Roy William Smeds

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Roy William Smeds, son of Vilhelm (aka Billy and William) Smeds and Maria (aka Mary and Marie) Rautiainen, was born 1 September 1913 in San Francisco, CA. At the time of his birth, his parents and his grandfather Herman Smeds were residing on a farm north of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. However, there was no doctor readily available in Reedley, and so when the pregnancy neared its completion, Mary went to stay with her sister Annie and brother-in-law Jack Smeds until labor and delivery were safely accomplished. Otherwise Roy can be considered a native of Reedley.

Roy is not to be confused with his first cousin, Jack and Annie’s son Roy William Smeds. The “other” Roy developed pyloric stenosis as a baby in 1909 and died of the condition at less than three months of age. The younger Roy may have been named in honor of the deceased child, as well as taking his middle name from the Americanized version of his father’s name.

Roy was raised on Holbrook Avenue three miles north of Reedley. The family moved several times, but all of their homes were within a tenth of a mile of where they started. His main companion during childhood was his slightly younger brother Alfred. (The family was small because a case of typhoid fever in the mid-1910s left Mary unable to have further children.) Other playmates included double first cousin Lawrence Smeds and the neighbor children who lived along Peter Avenue and Holbrook Avenue, the two short country lanes along which sat the farms of the mini-colony of “Finland Swedes” the Smedses were part of. Though Reedley was only three miles away to the south, that was enough distance in that era that the boys could not easily participate in organized activities in town, so they made up their own pastimes. One of the most popular things to do in the warm months was to go swimming in the Kings River. The family home was located atop a low bluff a good hundred yards away from the stream itself. This meant that while swimming, the boys were near enough to summon by shouting to them or by ringing a cow bell, but were too far for direct supervision. Al and Roy were bold and active, so they would clamber forty feet up into the riparian oak trees and plunge from there into the water. Had their mother ever seen them, she would have been frantic.

Roy began his formal education at Fink School, a one-room rural school on Adams Avenue a mile east of the farm. Because the entire student body was taught as a single group, Roy was in the same class as his much-older cousins Sylvia and Lillian Smeds. More and more families were becoming established north of Reedley at this point. The need for a large school was obvious. This led to the construction in the early 1920s of Great Western Unified three miles to the north, which absorbed the pupils of not only Fink School but several other small schools -- including Wahtoke School, which when torn down yielded salvage lumber Billy Smeds used when building the small house the family occupied for most of the 1920s. Great Western was where Roy received at least five years of his schooling. He was a forerunner in a sense, because for the first fifty years of Great Western’s existence, there were hardly any individual calendar years when a Smeds could not be found on the active enrollment roster. (The photo at right shows Roy’s first class at Fink School. Judging by a note Roy himself wrote on the print, he is shown in the image, but it isn’t quite certain which little boy he is -- probably one of the ones wearing a hat. Lillian and Sylvia are two of the adolescent girls in the center in second row from the back.)

In 1930 Billy and Marie finally were able to settle into a long-term residence when they purchased the home and farm of good friends and neighbors, Fred and Katherine Tenhunen. The Tenhunens had moved away from Reedley in 1919 but had held onto ownership of their real estate, perhaps with the intent of returning upon Fred’s retirement. The onset of the Great Depression was devastating to Fred’s jewelry business in Oakland, CA, and sale of the house and the acreage was necessary to replace the lost income. Except for a brief period of wanderlust as a young man, for example when he attended University of California at Berkeley for a year, Roy would live all of his life from 1930 onward at the same site, first in his parents’ home (i.e. the former Tenhunen place), and then in a large adobe house that shared the same yard, built for him and his wife Mildred in the late 1930s.

Mildred was Mildred Bernice Stone. A daughter of Edward Nelson Stone (born Edwin Roy Stone) and Bertha Potter, Mildred had been born in Mountain Home, Elmore County, ID, and had been raised there and elsewhere in Elmore County, particularly in Pine, a small community of loggers and miners and their families where Mildred’s grandmother Jennie Winter Potter and Jennie’s daughter-in-law Alieene Bowlden Potter operated a boarding house. (In later years, after Mildred’s time there, Pine was submerged due to the construction of Anderson Ranch Dam.) In the 1930s, Bertha suffered a health impairment that left her so mentally compromised she was institutionalized at the state hospital in Bingham County. Partly as the fallout of that, and partly as a consequence of her father tending to be employed in rustic setting wherever he could find work as a miner, Mildred came to stay with her father’s sister Anna Belle Stone Truesdale, whose husband George Franklin Truesdale was a raisin farmer near Dinuba, Tulare County, CA, just south of Reedley. Mildred began attending Reedley College, where she had the companionship of Truesdale first cousins as classmates. There she met Roy, and the pair took an interest in one another. When Mildred went back north, Roy soon followed her. She was impressed, and agreed to marriage. The wedding took place 14 May 1937 in Roseburg, Douglas County, OR, near where her father was temporarily residing. The couple spent a brief interval in Oregon and/or Idaho as newlyweds. During this time, Roy considered various occupations, but very soon decided he would be a farmer and work with his father. So down to Reedley the new couple came. They were there by the time their first child was born in the summer of 1938.

Roy felt the urge to make his mark and do more than just raise Thompson Seedless grapes for Sun-Maid Raisin Company as his father had been doing, so he instigated a new venture -- raising chickens and eggs. It did not take long before Roy became disenchanted with this side business. Soon the chickens were gone, and for that matter, so was any other poultry or livestock. The last resident animals -- aside from the household dogs and cats -- were the burros kept for pack trips in the mountains. These beasts died off one by one until by the end of the 1950s, there were no more left. The true “big change” from a farm management standpoint was a shift away from dependence on Sun-Maid. Instead, the family’s grapes were grown for the fresh market, or as it is known in the industry, the “table” grape market. In the 1940s and 1950s, table grapes represented the prime hope for San Joaquin Valley grape growers to make a living. Consumers now had refrigerators rather than ice boxes, and enjoyed getting their fruit in fresh form rather than as raisins or other dried fruit. Grape growers in places like the Napa Valley concentrated on wine grapes. That was not the case with the Smeds farms. The climate was not suitable for wine grapes. The family only sent “leftover” grapes to wineries, selling it cheaply for bulk juice. In addition to his vineyards, Roy increasingly devoted acreage to peach orchards, again aiming the crop at the fresh market.

Until the late 1950s, Roy farmed in partnership with his father and brother. In approximately 1960, the business arrangement changed. Billy retired. Alfred struck out on his own. Roy’s son Bill became his new partner. However, the old business name, William Smeds & Sons, was retained, as was the “Diamond S” brand name used on the box labels.

Roy is almost singularly responsible for the establishment of red seedless grapes in the general produce marketplace. He was the recipient of test vines of the ruby seedless variety that had been created by Harold Olmo, a professor of horticulture at University of California, Davis. The variety did not pan out well in its early tests and UC Davis gave up on the variety, deciding it was not commercially viable. Roy, having had poor results in the moist riverbottom spot he had initially used for his test vines, planted more vines -- at his own initiative -- in sandier soil on a parcel he owned a few miles away near Great Western. The drier conditions at this second property alleviated the tendency for the ruby seedless to succumb to mildew. Roy determined that by using anti-fungal spray and taking other measures to expose the vines to light and air, the mildew problem was manageable, and the fruit was not only good, but had many superior qualities. Once the public realized a seedless type of red grape had become available, demand grew sharply. Given the headstart on production, Roy and his brother Al enjoyed a near-monopoly situation for the variety for several years, and were able to get high prices for their crops. This stroke of persistence and luck accounted for a sizable portion of the prosperity Roy enjoyed late in his career.

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

Roy and Mildred were characteristically hospitable and their property large enough that they often took in various lodgers over the course of their lives. Some, such as farmworker Kathy Zimmerman or French exchange student Eric Denard, stayed in vacation trailers in the farm shed. Others lived in Roy and Mildred’s house, including a slate of over ten family members. (One or two at a time.) While these were nearly always younger family members, placing Roy and Mildred in the role of surrogate parents, in the mid-1960s they also took in Mildred’s father Ed Stone and his brother-in-law Dick Peck when that pair, who had shared homes in Idaho and Oregon, became elderly. Dick Peck passed away soon after coming to live in Reedley, but Ed Stone remained several years, passing away in 1972.

Roy loved to discuss politics, and paid great attention to the changing trends in the political scene. This was unusual among the Smeds clan, though when Alfred’s new son-in-law Gilbert Rodriguez became part of the clan in 1958, Roy finally had someone to debate such issues with, which both men proceeded to do at many a family gathering over the next couple of decades. (They always did so with enthusiasm, and always with good will.) With his farm background, Roy was inevitably somewhat on the conservative side compared to urban dwellers, but compared to his friends and neighbors, he showed a distinctly liberal, even radical, streak. His curiosity about social change prompted him to try something none of his peers would have remotely contemplated, which was to become the first small table grape grower to sign with the United Farm Workers in 1970, during the era of the original grape boycott instigated by Cesar Chavez’s organization. Roy bore the brunt of quite a bit of criticism for his willingness to enter into that contract. Key members of the UFW would ultimately put in an appearance at Roy’s funeral.

In a nod toward his heritage, Roy dabbled in a typically Finnish (and Swedish) artform -- high-relief woodcarving. The artisan takes a plank of wood, usually pine and usually about an inch thick, and carves an image on the face, delving into the wood only a fraction of an inch at the deepest places, sometimes accentuating major features of the scene by burning their edges or their lines. The resulting finished work, despite being almost flat, conveys a sense of three-dimensionality. Left unpainted and often unstained, the carvings can withstand the heat of a sauna and are characteristically hung within them to spruce up what might otherwise be utilitarian walls. In fact, one of the traditional subjects for such carvings is the sauna itself. The style is typified by its minimalist aspects. If the view is of the exterior of the sauna shack, the design may be balanced by as little as a birch tree and maybe a pile of cordwood. If the view is the interior, perhaps the rendering will consist of nothing more than the walls with a bench and a wooden water bucket on the floor. Roy did not pursue the hobby long enough to claim mastery, but several of his better attempts still grace Smeds family homes and vacation cabins.

Roy passed away of a heart attack 6 January 1980. His remains were buried at Reedley Cemetery. Mildred survived him. She spent over a quarter of a century still in the family home, among other things helping to care for her mother-in-law, who did not go into a rest home until 1999. Mildred herself did not require full-fledged elder care until way up into her nineties. She passed away at age ninety-seven at a Fresno County care facility in the wee hours of 14 January 2010.

Descendants of Roy William Smeds with Mildred Bernice Stone

Click here to go back to Roy’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.