Lawrence Jakob Smeds

(This biography is not yet in its final form. At some point it will include more text and another photo or two will be added.)

Lawrence Jakob Smeds, son of Jakob (“Jack”) Smeds and Anna (“Annie”) Rautiainen, was born 26 July 1917 on a farm north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. He was the youngest of four children, following Sylvia, born 1905, Lillian, born 1907, and Roy, born 1909. Inasmuch as Roy perished as a young infant, Lawrence was “the” son of the family, which meant he was positioned from an early point in life to succeed his father as the steward of the family farm, particularly after his sisters ended up marrying men accustomed to an urban life and who were not motivated to dedicate themselves to careers in agriculture.

Lawrence was part of a tandem of three Smeds boys of Reedley. The others were Roy (another Roy, not the same as the brother Lawrence never knew), born 1913, and Alfred, born 1914. Roy and Al were Lawrence’s first cousins two ways, because Jack Smeds was the brother of Roy and Al’s father Billy (Vilhelm) Smeds, and Annie Rautiainen Smeds was the sister of Roy and Al’s mother Marie (Maria) Rautianen Smeds. All three boys were raised on the same stretch of farmland that ran between Holbrook Avenue and the Kings River. All three attended Great Western Elementary School and then Reedley High School, with their years overlapping to some extent. Roy and Al were therefore almost brothers to Lawrence, and their life stories, as well as sometimes their business ventures, would profoundly overlap.

As he came of age, Lawrence became an active farmer. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, at the same time that Billy Smeds and his boys Roy and Al decided to found William Smeds & Sons, Jack and Lawrence became J.H. Smeds & Son. Fruit began to go out under these business names. The practice of colorful box labels, made famous by southern California’s orange growers, had taken hold. The two Smeds farms adopted labels of their own, Diamond-S for William Smeds & Son, and Anvil for J.H. Smeds & Son. All the farms produced a lot of raisins at first, but over time, the emphasis came to be upon table grapes, peaches, nectarines, and plums.

Lawrence married Opal Fern Finster, daughter of Chester Conrad Finster and Arley Delphine Wooley. (Shown at right at age forty.) Like Lawrence, Opal was a native of Reedley, born there 31 October 1919. She had not, however, been entirely raised in the community. Her father, a grocer, moved his business in the early 1920s to Selma, half a dozen miles or so west of Reedley, so Opal and her younger brother Virgil “Bud” Finster spent their little-kid phase there. After Chester Finster died in the autumn of 1927, Arley moved herself and the kids five miles farther south to Kingsburg. Later in the Great Depression, Arley obtained a job in Reedley as a clerk and the family returned. Opal and Lawrence became an item while still at Reedley High School. Opal’s name appears on the guest register of the wedding of Alfred Smeds to his bride Josephine Warner, an event held 12 September 1936 when Opal had not yet quite turned seventeen, an indication that she and Lawrence were already an item at that early point. The courtship went on for quite a while, though. The pair did not wed until 17 December 1939.

Opal could accurately be described as having been raised (after the age of eight) by a single working mother. Opal would eventually have a stepfather and a couple of step-siblings, but this only happened as a result of Arley’s marriage to John E. Plank in the autumn of 1940, which obviously was after Opal had left the nest. Bud Finster was the only sibling with whom Opal shared an upbringing. Opal’s background lent a different flavor to Lawrence’s life as compared to his cousins Roy and Al. The latter settled into a fully agricultural lifestyle and their wives Mildred and Josephine devoted themselves to being full-time farm housewives. Lawrence and Opal led a more varied existence. This is not to say that farm roles did not loom large. This was particularly true while the couple’s two sons, born in the first half of the 1940s, were small. But even in that period, Opal was contributing to the household income. She was a gifted pianist, and for decades a steady stream of young people of the community would drop by the farm for lessons.

Piano lessons were not the only way in which Lawrence and Opal became exceptionally integrated into the overall community of Reedley. Lawrence was very active as a Boy Scouts leader. Many a Boy Scouts conclave was held in the lower pasture along the river, where the boys could enjoy swimming in addition to their camping activities. Lawrence led numerous Boy Scouts hikes in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, whose palisade of snow-capped peaks was a much-beloved part of the eastern horizon to gaze at from the frosty fields of the farm on clear winter days. The sight was one of the blessings to relieve the monotony of the many weeks of vine-and-tree pruning the farm required each dormant season. On one Boy Scouts hike into the remote back country in the 1940s, Lawrence came across a huge trove of Indian arrowheads and other artifacts in a granite cleft. Many of them were museum-quality and did, in time, end up as part of a museum collection.

Jack Smeds aged and withdrew from active farming as the middle of the century came along. Lawrence took over more and more. However, he was not entirely content to be just a farmer. A substantial part of his earnings in later years came from selling insurance. Opal was an active part of this sideline business, handling much of the office work. When Lawrence’s eldest son decided to become a full-time farmer right out of high school, Lawrence quickly put him through his apprenticeship and scaled back his own agricultural hours.

The decision of that son to become a married man and farmer so early led to another house being built about thirty paces south of Lawrence and Opal’s home. And just north of the main house (a few steps away) sat the large trailer/mobile home in which Annie Rautiainen Smeds spent her final twenty years of life. With the birth of Lawrence and Opal’s first grandchild at the beginning of the 1960s, the farm became the dwelling place of four generations simultaneously. This would remain the case for the greater part of three decades.

Lawrence’s varied habits had him “out and about” fairly often. A notoriously early riser, he was known to drop in on his cousins at seven in the morning, having been active for hours, and express surprise that they were just getting started with their day, or that one or two household members might even still be in bed.

In 1970, a prime section of 160 acres of land along the Kings River just west of Al Smeds’s farm, previously owned by the Hershey family, came up for sale. Al purchased sixty acres. Roy and son purchased the remaining hundred acres and immediately planted peach trees on twenty acres of the parcel -- four varieties, each orchard filling five acres. This development meant that the volume of tree fruit coming from the various Smedses (not only peaches, but plums and nectarines as well) would soon rise to such a level that it made sense to form a cooperative venture to reduce each farmer’s packing costs. So in 1971 the Smeds family farmers -- Roy and son, Lawrence and son, and Al -- formed Smeds Packing Company. The ownership was divided 40%, 40%, and 20% between the three farm entities, Al taking a smaller share because he had only just started converting old vineyard land to tree fruit and did not plan to switch as severely away from grapes as his relatives were willing to do. Used equipment was purchased and installed in the shed at Al’s farm and the co-op came into active existence as of the summer 1971 harvest. (In addition to packing Smeds fruit, the family sought out fruit from outside sources, offering a competitive rate to those growers in order to have enough work to keep the crew busy and pay off the equipment-purchase costs. The business grew. In 1974 it was time to build a brand new packing shed. This time it would be located on J.H. Smeds & Son land. Lawrence and his son cleared away about thirty peach trees. A concrete slab was laid and a new packing shed was built along the driveway near the corner of Peter Avenue and Holbrook Avenue, a long stone’s throw from the family residences. This version of the packing shed served for fifteen harvest seasons, with all-new equipment being installed a couple of years after the relocation. Over its existence Smeds Packing Company employed over a dozen members of the younger generations of the family as they became old enough to hold down paying summer jobs. Lawrence, in addition to being involved with purchase decisions and various aspects of construction, installed all the electrical wiring -- any farmer needs to multi-task in order to be successful, and skill as an electrician was one of the abilities Lawrence had acquired over the years.

Over the lifetime of the packing-shed partnership, Lawrence and Opal maintained the accounting and other paperwork. They were the natural ones to handle this task as they already maintaining a home office due to their insurance business. (A small separate building to house the office -- and the family sauna -- was constructed at the beginning of the 1970s, built upon the slab where the carport had been.)

At the beginning of 1980, Roy Smeds died of a heart attack brought on by blocked coronary arteries. The family doctor recommended that the other men of the family of that generation have their coronary arteries checked. Al Smeds came through the evaluation with a clean bill of health, but Lawrence was found to have two arteries that were completely blocked, another that was ninety percent blocked, and a fourth that was eighty percent blocked. If his heart had not found a way to reroute some of its blood supply, he would have already died. As it was, he was in imminent danger of an attack. Arrangements for a quadruple bypass were made at once. Lawrence made it through the operation with flying colors. After his recuperation, he enjoyed a dancing-on-air mood for months to come. Even though he had not suffered an attack, he had for years been experiencing fatigue due to the reduced blood supply. Now that the problem had been fixed, he felt decades younger. His doctor warned him that he would have to be careful and cautioned him not to take his reprieve for granted. Bypasses like his were known for their tendency to last for no more than ten to twelve years. Remarkably, Lawrence never needed a second procedure. Some of this fortune can be attributed to changes in diet. Also, in his late seventies and early eighties, a granddaughter got seriously into kickboxing and put together an exercise regimen for him that his body responded to quite well, even at his advanced age. His contemporaries were a bit thunderstuck to see this, as Lawrence had often been looked at as the least athletic of the clan and had been on the chubby side even as a young man.

The changing global economy squeezed hard upon San Joaquin Valley family farmers as the 1980s progressed. In addition, J.H. Smeds & Son had to cope with challenges to profitability brought on by a labor contract with the United Farmworkers Union. It became clear to Lawrence and his son that J.H. Smeds & Son could no longer thrive. The farm was therefore sold in 1988. (Smeds Packing Company was also shuttered, bringing to an end the last big whole-family business enterprise.) Divided into twenty-acre parcels, the farm acreage sold for better prices than expected, and all debts were covered -- something not viewed as certain when the decision to sell was first made. Even with that welcome development, the money freed up was not staggering, so Lawrence and Opal scaled back to a modest situation in a mobile home park three miles to the south, again near the Kings River, but now within the town of Reedley itself.

Lawrence and Opal were popular in the little community of mobile-home owners among whom they had found themselves. They participated actively in the social scene there. (The couple are shown at left in a formal studio photo taken during that phase of their existence.) Unfortunately Opal was able to enjoy these circumstances for less than a decade. She passed away 17 March 1996. Lawrence continued on as a widower, always retaining his identity as a Reedley boy but now making regular trips to Florida, where his younger son and family had relocated.

Seven years after Opal’s death, when Lawrence was eighty-five years old, he reached a point when living on his own ceased to be practical. Acknowledging this, he moved into the assisted-living section at Sierra View, a retirement complex in the eastern portion of Reedley. This was on the opposite edge of town from the mobile home park. All in all, though, it was not a big geographic adjustment. In fact, it is accurate to say that Lawrence resided within the same few square miles of Fresno County his whole life. He was in place at Sierra View in time to celebrate his eighty-sixth birthday.

Sierra View was a full-scale complex serving the needs of the elderly, meaning that the campus included a convalescent hospital -- the very same nursing home in which Lawrence’s aunt Mary Rautiainen Smeds had taken her final breath in 2001. Lawrence died there 26 August 2005. He was the last grandchild of Herman Smeds to pass away. A few days later a memorial was held in the chapel of Cairns Funeral Home. The services were officiated by Opal’s nephew David Finster. Lawrence and Opal’s grave is located at Reedley Cemetery.

Lawrence is in the middle in this photo from the 1950s of Smeds menfolk. The elders are his uncle Billy (on the far right with his hand on the German shepherd) and his father Jack. On the far left is his double first cousin Al and second from left is his double first cousin Roy. 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.

Descendants of Lawrence Jakob Smeds with Opal Fern Finster

Click here to go back to Lawrence’s father's page, and here to go back to his mother’s page. To return to the Smeds Family History main page, click here.