Lyle Horatio Smith

Lyle Horatio Smith, third of the three children of Vivian Blanche Martin and Ray Burnette Smith, was born at 5:15am the morning of 4 September 1913 on a farm just north of Martintown, Green County, WI, the village founded by his great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. Lyle was his own third cousin. His mother and father were second cousins. Lyle was along two different lines of descent a great-great-grandson of John Hart and Ruth Brown, a couple who had settled in the late 1840s at Cadiz, a tiny hamlet that no longer exists, but while it did, was located a mile or so north of the spot where Martintown would rise.

Vivian and Ray had no further children. Lyle’s childhood was shared with his brother Leon, two years his senior. (The Smith boys are shown below right in a photo taken in late 1914 or early 1915.) Another sibling had been stillborn in 1912. All his life, Lyle carried with him an affection for his boyhood haunts and the idle hours spent there. He wrote of countless fishing expeditions along Honey Creek, of sliding on makeshift mud ramps into the Pecatonica River, of skating on the river’s ice in winter, of zooming down snowy or muddy hillsides on skis made of salvaged barrel staves.

Perhaps some of Lyle’s rose-colored memories were a product of the nostalgia that came from living so far away after he was grown, but there was no denying Martintown was an excellent place to “be from.” The nearby parts of Green County, WI and Stephenson County, IL brimmed with personal history. Lyle’s Strader, Martin, Brown, Hart, and Smith ancestors had come to the locale in pioneer days and those forebears had all played their part in transforming the area into a vibrant piece of the heartland of late 19th Century America. During the time he was embedded in that milieu, Lyle never had to question that he had a right to be there. However, by the 1910s, Martintown’s heyday had already passed it by. The settlement phase was long over. Railroad service had invigorated the village with its arrival in 1888, but now the local folk were feeling the crunch as America shifted from an economic base of small family farms and cottage industries to urban industries and services. Family members who had once been firmly entrenched were moving elsewhere to find jobs -- vanishing to such distant places as Maine, Texas, and California. Those who stayed found life hard and the monetary reward small. Ray Smith was able to just barely provide for his family from the earnings from the farm. Vivian and the boys did not mind the poverty, but Ray was dissatisfied and by the time Lyle was school age, began seeking out other ventures. He took a job as an “outdoor sales” representative for a small company based in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, Martintown’s sister village just across the state line. This panned out so poorly that Ray was not able to earn enough to keep the family in its own home. By the end of the 1910s, he and Vivian moved in with his parents, Chester and Diana Smith, on their Green County farm.

Ray and Vivian may have made one more attempt at maintaining an independent home in the early 1920s, but gave it up in 1923 when Chester and Diana Smith decided to sell their farm and retire to Winslow. The generations combined forces. For the rest of Lyle’s childhood, he and his brother and parents would share Chester and Diana’s home. This was not entirely a case of charity on the older couple’s part. They needed someone younger close at hand. Both were in their seventies, and Chester was an invalid. He had lost part of a leg in a hay mower accident years before and had given up getting around on his wooden leg, turning to full-time use of his wheelchair. (Chester and Diana are shown below left in front of their Winslow home.) Lyle and Leon were called upon regularly to help shift their grandfather from bed to wheelchair or bathroom as needed, and help roll him along on outdoor excursions. During the 1920s their other grandfather -- actually step-grandfather -- Elwood Bucher was also an invalid living in Winslow, but Lyle and Leon were seldom if ever called upon to help with his care, because Elwood’s debilitation was apparently caused by something Vivian felt the boys shouldn’t be exposed to.

When not in school or helping with Chester, Lyle and Leon were able to earn small bits of money hunting and fishing. Fish could be sold to housewives in Martintown or Winslow on the way back from the streams. Rabbits, quail, and pheasant, typically hunted in the autumn after the weather had progressed into nightly hard frosts, could be cleaned and hung from the porch rails in the evening to freeze overnight, and be sold over the course of the week. The boys also hunted otter, muskrat, fox, possum, and even skunk. They made additional cash from the sale of the pelts they cured. Earlier in the boyhoods had used the tactic of skunk-hunting as a means to skip school. They would show up reeking of the previous evening’s prey and the teacher would send them home rather than put up with the stench in her classroom all day. Enough lessons were skipped that Leon fell back a year and then another and eventually graduated from Winslow High School as part of the Class of 1931, the class year Lyle should have been in except Lyle also fell back, if not as far, and ended up in the Class of 1932. (See basketball team photo below.)

Grandma Diana passed away in early 1927, a bit before Lyle began his stint at Winslow High School. By the time he graduated, Elwood Bucher had also perished and Lyle’s maternal grandmother Laura Hart Martin Bucher had chosen to leave Winslow in favor of Orangeville, farther east in Stephenson County. Various other relatives had been abandoning the community throughout Lyle’s lifetime. Idyllic as Martintown and Winslow had been as a place to grow up, it had changed so much that now it was far from the sort of place a young man could count upon to lay the foundations of his future. This became increasingly so as Vivian and Ray Smith’s marriage faltered -- it would fail altogether by the end of the 1930s. Leon got out early, moving as a young man to Colfax, Whitman County, WA. Colfax was where Vivian’s brother Clark Fuller Martin had gone as an equally young man in 1922. Clark had spent the interval since then working at Jersey Creamery, which was operated by his step-uncle, Elwood Bucher’s younger brother Charles Benedict Bucher. Unfortunately Leon’s persistent headaches caused such suffering he committed suicide in early 1936. However, Clark Martin and Charles Bucher remained in place, and throughout the 1930s Lyle undoubtedly saw the Pacific Northwest as one of the prime spots where he might begin a new, and presumably more exciting and successful, chapter of his existence. For half a dozen years, though, he did not fully give in to that siren song, though certainly he made visits -- in later years he reminisced about a time when he and Leon were stranded halfway there when the differential twice dropped out of their Model T Ford while crossing the Rocky Mountains. The ideal situation eluded Lyle, to such a degree that sometimes he hopped trains and went where they would take him. To avoid the train guards, he would find a spot on the top of a boxcar, sticking his feet into the rungs so as not to fall off while he slept.

Shown here is the 1930/31 Winslow High School basketball team along with their coach, Clarence C. Clarno, as pictured in the 1931 Win-Nel, the school yearbook. Lyle is on the far left in the back row. A junior that year, Lyle played second-string forward. His brother Leon -- who as it happens was the Athletics editor of that edition of the Win-Nel -- is in the same row, second from the right next to Coach Clarno. Leon’s nickname on the team was “Smitty” while Lyle was “Smith Brother.”

Some of his time was spent back in northern Illinois. There he was known to employers of the area, and could take advantage of a marketable skill -- he knew his way around electrical power equipment. In 1909, Elwood Bucher had added an electrical generation station to the Martintown mills property, adroitly making use of the flow of the Pecatonica River through the preexisting waterwheels to serve as the energy source. His first contract had been to supply the power for the street lights of Winslow, and the business had grown thereafter. Lyle gained at least some training there. Elwood sold the business in 1922. Lyle worked not for his grandpa, but for Wisconsin Power & Light. Still, the firm was a major employer of young men of the family, so it is fair to say Lyle achieved an insider’s understanding of the industry. Thanks to the skills he acquired there, he managed to keep finding jobs even while the nation was mired in the Great Depression. His last gig was as a lineman for Illinois Northern Utilities of Dixon, Stephenson County, IL, for whom he worked in 1938 and early 1939.

Finally the watershed moment came. In 1939, Lyle left Winslow for good. He would never again reside within a thousand miles of his birth home. His move was not just geographic, but a change of life direction. Once in Washington, his landlord, a doctor, soon persuaded him to pursue an upper education. Lyle went to Ellensburg in Yakima County, enrolled at Central Washington College of Education, and began taking classes with the opening of the autumn term.

Unfortunately, his ambitions did not match his abilities. He earned C after C in his classes, with the exception of Physical Education courses. In the latter, he excelled. (Lyle had always loved sports, and the years since leaving high school had not taken away his skills at softball. He is shown in his baseball uniform in the photo at lower right, an image taken not in his college days, but in 1947. Even in his mid-thirties he still loved to get out on the playing field.) Finishing his first academic year in June of 1940, Lyle decided he had tried enough. He did not go on to earn a degree.

A by-product of his presence in Yakima County was that he came to know a local girl, Dorothy Tamburello. On the first of November, 1941, she became the first Mrs. Lyle H. Smith. The only daughter of Italian-immigrant Charles (aka Calogero) Tamburello and Katie Watton, Dorothy had been born 21 Dec 1923 and so was a teenaged bride. This was in keeping with precedents within the family. Lyle’s grandfather Horatio Martin had married Laura Hart when she was fifteen, and Lyle’s uncle Nate Martin had married Kittie Bolender shortly before her fourteenth birthday. However, both those marriages had been or would be “until death us do part” unions. Lyle might have done better with someone closer to his age. By early 1942, he and Dorothy were no longer living together; they were divorced no later than the early part of 1943. In later years Lyle spoke ambivalently about the relationship. His description of his time with Dorothy leaves questions unanswered, including the actual duration of the time they spent in each other’s immediate company. Lyle spoke of a medical problem. Though his description sounded like appendicitis or some other sort of intestinal issue, it is tempting to think he was alluding to something embarrassing. A couple of possibilities would fit. One is that Dorothy may have been mentally unstable. The other is that she may have suffered a miscarriage. The latter scenario is in keeping with Dorothy’s later medical history. In late 1944, she gave birth to a son with Lamont H. Derricott. The baby, Lamont, Jr., only survived twelve days. It is an open question whether, back in 1941, the wedding might have taken place in part because Dorothy was pregnant, and then dissolved when a miscarriage erased the need to “do the right thing.” However, there is no proof the union was anything other than an ill-fated and short-lived pairing of two incompatible partners. Lyle and Dorothy went their separate ways and did not subsequently keep in contact. Her ultimate fate is unknown. (Her parents and two brothers are known to have lived out their lives in Washington state.) She did not stay with Lamont Derricott. She married William Harley McDaniel in Kittitas County, WA 30 May 1948. Her doings after that point have not been tracked.

On the 17th of February, 1941, feeling the need to get away from Yakima and the need for yet another new direction, Lyle enlisted in the U.S. Army. He began his service at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, WA. In many ways he was just what the Army needed. He was five ten in height, 172 pounds, and his physical condition was excellent. He had skills in electrical infrastructure, a year of college education, and was a decade older than the green eighteen-year-olds that surrounded him in boot camp. These qualities paid off. Lyle’s first assignment after boot camp was a coastwatch station along the Strait of Juan de Fuca at or near Port Angeles, Clallam County, WA. The purpose of the outpost was to be on guard against the arrival of Japanese planes. While the United States was not yet at war, there was a great deal of concern that the west coast of North America might be surprise-attacked. Lyle was assigned to be a listener, but he had only been there a month when his superiors realized they could, and should, make use of the skills he had acquired as a civilian, so Lyle was given the responsibility of maintaining the power generator for the anti-aircraft searchlights. This remained his role until the end of the year (taking him into the first part of his married life). During that interval, his mother moved to Port Angeles in order to be near him, her marriage to Ray Smith having completely crumbled. (She would linger there some months after his departure, only to die of either suicide or murder.)

As of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lyle set out in pursuit of a more meaningful position in the army. He applied for the Air Corps as a pilot but was rejected due to color blindness. However, he succeeded in being admitted to the 82nd Airborne/504th Infantry. Officially, he was relegated to being a cook, and this would be his official designation throughout the remainder of his enlistment. But Lyle nevertheless had reason to be proud. In World War I, the 82nd had won renown and earned the nickname of the “All American Division.” He was now part of an elite force.

Lyle’s memoirs do not specifically address the issue of where he received his training, but unless he was for some reason a special case, he attended paratroop school at Fort Benning, GA, where he earned his wings as a paratrooper and sharpshooter, and then he and the rest of his comrades gathered at Fort Bragg, NC, where they waited to be deployed. They waited and they waited. The 82nd was held back, because the strategy of dropping large numbers of infantrymen behind enemy lines by parachute was a tactic that could not be effectively utilized while the Allies were on the defensive. In the face of Germany’s gains during the early part of the war, Lyle and his division saw no action throughout the whole of 1942 and then had to be patient a few months more. For Lyle, the respite was in hindsight a good thing, because in the long run, he would be tested in some of the worst battles American soldiers had to fight in Europe. In the meantime, the enemy was boredom.

In the spring of 1943, the 82nd Airborne finally got its chance to show what it could do. The assignment was to serve as the phalanx of soldiers designated to invade Italy, beginning with the island of Sicily. For all of the delays, the 82nd was the first airborne division to be shipped out. The troop ships departed New England 29 April 1943 and landed at Casablanca, Morocco on the tenth of May. The division then moved by rail and truck to Tunisia, where staging began for the jump into Sicily. The first drops began 9 July 1943. The effort was successful, and soon American forces were pushing into the southern portions of the main Italian peninsula. The fighting was fierce and casualties were high on both sides. Lyle was among those held in reserve in Tunisia until early September. At that point, with important beachheads having been secured, the Allies began their all-out offensive. Until the following spring, Lyle would remain embroiled in what came to be known as “The Italian Campaign,” the fierce series of engagements that took the 82nd Airborne and other parts of the Allied army up from Sicily into northern Italy, dooming Mussolini’s regime and pushing the German army’s southern front back to the Alps. Early on, in Sicily, Lyle’s best buddy, an Indian (as in native American), was among the casualties.

In December, 1943, after important victories, the main part of the 82nd Airborne was withdrawn to England. The big priority now was the pending invasion of France. This required a great deal of staging. The top brass felt that the 82nd needed a breather and needed to be beefed up -- while there, two new parachute infantry regiments, the 507th and 508th, were added to it. However, the concentration on Normandy was in some ways premature. The Italian Campaign was not over. The Germans were holding firm in the hills south of Rome. The remaining Allied forces were expected to overcome that resistance in spite of the siphoning-off of troops and equipment. Lyle and the other soldiers of the 504th, which had been detached from the 82nd, were among the men tasked with that formidable duty. The one hope of success was to attack the German entrenchments in the hills (the so-called Winter Line) at the same time that other divisions invaded the coast south of Rome at the resort community of Anzio. The latter maneuver had the virtue of getting Allied forces behind the German front. Unfortunately, this was an obvious move, one that the Axis forces were anticipating. Lyle was caught in the thick of it in late January when the 504th landed on the beach and became immersed in what would become known as the Battle of Anzio -- perhaps the very worst, and hardest-fought, battle of any that had occurred in Europe to that point in the war. The 504th emerged from the chaos with a historic reputation. They became known as the Devils in Baggy Pants, from a description entered in a German officer’s diary.

Somehow, Lyle made it through the battle unscathed. Many other comrades with whom he had served for months were not so lucky. The 504th was so depleted that when they rejoined the 82nd in England in April, they were removed from the list of those elements that would invade Normandy. Thus, when D-Day came early that June, Lyle was relatively safe -- or as safe as anyone could be in the London area during the Blitz.

Able to spend time on his own in a civilian milieu, Lyle got to know some of the local folk. While drinking and relaxing in a café-hotel in Piccadilly, Lyle caught the eye of an English girl, Doreen Margaret Post. To her, he was the epitome of a dashing, handsome, brave American serviceman. The pair hit if off at once. This brought Lyle into the sphere of the Post family. It was to be a permanent development.

Doreen had been born 18 November 1923 in Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, England to James William Edward Post and his wife, the former Gladys Christlieb Bennett. In early childhood the family had moved to Moonee Ponds, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Later, during Doreen’s early school years, another sojourn had been made to British Guiana. For ten years or so leading up to the meeting between Doreen and Lyle, the Posts had resided at 64 Elmfield Road in Chingford, Essex, on the northern outskirts of greater London, just south of Epping Forest. In 1944, the Post family was doing what it could to contribute to the war effort. Doreen was in the Royal Air Force, performing secretarial duties at an airdrome bunker. Her younger brother Ian was a rear gunner on a four-man aircrew made up of Australians -- Ian himself qualified as an Australian citizen because he had been born during the interval at Moonee Ponds. The Posts had brought Ian’s comrades into their embrace, helping to supply them with a home-away-from-home, as so many homeholders throughout the greater London area were doing for foreign Allied servicemen. Whenever the four airmen were off-duty, they had a habit of gathering around the kitchen table at 64 Elmfield, where James and Gladys kept them well-supplied with liquor. Among other things, this kept the boys out of the pubs, where they had a tendency to blow off a little too much steam, given the great pressures they were under. (Their duty hours were spent on bombing missions over Germany, and on any one of those, they might lose their lives.) They were supplied with meals, given a chance to take their boots off, taken on excursions into the countryside -- something the family dog, Mac, enjoyed immensely. Lyle found adopted not only by the Posts but by the four Aussies (Ian, Jack, Tommy, and Johnny) as well. They were all in turn part of a larger social group, which often included a local doctor named Kirkland, and sometimes Kirkland’s wife, a former stage actress. Lyle would cherish the memory of this cast of characters to his dying day.

The romance between Lyle and Doreen proceeded with an alacrity spurred by wartime. They could not be sure how long they might have together, and did not want to waste a moment. Though Lyle had been spared the horror of Normandy, he knew it was only a matter of time before the 504th headed back to the front. In the meantime, Doreen was none too safe herself. Her airdrome bunker was a prime target for German bombers. And so, the two decided to get married.

The engagement party took over the Royal Forest Hotel, a well-known Chingford pub. The event filled the place to the walls with military comrades and with friends from the Posts’ social gatherings. Liquor was subject to rationing at that point, but the group was not about to stop drinking when the bartender announced he had reached the limit of what he could serve. The revelers took over the bar and kept on celebrating until dawn. At one point a brawl ensued when an Army sergeant, a man billeted by the Kirklands, shook Lyle’s hand so hard it brought Lyle to his knees. Some of Dr. Kirkland’s teeth were knocked out in the fracas. Surprisingly, despite the amount of liquor he consumed that night, Lyle would recall the party well for the rest of his life.

The wedding itself took place 21 October 1944 in Chingford at St. Peter and St. Paul Church. Alas, the newlyweds were able to indulge in each other’s immediate presence for only a matter of weeks. On the eighteenth of December, Lyle headed back to war. He went to Belgium and France. He was directly in harm’s way during the Battle of the Bulge in early 1945. Again, fortune smiled, and Lyle made it through unwounded, but Doreen had to endure a severe moment of distress when, accompanied by Jack Hart, one of the Aussie air crew, she visited the U.S. Embassy in London to try to obtain news of Lyle, who had not been heard from in some time. She was told there that given the intensity of the battle and the status of Lyle’s unit, that he was almost surely dead. It was not the sort of thing a new bride needed to hear. She had already had to endure the loss of an earlier sweetheart, a British Army sergeant who had vanished in the fighting in Burma. It is easy to imagine the depth of her thankfulness later as she was able to witness Lyle receive his Bronze Star.

The war ended. Draftees were sent home at once, but Lyle finished out a more substantial hitch. In some respects this was unfortunate, because while in Germany, Lyle got into an argument with a man who outranked him, punching the fellow in the nose. As a consequence, he was demoted. Thus, despite his many medals and his courageous service, he was discharged as a private. Fortunately, it was not so severe an infraction as to lead to being kicked out, and he was honorably discharged at the culmination of his five years in the military. That anniversary rolled around in late February, 1946. As of the first of March, he was a civilian once more.

There was no question that Lyle would remain in England. His mother and brother were dead, his father was living a rootless life. He had no job or situation beckoning back to his native land. Whereas if he stay in England, Doreen would be able to enjoy the company of her parents, and Lyle could savor more time in the place he had come to love, and see it transform into its peace-time aspect.

Lyle and Doreen were still in the Chingford area when they welcomed their first child into the world. It was a good place to be for the time being, but the pair were young and open to new possibilities. The enduring friendship with the Aussie aircrew and the Posts’ earlier connections with Australia eventually shaped their choice. In 1949, they moved with their toddler to Melbourne. Their first home was in the suburb community of Highett, south of the old city (the so-called central city). Lyle’s initial job, however, was in Footscray, a full fifteen miles away to the west of the central city. He worked as a sheep classer, meaning that he evaluated wool pelts for imperfections. To save the cost of automobile commuting and because he enjoyed exercise, Lyle rode a bicycle to and from his workplace. (Today the Melbourne area is renowned for its commuter rail system, but service was much more limited in the early 1950s.)

Within three years of the Smith family’s arrival, Doreen gave birth again. The existence of a second grandchild prompted James and Gladys Post to relocate to Australia was well. They moved into the house behind that of Lyle and Doreen in Highett. Doreen’s brother Ian Post came as well, living next door.

Lyle took night classes at a trade school and by the mid-1950s obtained a job more local to Highett as a welder. For the most part, he retained the occupation of welder for the next twenty years, but not with the same employer. Nor could he have remained with the same employer, because in 1960, the family -- meaning James and Gladys, Lyle and Doreen, and the two children -- moved back to Chingford. They stayed five years. The kids had a chance to see the environment and culture in which their mother had grown up, and Doreen and her parents enjoyed renewing bonds and reconnecting with their past. Lyle worked as a welder for a government munitions factory, making rockets.

In 1965, the Smiths returned permanently to Australia, once again settling into a residence in a community southeast of Melbourne, this time in Bentleigh rather than Highett. James and Gladys Post moved simultanously and then would spent the rest of their old age sharing the house with Lyle and Doreen. (At the time of the move, James was seventy-one and Gladys in her late sixties.) Lyle found work nearby as a welder. By now both of the youngsters were teenagers, so Doreen also worked outside the home. She was an accounting secretary.

As the latter part of the 1970s arrived, some of the less pleasant effects of getting old began to rear up. The first was somewhat unexpected -- in 1976, at age sixty-three, Lyle was laid off from his welding job (or as it is termed in Australia, he was retrenched). He spent the final two years until his retirement working as a library janitor. In 1979, Gladys Bennett Post passed away. Then, in 1983, it appeared that Lyle’s turn had come. He suffered an aneurysm of the iliac artery. Surgeons worked on him over a three-day period, warning the family that the outcome would probably be death. Instead, Lyle made it through. However, the scare had been a severe one. Lyle and Doreen -- still with James Post in tow -- moved into a home in Endeavour Hills, where they could be near their younger child should further medical crises ensue.

Ironically, it was Doreen -- the youngest of the three that shared the Endeavor Hills residence -- who would succumb first. She developed lung cancer. (Though she had been a smoker, she attributed the disease to her World War II service. The bombs dropped during the Blitz often knocked loose particles from the bunker’s asbestos-laced ceiling, leaving the occupants inhaling the resultant dust.) Doreen was not alone while in the hospital for treatment of the cancer. Though the abdominal surgeries had saved Lyle’s life, he had been left subject to recurrent problems with scar tissue adhesion, and so for a period, both he and Doreen were patients at the same facility. This left James Post, by then well into his nineties, to be looked after by a grandchild until hostel care was arranged for him.

Lyle and Doreen made it out of the hospital, but it was obvious that they were in no shape to maintain the large Endeavour Hills home. They downsized to a two-bedroom unit in Doveton, where she died 6 July 1988, the cancer having been ultimately unstoppable. She was outlived by her own father, who survived until late the following summer, heart-broken that his baby girl was gone. James Post was ninety-five when he finally expired.

Lyle spent the next two years as a widower. He was helped through his period of mourning by Doreen’s long-time friend Annie Hart, who had been a mainstay of support while Doreen was in decline. The comfort of each other’s presence eventually led to a marriage. The wedding was held 17 March 1990 at St. Michael’s Church in Dandenong North, a short distance from Doveton. They were able to enjoy a decade together. In 1994, Lyle suffered a second aneurysm. Once again, he pulled through. And once again, he would go on to outlive a wife. Annie passed away in the year 2000.

In February, 2003, Lyle moved out of his Doveton place into a veterans’ nursing home in Frankston, at the southern extremity of the greater Melbourne urban zone. That was where he was living when this website was first activated in late 2005. By then, Lyle was an embodiment of the characteristic longevity of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. (Credit can also be extended to his Smith heritage -- his great-great-grandfather Daniel Smith made it to within three months of his 102nd birthday.) Due to Lyle’s survival he was one of the rare members of his generation of the clan to contribute to his own biography, as well as supply otherwise unavailable details about his kinfolk. He was still lucid at the time, and would remain so into early 2007, though troubled by a number of ailments, including bladder cancer. In June, 2007, his condition having grown dire, he was moved to a care hostel close to his old residence and within more convenient reach of family members. This facility, located in the community of Noble Park, was where he passed away 5 August 2007.

Descendants of Lyle Horatio Smith with Doreen Margaret Post

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