Howard Jacob Smeds

Howard Jacob Smeds, son of Axel Smeds and Ina Marie Jacobsen, was born 24 March 1918 in Eureka, Humboldt County, CA. His middle name was inspired by two influences -- Jacob in honor of his grandfather Jakob Smeds, and Jacob as a shortened version of his mother’s maiden name. (The photo at left is the one taken for his senior-class yearbook. The scan was made from the print sent in 1936 to his uncle and aunt, Vilhelm and Maria Rautiainen Smeds.) Howard was the second child of Axel and Marie, the first being his brother Kelly, three years his senior. The family would grow no further.

When Howard was an infant, or perhaps even while he was still in the womb, his parents moved into a house at 2719 L Street between Hayes Street and Henderson Street in the southern central portion of Eureka. Howard would know no other home for the remainder of his childhood. The house was one of a group built by his father’s brother-in-law Fred Malm, a contractor, husband of Axel’s sister Augusta. The construction project was an entrepreneurial scheme hatched by Fred and Augusta to accumulate enough money to become “landed gentry” as it were. As the various structures were sold over the course of the late 1910s into the early 1920s, Augusta and Fred succeeded in reaping enough profit that they bought a dairy and an accompanying large amount of acreage at the southern edge of town, in an area known as Bucksport, where they continued to live for the rest of their lives. In the early phase of this project, Augusta and Fred lived in one of the houses, while Axel and Marie lived in the one at 2719 L Street. The arrangement was perhaps meant to be temporary -- as it was in the case of the Malms. But in early 1920, Axel died of the flu in the great pandemic. Augusta and Fred could not bring themselves to force out their relatives, even though as a widow, Marie paid far less than the going rate for rent. Indeed, it was not until the early 1940s, after both Kelly and Howard were grown, that Fred (by then a widower) finally sold the property. (The house still exists. The neighborhood has remained residential and has not succumbed to the same sort of rebuilding and refurbishment characteristic of the commercial and industrial parts of Eureka, which are primarily located along the western and northern sections along the shore of Humboldt Bay.)

The stability of living in the same home was undoubtedly immensely helpful to Howard’s sense of well-being, but his childhood could not be said to have been happy. He had lost his father, who all accounts was a gentle, nurturant, well-tempered individual. That left him in the care of a decidedly cold and unpleasant mother. Things grew worse when Marie married again in 1926 (or in late 1925 or early 1927). Her new husband was Frederick Brundydge Lee. More familiarly known as Fred Lee, he had recently come to Eureka, where he initiated a quarter-century-long career as a barber. Born in Battle Creek, MI, raised mainly in Washington County, KS, he was much older than Marie. He had been married before and was the father of four children, which he and first wife Harriet Smutz had brought up in Kansas and then in San Jose, CA before divorcing in the 1910s. All of his offspring with Harriet were so much senior to Howard and Kelly that they had lives of their own back in the San Francisco Bay Area and never shared a household with the Smeds boys. But Howard and Kelly did, alas, have to get to know Fred, a man of such strict and old-fashioned ideas that he was a clergyman as well as a barber. The phrase “spare the rod, spoil the child” was one of his guiding principles. Understandably, his stepsons never grew to like him, nor appreciate that their mother had subjected them to his oversight. Unfortunately, his influence lingered in Howard in at least one respect. In the 1950s and early 1960s as child psychologists were successfully extinguishing the notion that corporal punishment was an appropriate means of disciplining children, Howard observed the standard he had been accustomed to as a boy.

There was one distinct beacon of light in Howard’s upbringing, and that was the close-at-hand presence of the Malms. Unfortunately Augusta passed away of a stroke a few months before Howard turned fifteen, but Fred -- “Good Uncle Fred,” not Fred his detested stepfather -- remained, as did Howard’s older first cousin Mildred Malm. As a result, his bond with the Smeds side of his heritage remained strong. Howard was a familiar figure at extended-family gatherings right up until his retirement years.

It is easy to understand that when Howard made his big break and said good-by to Eureka, he went far away and never came back. This echoed the example of his brother. The big difference is in the manner in which the brothers made their escape. Kelly joined the Navy, departing in 1937 and then reenlisting when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Howard lingered in Eureka into the early 1940s and even continued to reside within the family home. His way out would be through the work skills he began developing at Eureka High School when he joined the production staff of the school’s newspaper, the Redwood Bark. Unlike a lot of other school newspapers, the students didn’t just prepare the content and then hand their material over to a local professional newspaper production department to be typeset and printed. The school had its own Linotype machine and printing press. The weekly editions were done on-campus from start to finish by the students and their teacher, with the juniors and seniors handling the equipment and the beginning students helping out with folding and collating. Howard became a linotype operator responsible for composing the type for the news section. Like many other members of the Redwood Bark staff, Howard was also involved with the production of the annual yearbook, the Sequoia. This invaluable training won him a job right out of high school with the production department of the local city newspaper. After a few more years gaining experience there, he had a résumé that could land him a job in almost any city he set his sights on. Away he went.

Howard seems to have wandered far for a few years, even as far as Latin America. The details are not entirely clear except that one of his sojourns -- perhaps the very first -- brought him to the haven of his many Smeds relatives on their farms north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. For a spell in the mid-1940s he lived in a small vacation trailer parked in the barn on the property of his first cousin Alfred Smeds. This was Howard’s “taking stock” period during which he mulled over his career prospects. Aside from being a golf caddie as a teenager, he had only ever earned money from newspaper production and he needed to be sure he wanted to stick with it. After his savings dwindled and he’d had a taste of farm work, he decided he was happy enough to stick to what he knew -- though as he said to Al’s younger son at a family gathering in 1980, he never really thought of his long years working with ink and lead type and pulp paper as a career, but as “just a job.” Meanwhile, decision made, he accepted a position as a printer for the Times Company, the syndicate that owned the New York Times and various regional newspapers across the nation. The opening happened to be in Davenport, IA. The timing of his arrival there appears to have been late 1947 or early 1948. The Davenport years would have quite an impact on him, but when he first left for Iowa he probably viewed the relocation as a temporary situation -- an “any port in a storm” sort of development. A hint that this was the case was that he left his vacation trailer in place at Al’s farm for possible further use. However, Howard never reclaimed it. The trailer was moved to the open air out behind the barn, but it then remained parked on that patch of ground for decades, used sporadically as farmworker housing and then as a storage unit. Constructed of the cheapest sort of materials, it had severely deteriorated by the time it was hauled away in 1971 as part of the clean-up associated with the installation of Smeds Packing Shed.

Upon first coming to Davenport, Howard appears to have found rental accommodations in East Moline, Rock Island County, IL, which is the part of the Davenport urban area that lies on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. There he met Lois Jared, a clerk at the local A&P Food Store, who was soon to become Howard’s first wife. (Shown at left.)

Lois’s maiden name was Lois Ruth Strong. She was the ninth of the ten children of Nathan Hawthorne Strong and Minnie Belle Carmichael. She had been born 3 June 1921 in What Cheer, Keokuk County, IA and had subsequently been raised in that community. Lois was only twenty-six when she met Howard, but had already seen a lot of life. Amid circumstances later “not talked about,” she had become pregnant at age twelve and had given birth to a daughter, Beverly, just after turning thirteen. The identity of the father is not available. (This is true despite Beverly’s own efforts. In middle age, she sent for a copy of her birth certificate from the relevant county vital-stats office, and received back one that had the parents’ names blacked out. It seems the clerk who processed the application felt the information was too shocking even for Beverly herself to be allowed to know.) Suffice it to say, becoming a mother that early was quite a development in Lois’s young life. Matters eased somewhat upon her marriage to automobile mechanic Earl Cloyd Jared (1914-1989), a long-time neighbor from What Cheer, but by that point, Beverly was already three years old. The wedding took place 15 July 1937. Lois had just turned sixteen, but got around the impediment of needing parental permission to wed by claiming to have turned eighteen. They went through the process in Lancaster, MO, and given that no one knew the couple there, they were not prevented from following through. Once done, it was done, and the couple returned to What Cheer to begin their married life.

As World War II began, job opportunities brought them to Davenport, where Earl worked as an assembler at the National Arsenal. The marriage had not been blessed with children (other than, of course, the on-going presence of Beverly), and city life brought new stresses the couple’s relationship failed to withstand. In about 1943, Lois and Earl separated, and soon went on to divorce. In late 1945, Earl married Bernadine Mary Miller, maiden name Harris. He went on to live out his life with her, helping raise stepson Ron Miller. Lois began working at A&P, residing at 224 E. Sixth, Apt. 8 in East Moline, which was probably still her residence when she met Howard. He was not her first post-marital relationship, however. She had become pregnant in early 1947. It was not the result of a marriage, and again the identity of the fellow is not available, but by the time she became involved with Howard, she was in the latter stages of the pregnancy, or had recently given birth to another daughter. (Family accounts differ as to whether Howard and Lois became a couple shortly before, or shortly after, this birth occurred.)

Howard adopted the newborn, who became a Smeds. Beverly was already a teenager and continued to go by the last names of Strong and Jared, the latter a legacy from the five years Earl had been her stepfather. Together Howard and Lois produced two more daughters in quick succession, Diane Signe Smeds (known within the family as Signe but later known as Diane) and Anita Carol Smeds, in 1949 and 1950, respectively. The births took place in Davenport. Later in the 1950s, Howard and Lois and their brood moved to San Antonio, Bexar County, TX, where he began working as a printer for yet another newspaper.

The weather in San Antonio was hot, but as Howard said later, he didn’t mind. Eureka has some of the coldest, foggiest summers of any place in the continental United States. Having put up with that all through his youth, Howard enjoyed living in places with hot summer weather, and would do so for the rest of his life. However, there was one downside to Texas. He was ridiculed for not eating meat. Today being a vegetarian is unremarkable. In his generation, it was regarded as an oddball choice.

Texas, though, was a temporary haven. In 1956 or 1957, Howard and Lois and the three younger girls settled long-term in Fresno. Their first home was at 2327 W. Fountain Way. By the early 1960s, they began living at 4481 W. Olive Avenue in the semi-rural southwestern part of the city, which among other things meant Central High School would be where the girls would go when they reached the appropriate age. (Anita however transferred to Fresno High School for her senior year.) Being in Fresno meant Howard was now based only two dozen miles or so from Reedley, close enough that Howard became part of the many extended-Smeds-family gatherings he had not known in his childhood. He and Lois and the three girls were regulars most especially at the whole-clan Christmas get-together held on the evening of the 25th each year after the individual households were done with their Christmas Eve and Christmas Day feasts. Howard and Lois in turn hosted the occasional spring and summer event at their residence, including the party celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their wedding.

Lois’s daughter Beverly had married back in San Antonio and did not make the move in tandem with the rest of the family. However she, too, soon relocated to California. She did not live in Fresno County, though. Howard and Lois got together with her relatively seldom, usually while staying at their vacation home in Concord, CA. The Reedley relatives did not get to know her and most remained unaware of her existence.

Howard’s occupation in Fresno was, of course, newspaper work. He was part of the production staff of the semi-weekly Fresno Guide, the smaller of the city’s two newspapers. While the Guide did engage in a certain amount of editorializing (all of it on the ultra-conservative side of the political spectrum), it was not so much a source of news and opinion than it was an advertising flyer and legal-notice outlet. That latter aspect means Howard’s role as proofreader (among other duties) was more critical than it would have been at a larger publication. As a consequence of his many years dealing with print and type, Howard could read upsidedown and backwards -- a skill he demonstrated at a family party or two.

Along with the two younger girls, Howard and Lois were active in the 1960s in the Unity Church, a progessive “alternative” church devoted less to traditional doctrine and more toward personal improvement, even if that improvement happened through means other than Bible study. This emphasis was much the opposite of the “fire and brimstone” philosophy of Howard’s unmourned stepfather.

Howard and Lois’s life together was truncated by her early death. Lois suffered from a health condition that caused her to experience seizures and/or strokes. The cause even today is a mystery except that it would seem it may have been an inherited vulnerability because in the end it caused the death of Anita and may have been contributory to the deaths of Beverly and Signe, though at least those three all made it to the second half of their sixties. Lois by contrast died at age forty-eight. Her date of death was 18 September 1969. She had suffered a lesser episode about three months earlier and had not bounced back as she had from previous ones. Even so, for her to actually perish left her loved ones in a state of shock. The only saving grace was that by then, the girls were mostly grown, with the youngest, Anita, due to turn eighteen before the end of the year.

Howard soldiered on as a single father. As the 1970s progressed, the girls all left the Fresno area, the eldest ending up in Idaho, Signe in southern California, and Anita in the San Jose area. All became wives. None had biological children, but Signe and Anita did become stepmothers, in both cases to the already-grown offspring of husbands much older than they were.

Howard’s widowerhood ended after just a few years upon his marriage to Helen Elizabeth Thomas. A daughter of Edward Ellis Thomas and Elsie Glasgow, Helen had been born 22 June 1916 in Whittier, Los Angeles, CA, where she had gone on to be raised. Due to the death of her father when she was twenty, she took over the family home in Whittier, into which soon moved her first husband, Howard Dobson Nelson, an entomologist specializing in the study of crop-pollinating insects, primarily bees. They were wed 31 December 1937 in Whittier. Despite becoming a wife at only twenty-one years of age, Helen never gave birth to offspring. The pair divorced in 1970, by which time they had made their way to Fresno County.

The second-time-around-the-block wedding took place 29 April 1973 in Fresno. (Howard and Helen are shown at right at their wedding.) Over the long haul he racked up more time as her husband than he had as Lois’s, and she spent nearly as much time as Mrs. Smeds as she had spent as Mrs. Nelson. At first the two of them were based at first in Fresno, but upon reaching retirement age, they moved to Sedona, AZ. Howard’s love of hot weather must have contributed to the choice of venue. It was also a place where he didn’t have to worry about rain spoiling chances to get in nine holes of golf, that sport having been a favorite pastime since his caddie days in Eureka.

Howard died in Sedona 11 December 2002. Helen survived him by only six months, passing away 22 June 2003 in Corvallis, OR.

Descendants of Howard Jacob Smeds with Lois Ruth Strong

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