Sylvia Alice Smeds

Sylvia Alice Smeds, daughter of Jakob (“Jack”) Smeds and Anna (“Annie”) Rautiainen, was born 21 December 1905 in San Francisco, CA. She was the very first grandchild of Herman Smeds and Greta Mickelsdotter Fagernäs.

Within the previous few years before her birth, Sylvia’s parents had each, as part of separate journeys, left northern Finland and immigrated to the United States. Most of the couple’s friends during their early years in America were recent arrivals from Finland, Sweden, and Norway. The year before Sylvia’s birth, Jack had parlayed his skills as a goldsmith -- skills gained during an apprenticeship back in the mother country -- into a position as a jeweller at Shreve & Company, the large jewellry and kitchenware firm located near Union Square in San Francisco. This job meant a secure financial situation for the family while Sylvia was young, in contrast to the experience of some members of the city’s immigrant class.

The benefits of the situation in San Francisco kept the family based in the city for years. One of the byproducts of this choice was that Sylvia grew up in a wholly different environment than had her parents. It is safe to say that as an adult, Sylvia was equipped to embrace the values of 1920s and 1930s urban America, whereas Jack and Annie probably wished the world would change more slowly and -- as they would have characterized it -- properly.

Sylvia was a baby at the time of the 1906 earthquake. Her parents put her in her perambulator and fled to the haven of Finnish friends in Berkeley while their home in San Francisco burned in the great fire. No member of the family was physically hurt in the incident, but aside from the perambulator, the only possessions saved from the inferno were their clothes and whatever they could carry with them when they crowded onto the ferry. One valuable item they managed to save was the silver coffee pot given to Jack and Annie as a wedding gift by Shreve & Company. After being allowed back into the devastation, Jack pulled a handful of other items, including a charred plate and spoon, from the rubble that had been their home. Given the short supply of housing in the immediate aftermath of the destruction, the family lived in a tent for a number of weeks or even months.

Even before Sylvia’s birth, her father had embarked upon a plan to develop a farm three miles north of the small town of Reedley, Fresno County, CA. In January, 1908, Jack hired his father and his brother Vilhelm (“Billy”) to move down to that acreage and assist in that effort. The farm was viewed as the family’s home-to-be. Sylvia and her parents and her sister Lillian, born nine months after the great quake, often visited this land to help with planting and harvesting and just to get away from the city, but it was not until 1915 that Jack and Annie began residing in Reedley year-round. Meanwhile they lived in a series of rentals in San Francisco. These dwelling places were all within the core (or central) neighborhoods of the city, but they seldom stayed more than two years at any given address. The longest stretch was from late 1908 or early 1909 on into 1911, when Jack and Annie were live-in caretakers of the Finnish Temperance Hall in the Noe Valley neighborhood.

After the move, Sylvia continued her classroom life at Fink School, a rural one-room school north of Reedley a mile east of the farm. (The photograph at right shows the 1915/1916 student body -- or perhaps the one from the following year -- posing in front of the school. Sylvia is in the second row, fifth from the right. Lillian is beside her, sixth from the right.) She went on to graduate from Reedley High School.

Reedley was quite a change of venue, but it was a place to thrive. Sylvia was the “big sister” and “big cousin” among the non-adults at the family get-togethers and seems to have had the confidence that went with being the eldest. The gaggle of youngsters included her brother Lawrence, born in 1917, and cousins Roy Smeds, Alfred Smeds, Agnes Strom, Karin Strom, and Frances Strom, a quintet born from 1913 to 1920. Sylvia more than any of her generation had the chance to get to know her parents’ friends and neighbors, most of them being immigrant Finns who had come to Reedley no earlier than 1905. She was a big part of the many parties down at the river below the farms. The photograph at left captures Sylvia in the midst of one of those fun days. She is the left one of the two teenagers near, but not quite at the top of, the “human pyramid” made up of relatives, neighbors, and friends. Sylvia is the one who looks like she is in the midst of losing her position and causing the pyramid to collapse. The names of all of the participants of the pyramid can be found in the biography of her uncle Billy Smeds elsewhere on this website.

Inasmuch as Sylvia had been spent nearly ten years as a denizen of San Francisco, she retained a familiarity and affection for the city. She felt completely comfortable returning there in order to enter nursing school. Her parents were more cautious, not wishing her to go alone. However, soon Lillian was old enough to go along with the same purpose in mind. Jack and Annie stepped aside and let their offspring be fledged from the nest. Sylvia and Lillian received their training at San Francisco General School of Nursing as part of the Class of 1927. (Below right, Sylvia and Lillian pose with their diplomas in hand.) In 1926, Lillian married Harold Quinney, known as Bob (and as Bobs). Sylvia shared an apartment at 165 Julian Avenue with the newlyweds through 1928 into early 1929, departing shortly before or shortly after her niece Barbara Quinney reached her first birthday (which happened in February of 1929).

Sylvia found quarters at 1405 Franklin in the Van Ness Avenue neighborhood bordering Pacific Heights, entering a nearly three-year-long phase as a single working woman living on her own, supporting herself as a nurse. For a short stretch in 1931 she lived at 1850 Sacramento Street in the same part of the city, but not long. Her single days were ending -- somewhat late for a woman of her generation. She did not become a wife until she was almost twenty-six years old. By then, Lillian was already five years into her marriage. Sylvia’s bridegroom Daniel Joseph Heagerty, a reporter for the San Francico Call newspaper. A son of Irish immigrants David D. Heagerty and Ellen D. “Nellie” Cronin, Daniel had been born 20 January 1905 in Oakland, Alameda County, CA. Most of his childhood had been spent in San Francisco. The wedding took place 31 October 1931 in San Francisco. A little over a year later, Sylvia and Daniel became parents of daughter Diane Margaret Heagerty. Diane was to be their only child. At first they made their home in the Hayes Valley neighborhood, not far from where Sylvia had lived while single. By the mid-1930s they had relocated to the Richmond District -- Sylvia had by then lived in many different parts of San Francisco, but never before so far west. The lure may have been the Quinneys, who also came to that side of the city.

At some point during the stretch from her nursing school days to her young-mother days, Sylvia spent an interval working in a tuberculosis ward at San Francisco General Hospital. It is fair to say this sealed her fate, because eventually the disease took hold of her. However, it appears that it lay dormant at first. Sylvia appears to have wrapped up her stint on the ward under the impression she had dodged the bullet. She accepted a job as head nurse at Dinuba Hospital in Dinuba, Tulare County, CA. The family found temporary quarters in the basement of the hospital itself. This sort of living arrangement had been common in the medical profession in earlier times. Today doctors with a year or more of seniority on a hospital staff are still called residents, but in the old days, that was a literal description. They lived at their workplaces. Dinuba Hospital still had such accommodations in the 1930s.

The town of Dinuba is a few miles south of Reedley, so the shift brought Sylvia back into the sphere of her parents and other relatives -- very much so, because the plan was for her husband to become a farmer. This was a plan that had its merits. Jack Smeds was now in his mid-fifties. He was ready to off-load some of the burden of farm management onto younger shoulders. Sylvia’s brother Lawrence was just finishing high school and could not bring the same maturity to the role that thirty-year-old Daniel supposedly could. Moreover, the move to the San Joaquin Valley was good for the financial health of the Heagerty household, guaranteeing both Sylvia and Daniel jobs. The Great Depression was in full swing and opportunities for secure employment were not to be taken for granted.

Saying good-by to the basement quarters at the hospital, Sylvia and Daniel and little Diane moved to a house at the juncture of Reed Avenue and Peter Avenue, just a quarter of a mile east of her parents’ farm. The place was home to them for a shorter span than expected, though. One autumn night, Sylvia’s sleep was disturbed by a pitter-patter noise she interpreted as raindrops falling on the roof. She woke up Daniel at once because too much moisture would ruin the raisins drying on the trays in Jack and Annie’s vineyards -- raisins that represented the main source of annual family income. The trays needed to be covered at once, even if the work had to be done in the dark. But Sylvia and Daniel soon realized the noise was not raindrops, but the crackling of flames. The house was burning. They got themselves and Diane to safety, as well as rescuing some of the furniture, but the house was a total loss. (Diane would remain nervous about fire for the rest of her life.)

The burning down of the house was symbolic of Daniel’s attempt to be a farmer. The fact was, his upbringing had been thoroughly urban and he didn’t adapt well, nor appreciate, the agricultural lifestyle. Worse yet, he and his parents-in-law rubbed each other the wrong way, no doubt for many reasons including Jack and Annie’s dim view of liquor consumption versus Daniel’s Irish and cosmopolitan attitude toward the subject. Lawrence Smeds had perhaps the greatest reason to resent Daniel’s presence. In the absence of a brother-in-law poking his nose in, Lawrence was positioned as the heir apparent of the family business.

How long this tense situation might have gone on is hard to say. Daniel kept trying to play his part. On the positive side, Sylvia was able to switch to a job as an office nurse with Dr. Dietrich Wiebe and Dr. Menno Gaede in the town of Reedley, a welcome change that removed her from the stress of hospital nursing. Awkwardness aside, the family dynamic might well have remained unchanged for many years. But by the end of the 1930s, the TB manifested. Matters therefore reached a point of crisis.

Hoping that treatment might make a difference, Sylvia moved into Wish-I-Ah, a tuberculosis sanitarium at Auberry, Fresno County, in the lower foothills of the Sierra Nevada about thirty miles north of Reedley. This left her unable to care for Diane. The little girl had often been supervised by her grandma Annie while her mother was at work and her father was out in the fields. Annie and Jack offered to continue this arrangement on a full-time basis, but they had a condition: their son-in-law had to leave.

(At left, Sylvia sits with her sister Lillian on the bluff of the Kings River, either on the farm of Jack and Annie Smeds, or the farm of Billy and Marie Smeds. Sylvia is the one in the striped blouse. This photograph was taken during Sylvia’s final year of life.)

It is easy to imagine the ambivalence felt by Daniel in accepting these terms, and Diane’s distress at losing the daily presence of both her mother and her father. The ultimatum was a severe step for Jack and Annie to undertake. From an outside perspective it might seem to be the actions of a set of strict and interfering grandparents. Suffice it to say Jack and Annie knew the arrangement would be best for Diane. Jack and Annie looked at Daniel and correctly saw a person who would not be a good enough father without his wife there to add her contribution. His issues were undoubtedly deeply rooted. He had lost his own father at age four. His mother had never remarried. Therefore Daniel had not had a male role model from whom to learn how to be a proper father. Daniel did leave. He returned to his life in San Francisco, taking refuge with his sister Mary and brother-in-law Emmett O’Brien. At first, he resumed his life as a journalist. Then as war loomed, he took a job as a shipping clerk. In late May, 1942, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. He was sent overseas, spending much of his hitch in North Africa. Diane remained in the full-time care of her grandparents for six years, from age seven to thirteen.

Through the early 1940s, the tuberculosis was held at bay. However, it couldn’t be stopped. When it became clear that further institutionalization was not going to positively contribute to her situation, Sylvia “came home to die.” She did not, however, physically move into her parents’ home. To do so would have increased Diane’s exposure. Also, Sylvia may well have resented the way her folks had kicked her husband out. So instead, Sylvia accepted the invitation to stay with her uncle and aunt Billy and Mary Smeds. Their home was located on the very next piece of acreage to the north along the river bluff, only a short walk from Jack and Annie’s. Billy and Mary were willing to accept the risk of TB exposure, perhaps in part because they were putting only themselves in danger. Both of their sons were married men by then, living in their own houses with their own families. However, as a precaution, Sylvia slept in the enclosed back porch rather than in the main house.

Sylvia’s condition grew worse. She succumbed 22 June 1946. Her remains were laid to rest at Reedley Cemetery. It was the first burial there of any of the family aside from her grandfather Herman Smeds, who had died in 1914. Now in the 21st Century hers is one of many Smeds family graves that can be found there.

With her death, Daniel Heagerty regained custodial rights, and asked Diane (shown at right) to come live with him. She did so, spending her teens and early twenties as a resident of San Francisco. Daniel proceeded to fulfill Jack and Annie’s worst nightmares. He was such an awful father -- a criminally bad father -- that Diane refused to let him so much as meet her own children. The final straw came in the latter part of the 1950s when Daniel threatened to kill his new son-in-law. Diane made a life for herself and her family in Santa Rosa, CA, maintaining contact with the Heagerty side only through her aunts and cousins. (By contrast, she and her immediate family were often to be found spending time with her Smeds relatives.) Daniel, estranged from his progeny, finished out his days in San Francisco. His last occupation was as a salesman for Wilson Sporting Goods, a job he kept for twelve years. He died of lung cancer in San Francisco 15 July 1974 at the Veteran’s Administration hospital on Clement Street. His remains were interred three days later at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma, San Mateo County, CA.

Diane was asked why she had agreed to live with her father in 1946. She explained that number one, she felt as though she was supposed to go with him. He was after all her only surviving parent. Number two and more critical, no one in Reedley actually said out loud they loved her and wanted her to stay. This was an unfortunate miscommunication. Annie in particular was heartbroken that Diane was leaving. But both Jack and Annie were victims of their cultural upbringing. Stoic natives of the Far North, they had been raised to believe it was inappropriate to show strong emotion or be demonstrative with affection. At thirteen, Diane was in the midst of adolescent insecurity. It was the very point in her life when an overt display of love would have made all the difference. Instead, Jack and Annie depended upon quiet and indirect gestures such as making sure Diane had plenty to eat and had clothes on her back and was kept under their vigilant supervision -- which Diane perceived as actions they might be taking simply out of duty. The result was tragic.

Descendants of Sylvia Alice Smeds with Daniel Joseph Heagerty

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