Clarence Axel Smeds

Clarence Axel Smeds, son of Axel Smeds and Ina Marie Jacobsen, was born 23 July 1915 in Eureka, Humboldt County, CA. He was usually known as Kelly.

Kelly was raised in Eureka along with his younger brother Howard. In March of 1920, Axel Smeds became a victim of the great Spanish Flu pandemic. For much of the boys’ remaining childhood, the head of the household was their stepfather Frederick Brundydge Lee. Fred Lee, a Eureka barber, was twenty years Ina Marie’s senior. He had been married before and had produced four children. However, all four were much older than Kelly and Howard. The Smeds boys therefore did not experience a day-to-day, same-home existence with their step-siblings.

Kelly and Howard’s childhoods were later described as less than happy, in part due to the strict older-generation attitude of their stepfather, but more important because their mother was less nurturant than she might have been. Once the brothers came of age and began their independent lives, they never again made their homes anywhere near Eureka. Kelly’s first big step in this process of putting his past in the rear-view mirror was joining in the U.S. Navy. He signed up 10 November 1937. He served aboard a variety of vessels including the Hull, Henderson, and Tarpon before finishing his four-year enlistment in the latter part of 1941. The timing meant he was a civilian when the bombing of Pearl Harbor occurred. His sense of patriotism brought him back into the fold. He reenlisted and served throughout the remainder of World War II, rising to the rank of Chief Petty Officer. He was assigned to the destroyer U.S.S. Farenholt, coming aboard in early 1942 for a two-year stretch. (See the Wikipedia page devoted to the Farenholt to get an idea of what Kelly went through during the war.) From early summer, 1944 he had the distinction of being a sailor manning the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Missouri, which among other things means he was one of the ship’s crew members when the Japanese surrender ceremony took place on board in Tokyo Bay in late summer, 1945.

Shortly after the war while his ship was on a good will tour stopover in New York City, Kelly encountered the woman who was to be the love of his life, Mary Theresa Exner, maiden name Bizlewicz. Mary, born to Adam and Eva Bizlewicz 1 June 1912 in Jersey City, Hudson County, NJ, knew what it was like to grow up as the child of parents who had emigrated from the Baltic Sea region. Adam and Eva had come from Lithuania in 1903. Mary was one of eight children. (Her birth year was long believed to be 1916, because she preferred to tell people that she was younger than Kelly.)

It didn’t take Kelly and Mary long to determine they were right for each other. They were married in June, 1946 in Washington, DC. Mary came into the union with a daughter from her first marriage, whom Kelly adopted. A month or so after the wedding, the first of their two sons was conceived. The pregnancy culminated while Kelly was off at sea aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately Mary and Kelly had to put up with quite a lot of time apart during the early years of their relationship. At first Mary’s refuge was Jersey City, in easy reach of her birth family. By the end of the 1940s home port was in Long Beach, Los Angeles County, CA, where the couple’s second son was born. While in California there were a number of occasions when Kelly’s extended relatives in Fresno County stepped up to give Mary a break, for example in late 1949 and/or early 1950 when when Mary went through a bad bout of post-partum stress, and a bit later in the 1950s when the little boys stayed at the Reedley-area farms of Al Smeds and Roy Smeds so that Mary and Kelly could have some time alone together while he was on leave.

Finally Kelly reached the point in his career where the Navy was willing to let him remain ashore, permitting him to acquire a real house instead of having to make do with military-base accommodations. Given a three-tier choice of posting by harbor, region, or part of the world, he asked to be stationed 1) in Long Beach, 2) anywhere on the West Coast, or 3) anywhere in the United States. So naturally the Navy sent him to Yorktown, VA, putting him on the staff of the Naval Mine Warfare School. This was three thousand miles away from his true choice, but Kelly and Mary made the best of it. In the long run, they were glad things worked out the way they did.

In 1958, Kelly left the Navy for good. He departed with reminders such as a tattoo of a skull and the extra nickname of Smiley. He had put in twenty years and had qualified for a full Navy pension. This gave him and Mary enough financial security that he could relax if he wanted. He did have his pastimes, including golf, an activity he had grown fond of as a teenager -- one of his ways of making money back in Eureka had been to serve as a caddie. But diligence and hard work had always been in Kelly’s nature. Desiring to provide for his family to the best extent possible, he replaced his Navy job with not one, but two occupations. The first was a position that flowed naturally from the knowledge of ships he had acquiring during his decades in the Navy. He became an inspector at the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company. He was among those men who ensured that such ships as the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise were seaworthy.

(At right in the 1970s, Kelly and Mary pose on either side of Kelly’s first cousin Agnes Strom during a visit Agnes made to Virginia.)

Kelly’s other job was a whole new sort of venture. After briefly considering the purchase of a permanent home in Yorktown, in 1959 he and Mary acquired a piece of real estate just outside Williamsburg. The house was more than adequate to their needs as a set of living quarters and a place in which to finish raising their kids. But there was more. The property included the Twilight Motel, a roadside one-story row of eight rooms. This represented a substantial means of income inasmuch as the facility enjoyed a steady trade from tourists coming to visit Colonial Williamsburg. The theme park -- still there today -- consists of the oldest intact part of Williamsburg, once capital of the Virginia colony. Many structures in the neighborhood authentically reflect their appearance during the colonial period. Visitors are not only able to tour the streets and buildings, including the colonial governor’s residence (called the governor’s palace, but more on the scale of a mansion), but they can witness staff dressed in clothing modelled after the fashions of that era and often speaking as though they are individuals of 250 years ago, engaged in such authentically-performed crafts as cabinet-making, bookbinding, blacksmithing, butter-churning, wig-making, ham curing, and more. These days there are Renaissance Faires and many other historical sites that feature such content, but even now Colonial Williamsburg sets the standard. Kelly and Mary would go on to operate the Twilight Motel for a quarter century, and then after her death, he would continue to run it for several years more. (The home and motel no longer exist. The structures were razed in the early 2000s in preparation for the creation of a large shopping center. The precise spot is now occupied by a Toyota dealership.)

The years in Williamsburg were good ones. Kelly and Mary’s daughter grew up to marry a Navy man. Both sons graduated from college and one launched into what was to be a long-term career in the Air Force. Grandchildren arrived in the natural course of events. There was time and money for some travelling. The most frequent excursions were the regular holiday trips to visit Mary’s siblings in New Jersey. On his own, Kelly made it back to California once in a while to see kinfolk in Reedley, Fresno, and Eureka. A special occasion was a six-week tour of Europe in 1976, which incorporated a stopover in Finland and the chance for Kelly to see where his parents had spent their early years.

Both Mary and Kelly survived to be elderly, but Mary somewhat less so. She contracted cancer and passed away 26 September 1985 in Williamsburg. Kelly forged on as a widower for most of a decade thereafter, but inevitably age caught up with him. By 1992, he was coping with prostate issues, and in 1994, he was feeling frail enough that he finally agreed he could not stay in Williamsburg away from other family members. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law in Salem, New London County, CT. Before the end, he needed more nursing care than could be had in a private home. He passed away at 5:30 in the morning of 20 June 1997 at Mariner Healthcare at Bridebrook in the village of Niantic, town of East Lyme, New London County, CT. His remains were laid to rest at Williamsburg Memorial Park with those of Mary.

Descendants of Clarence Axel Smeds with Mary Theresa Bizlewicz

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