Lillian Anna Smeds

Lillian Anna Smeds, daughter of Jakob (“Jack”) Smeds and Anna (“Annie”) Rautiainen, was born 17 January 1907 at her parents’ residence on either 23rd Street or 28th Street in San Francisco, CA. Her birth was precisely nine months after the great 1906 earthquake. Inevitably, the joke was made that her conception had caused quite a rumble.

The family, which consisted of Lillian, her parents, and her older sister Sylvia, continued to dwell in San Francisco during Lillian’s early childhood while her father made his living as a silversmith for Shreve & Company Jewellers. However, before she was born (or during her early infancy), her parents gained title to a farm three miles north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. The acreage was cared for by Lillian’s uncle Billy Smeds and grandfather Herman Smeds. Jack, Annie, Sylvia, and Lillian made frequent visits to the farm, which in some ways was regarded as home because in the city they lived in rental accommodations. In fact, during some of Lillian’s very early childhood, they were not even housed in traditional living quarters but at the Finnish Temperance Hall during an interval when Jack and Annie served as the caretakers. Some of the neighborhoods they were based in included the Mission, Bernal Heights, the Castro, Noe Valley, and Glen Park. Some of these neighborhoods are now upscale and “gentrified,” but in the early 1900s were blue-collar areas with a substantial immigrant presence. It is safe to say that Lillian, along with her sister, was exposed to a wide diversity of people. This was very different than the upbringing her parents had known in remote northern Finland, and it was even different from most of her generation, who grew up on farms and did not move around much during their upbringing. Suffice it to say Lillian was not intimidated by an urban life as an adult.

In 1915, Jack and Annie took permanent possession of their Reedley farm. They would never move again except for a shift about a tenth of a mile south when they purchased the farm of long-time neighbor Karl Nordell and moved there, saying good-by to their somewhat-primitive original house. Lillian came of age as a Reedley girl. Finally she would know what it was like not to be surrounded by strangers. Her uncle and aunt, Billy and Mary Smeds, always lived along the same short country lane -- Holbrook Avenue -- as her parents. Her aunt Amanda Smeds and her husband Charlie Strom had a farm only a couple of miles away. Finally Lillian had cousins to play with -- though not in the sense of having peers, because the nearest to her in age was six years younger. Sylvia was her only similar-age companion within the clan. Their bond was strong.

Lillian attended Fink School, a small one-room rural elementary school north of Reedley. (The 1915/1916 student body -- or perhaps the one from the following year -- is shown here in front of the school. Lillian is in the second row, sixth from the right. Sylvia is beside her, fifth from the right.) Lillian probably spent more years at Fink than any other member of the extended family. Younger brother Lawrence, along with cousins Roy and Alfred Smeds, would instead spend most of their gradeschool years at Great Western Elementary School, an institution founded after Lillian had become a pupil at Reedley High School.

Lillian returned to San Francisco in the mid-1920s in tandem with her sister and became a nursing student at the San Francisco County Nursing School at the general (county) hospital. One of the orderlies putting in hours at the hospital during that period was Harold Roberts Quinney -- known as Bob Quinney -- who was studying dentistry at San Francisco College of Physicians and Surgeons. Lillian and Bob fell in love to such a degree they were not willing to wait to get married. This was somewhat of an issue because Jack and Annie Smeds felt strongly that the time was not right. Bob was still a student and Lillian, so they felt, was just too young. Lillian did not think much of the latter assessment. Annie had herself been nineteen and a half years old when she married Jack, and so Lillian, age nineteen and a half, went ahead and married Bob. Lillian’s diary reveals that on the 20th of July, 1926, Lillian and Bob and Sylvia left San Francisco General Hospital -- where they all worked -- and took the ferry over to San Rafael, Marin County, CA, where Lillian and Bob were united in matrimony at the Methodist parsonage at 6pm. This was accomplished without Jack and Annie’s active cooperation and amounted to an elopement. However, once the deed was done, the kinfolk adjusted well to the situation. Jack and Annie gave the newlyweds a piano as a wedding gift. Aunts Augusta Malm and Marie Rautiainen Smeds -- who apparently had been made aware of what was to happen and had given their blessing -- helped with honeymoon preparations. The new couple were soon launching their lives together in modest accommodations at 165 Julian Avenue in San Francisco.

The nuptials occurred just after Bob had turned twenty-six years old. The middle child of the eleven children of noted horticulturalist Henry Arthur Quinney and Mary Alice Pollock, Bob had been born 12 July 1900 in the Billings Bridge neighborhood of Ottawa, Canada. His middle name really was Roberts, not Robert. He was named for distinguished Anglo-Irish soldier Frederick Sleigh Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts (1832-1914), and like that much-decorated military hero was known as Bobs. Lillian would continue to call him Bobs, but others who did not understand the background of his name would inevitably call him just Bob without the “s” on the end. He answered to Bob without complaint to such a degree he was generally better known by the shorter version, which is the reason that form is used in this biography. Bob had come to the United States as a young man, arriving in Seattle 22 October 1922 aboard the vessel Dorothy Alexander out of Victoria, BC. If Bob had not already decided to remain permanently in America, the choice to marry Lillian was the tipping point. He had already recently applied for naturalization. He would go on to be granted citizenship 18 February 1931.

In the meantime, Bob continued to pursue his studies. He graduated in June, 1929. He still had his licensing exam to get through, though. During that interval, he worked at Liberty Drug pharmacy. The launch of his actual career was no certain thing. The country was plunging into the Great Depression and even dentistry was not immune to the downfall, as many potential patients chose to save money even if it meant their teeth would bear the consequences. But Bob had the grades and academic track record to prove how bright and diligent he was, and came armed with an enthusiastic letter of endorsement from a prominent professor. He soon landed a position with the Painless Parker dental practice in San Francisco. The company founder, Edgar Randolph Parker, was one of those dentists whose business was thriving because he was willing to do what so few of his colleagues did in those days -- he advertised. He had done so well he was leasing additional quarters and hiring associates. Bob was installed in Suite 713 at 870 Market Street.

The place of business was less than two miles from 165 Julian Avenue, an easy commute by trolley car. Lillian and Bob therefore stayed put into 1930 and possibly until the beginning of 1931. Sylvia Smeds shared the place until the early part of 1929. Both of Lillian and Bob’s two daughters -- Barbara Sylvia Quinney and Loris Lillian Quinney -- were born while they were based there. (The image below right depicts Lillian and Bob in the 1920s with her aunt Mary Rautiainen Smeds, who had come up to San Francisco to pay them a visit. The photo may have been taken at 165 Julian. Certainly it was taken during the years the Quinneys lived there.) However, steady income meant the couple did not have to remain in that south-of-Market part of the city, so they moved to Presidio Heights/Laurel Heights -- the part of San Francisco immediately south of The Presidio military base. They lived at three different addresses in this neighborhood over the next two to three years.

In 1933, Bob received an offer from a large dental outfit headed by James Campbell to open an office in Vallejo. Bob agreed. He, Lillian, and the girls relocated. For the remainder of the decade they lived in a series of three rental homes in Vallejo, but Bob became his own boss and finally the time was right to pick the right patch of ground within Vallejo and settle down for good. The couple arranged to have a house built at 39 El Caminito. They moved in during the second half of the year 1940. This would be the Quinney main residence for the rest of Bob’s life, a span of over three decades.

In the late 1930s, still in need of more clients to support his family, Bob established branches of his practice in Santa Rosa and Napa, commuting to each of those places once a week, while taking care of things in Vallejo the other three days. By the beginning of the World-War-II era he had enough local business that he closed down these sideline efforts. After that, the only other time he practiced outside Vallejo was an interval after his office burned down. James Campbell (or his heir) had an office in Sacramento where Bob was able to put in some shifts, so Bob commuted there until he could reopen his own operation.

Older daughter Barbara departed from the family home in the late 1940s. In her turn, Loris left as well, though the sisters pursued vastly different lifestyles, Barbara becoming a fixture of the arts scene in New York and San Francisco, living a Bohemian life and never settling into a career, while Loris joined the U.S. Navy, served as a nurse, and then became the wife of Phillip Ryan, a man just entering what was to be a twenty-year career in the Marine Corps. Freed of the entanglements of day-to-day parenting, and having perhaps been influenced by the temporary sojourn in Sacramento, Bob was inspired to consider a possible new and quite different occupation -- politics. He had long been active in community matters in Vallejo. One idea led to another and in 1956, Bob ran for U.S. Congress in the Sixth District of California (the Vallejo area) as the Democratic candidate. (He was also a delegate to the Democratic national convention that year, having been an alternate in 1952.) Though he was challenging Republican incumbent John F. Baldwin, Jr. of Martinez, Bob made a respectable showing, coming in less than six hundred behind out of 40,000 total votes. In 1960, he attempted to garner the Democratic nomination for the California Assembly Fifth District. He came in a distant second in the June primary to attorney Robert L. Leggett, but finished ahead of a third candidate. Inasmuch as he did not have to fill his days being a legislator, Bob stuck with his dentistry for a while longer. For that matter, he and Lillian resumed day-to-day parenting in a sense. Barbara had not ultimately not enjoyed her foray into independence. In the late 1950s or very early 1960s, Lillian made a plea: “Come back home.” And Barbara did. She resumed living at 39 El Caminito and remained with her parents until they each passed away.

Though Lillian and Bob treated Vallejo as their main base, they did not ignore Reedley. Bob’s earnings were plentiful enough to allow him and Lillian to acquire acreage along the Kings River at the western dead-end of Vino Avenue about a mile north of the farms of Lillian’s parents and her uncle and aunt. They named the place the Lazy Q Ranch. The cottage on that property was the couple’s home-away-from-home. They could be found there for portions of every year. Bob loved to do carpentry and woodworking projects. His workshop at Lazy Q was the envy of Lillian’s farmer brother, nephews, and male cousins. The Smeds men were all proud of their ability to be jacks-of-all-trades, able to rise to the occasion as carpenters, mechanics, electricians, or welders, but even they sometimes found themselves lacking certain tools and equipment Bob kept on hand, and their gear was seldom in the sort of prime condition in which he kept his.

It was understood that Lazy Q Ranch would possibly be the place to which Lillian and Bob would retire when the time came; however, they were still in Vallejo when Bob passed away 27 October 1972. Only in widowhood did Lillian settle year-round in Reedley. By the end of 1973, a large luxury mobile home was in place at Lazy Q, and before that holiday season was over, Lillian was able to be the hostess of one of the local extended-family gatherings. The existing cottage became Barbara's demense, a reversal of the usual dynamic where the younger generation takes over the main house and the old widow gracefully retreats to the haven of a mother-in-law unit.

Lillian was only able to enjoy residing back among the bevy of her kinfolk for a few years. A long habit of cigarette smoking may have been a factor in her developing cancer -- though it was not the classic case of lung cancer, but colon cancer. She was doing well with the treatment for this condition when she was abruptly diagnosed with leukemia. The latter illness claimed her life 15 December 1976 in Reedley. She had not yet reached seventy years old, meaning she died young by the standards of her clan.

Descendants of Lillian Anna Smeds with Harold Roberts Quinney

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