at his home along with his second wife, Mary Jeanette (“Jeane”) Spence Rockas, whom he married in 1980.

Erwin and Jeane went on to spend the bulk of their retirement years in Corvallis, Benton County, OR. Eventually, due to declining health, the couple moved to the Applewood Retirement Community in Salem, Marion County, OR, where Jeane died in 2009 at age eighty-two. Erwin passed away 22 October 2014 at that facility at the impressive age of ninety-six. This was nine years after the death of the last remaining grandchild of Herman Smeds, and with Erwin’s passing, there are no now longer any of Herman’s grandchildren-in-law left alive, either. The generation has now slipped fully into history.

Descendants of Frances Amanda Strom with Erwin Walter Jost

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