Josephine Alberta Warner

Josephine Alberta Warner, daughter of Albert Frederick Warner and Grace Mildred Branson, was born Alberta Josephine Warner 16 July 1917 at her parents’ house at 824 N Street in Sanger, Fresno County, CA. Soon the sequence of her given names was forgotten. She went through life as Josephine Alberta -- Josie during childhood, and Josephine or Jo in adulthood. Only a few documents, such as her birth certificate and her parents’ last will and testament, place the name Alberta first. (She was expected to be a boy, to bear the names of her father Albert and maternal grandfather Joseph.)

Her father Bert, or A.F., Warner, was the owner and operator of a Sanger feed grain warehouse and, beginning in 1919, a gas station as well. The family was well off financially throughout Josephine’s childhood. She grew up in middle class comfort, a much doted-upon younger girl of a small family. However, a youth spent in the Great Depression left its imprint upon her. Throughout her days, she looked for bargains and saved household items that could be re-used, from aluminum foil to chipped flower pots.

At the end of high school, Josie left to study nursing at Franklin Hospital in San Francisco, but did not complete her degree. She returned to Sanger, back to suitor Joseph Alfred Smeds, a farmer’s son from the outskirts of Reedley, ten miles to the southeast of Sanger. Al, born 12 September 1914 in Reedley to Finnish-immigrant parents Vilhelm (William) Smeds and Maria (Marie) Rautiainen Smeds, had first taken notice of Josie at a dance social in Sanger. The courtship lasted two years, weathering periods of separation while Josie was off at school, and later when Al took a job with Standard Oil in Taft, CA, more than a hundred miles away. Aware of the sort of economic uncertainty that his parents and so many other 1930s Americans were enduring, Al proposed only after a salary raise gave him the confidence that he could support a wife. The wedding took place in Josie’s next-door neighbors’ garden in Sanger 12 September 1936. (Al has a profile in the Smeds section of this website. Click here to go straight to that page.)

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, the price for farmland dropped precipitously, allowing the Smeds family business the ability 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. This would be Josie’s home for more than sixty years.

(At right, Josie and Al with their firstborn.) 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, his wife Mildred, and their two children, along with Al and Roy’s first cousin (a double 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.

With such a large and robust social circle around her, Jo tended to let her association with her parents’ kin fade -- not through any enmity, but chiefly through geographical proximity to the Smeds clan and as an inevitable consequence of the tightness that came as a result of that clan living on neighboring farms and sharing business ventures.

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, Alfred’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 good friends such as Jo’s best friend (a high school classmate and her roommate during nursing school) Harriet Mead Hunter and her husband Doug, 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.

While sharing in her husband’s farm life and such pastimes as mountain vacations and sailing, Jo had many independent interests. Prime among them was her long-term devotion to the local Episcopal church, Reedley Good Shepherd Parish. Jo also served as president of the PTA at Great Western Elementary, the local K-8 grade school that all four of her children attended, as had Al and all the local Smedses of his generation. She encouraged her children’s involvement in the school’s 4-H club. Among her favorite social activites was participation in bridge clubs, including two that she played in regularly for decades. Jo tended to be modest about her mental skills, but in bridge and other card games, she let her brilliance shine. She was easily able to memorize which cards had been played, and in the case of bridge, kept reliable track of its complex rules and bidding guidelines. She was a formidable player.

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.

Al converted his Thompson vineyard from raisins to table grapes. This helped him deal with the evolving market, but did not let him reach the same level of income he had enjoyed when the muscats had been in their prime. But good luck prevailed. In 1950, Roy Smeds had been given samples of an experimental red seedless grape developed by Professor Harold Olmo at the University of California at Davis. Roy's test plot and those elsewhere had demonstrated that the variety was vulnerable to mildew, and UC Davis abandoned it. But in the 1960s, Roy tried planting the grape in a sandy area and discovered that with the adoption of measures designed to increase the light and air the understory of the rows received, the fungus problem became manageable. Allan Corrin sensed a marketing opportunity. Roy planted several plots, and Al soon put in some acreage of his own, gradually replacing his muscat vineyard. Consumers, who had never known a red seedless grape before, responded enthusiastically. The variety, which became known as Ruby Seedless, commanded prices three or four times above those of Thompsons at the farmer level. UC Davis had let its patent expire, and the Smedses, through Corrin, were for several years the main growers of the grapes and main source of nursery stock. Ultimately other farmers would jump on the bandwagon, and UC Davis would introduce its “newer, better, earlier” red seedless variety, Flame Seedless, but the family’s advantage continued for a substantial period, helping buoy Al to a successful end of his active career as a farmer.

Josephine contributed to the farm’s operation in the traditional way of women of her generation, by being a housekeeper, mother, and cook. (Naturally, there were occasional times when she was drafted for lighter chores such as steering the tractor as it slowly moved down the rows while Alfred and his crew stacked boxes of fruit on its trailer. These instances essentially vanished once offspring were old enough to do those jobs.) This was a large contribution indeed, as it took three hearty and regular meals per day to sustain the household through the menial rigors of the agricultural lifestyle. This was particularly true in the early years, when laundry was run through hand-cranked wringers, dishes were washed by hand, and cooking fried chicken began with a trip out to the henhouse to grab a bird and chop off its head. Jo was an excellent cook and a meticulous housekeeper.

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, though frail, was able to continue living at home until just before Thanksgiving, 2003, when a major stroke left her speechless and unable to care for herself. She moved to Palm Village, this time to the same convalescent care section where Al had spent his final eighteen months. On New Year’s Day, 2004, another stroke did even more damage. From that point on, Jo seldom showed signs that she recognized people, nor was she able to interact in any meaningful way. It could be said that she died at that point, but her body did not give up its struggle until a few minutes after midnight 13 June 2004 (the night of June 12th).

She and Al share a gravesite at Reedley Cemetery.

Children of Josephine Alberta Warner with Joseph Alfred Smeds

To go back to Jo’s father's page, click here. To go back to her mother’s page, click here. To return to the Branson/Ousley Family main page, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.