Walter Herman Johnson

Walter Herman Johnson, son of Maria Elisabeth Smeds and Carl James Amos Johnson, was born 8 March 1910 in Berlin, Coos County, NH, where he was subsequently raised. Throughout his childhood the family lived in the same house at 232 Denmark Street. (Walter is shown below right at age four standing in the yard of that residence.) This made for a settled and secure environment and this no doubt had an effect on Walter’s sense of confidence. His parents both survived until long after he was an adult. His father kept the same job. Walter also had the steady company of his sister Esther (nicknamed Esta), four years his senior. If there was any unsteadiness, it had to do with his other siblings, whom he did not get to know nearly as well as he did Esta. His sister Thelma died of diphtheria in 1916 at only eight years of age. His half-brother James John Johnson was so much older than Walter that he was out of the family home by the mid-1910s. Walter’s half-sister Alvilda was raised mainly by her maternal grandparents (a set of grandparents not shared by Walter), and was only part of the same household with Walter for a few years in the second half of the 1910s.

In its way, Berlin was a colorful place to grow up. Its economy was dominated by production of paper from wood pulp. The mills of Berlin led the industry throughout the eastern United States during the years Walter spent there, resulting in vibrant local prosperity. The locale could also boast of a distinctly multi-cultural flavor, in part because of the large number of Scandinavian immigrants, and in part due to the proximity of Québec, Canada. So much French was spoken in Berlin the town was considered to have its own dialect of the language. The diversity was so integral that denizens labelled Berlin “The Switzerland of America.” By all accounts, Walter had a great time in his youth. He was one of the popular guys in his high school and in the local DeMolay chapter (youth Masonic lodge) and high school chorus. He distinguished himself most of all in theatre, with parts in several high school stage productions including the senior play. However, Berlin being a company town, Walter judged that if he remained, his life would be a bit too cut out for him. Accordingly, he left at age eighteen and never lived anywhere near New Hampshire again. His decision to go was a case of excellent timing. The Great Depression would slam the town hard. The main employer, Brown Company, would go into receivership. Layoffs would become rampant, with only such long-standing laborers such as Walter’s father assured of keeping their jobs. Walter chose the right time to get away.

His escape was well-planned and amounted to such an adventure that its various high points were reported in the local newspaper and in the Brown Company newsletter. Walter went in tandem with his buddy Lawrence M. Holt. The latter, two years older than Walter, was another of Berlin High School’s musical standouts. The two youths -- sometimes affectionately referred to in the news coverage by their nicknames, “Yonnie” for Walter and “Fatty” for Lawrence -- spent the summer of 1928 refurbishing a bright red 1919 Ford convertible in the yard of Lawrence’s parents’ home on Main Street. Finally they were ready. They set out on the morning of August 20th. They had a destination in mind -- the home of Walter’s aunt Augusta Smeds Malm and her husband Fred in Eureka, CA, where they had an offer of lodging and employment at Malm’s Dairy -- but they weren’t about to waste the opportunity inherent in a coast-to-coast journey. Their daily average travel distance was only a little more than 160 miles because they tended to make detours in order to check out various landmarks. Among the places they visited were Niagara Falls and Yellowstone Park. Inevitably, they lost further time due to car repairs and to rain -- the convertible not representing the most weather-worthy of conveyances. The pair spent just over sixty dollars for gasoline, a fortune in their terms but an expense they could not avoid and luckily, one they had planned for. They economized by skipping motels and camping whenever possible, often by simply pulling over when the sun set. They fixed most of their meals themselves rather than allow restaurant stops to drain their funds. The total trip cost was a manageable $172.00. The final leg consisted of a 589-mile sprint on the fifteenth of September, leaving from a campsite east of The Dalles, Oregon at midnight and arriving at the Malm residence in Eureka at six in the evening. The journey had taken twenty-seven days and twenty-six nights.

Walter spent at least two years working and living at the dairy. Lawrence Holt did so as well. For Walter, it was the first chance he’d had to know his mother’s kinfolk. Naturally it was easiest to become acquainted with his aunt and uncle and his first cousins Mildred Malm, Kelly Smeds, and Howard Smeds, all of whom lived in Eureka. But he was also now only a few hundred miles, as opposed to a few thousand miles, from his other Smeds relatives on their farms near Reedley in Fresno County. Surviving photographs serve as evidence he visited Reedley a number of times in the 1930s.

His duties at the dairy were low-level at first -- things such as washing bottles and delivering milk. His responsibilities expanded in due course, but only to a degree. The fact was, there wasn’t much of a future in store for Walter at Malm’s Dairy. Mildred Malm was of an age to marry, and indeed would soon do so, meaning that Augusta and Fred naturally were leaving the door open for a son-in-law to eventually take over the business. Had it not been for the companionship of Lawrence Holt, Walter might have moved on after no more than a year. After that, he hung in there a while longer because the Great Depression set in and he knew it would be foolish to give up a secure job. But eventually he got antsy. Lawrence Holt would live out a full life as a resident of Eureka -- becoming part of a popular Humboldt County dance band, marrying in due course, and eventually settling in for a long stretch as a store proprietor selling liquor, magazines, and cigars. But Walter decided he would head off to business school and then see where he landed next. One thing was certain, though. He had no desire to return to Berlin. He had fallen in love with the west coast.

Walter’s wanderings took him as far north as Pendleton, OR -- this may have been where he attended business school. Eventually he decided that San Francisco, CA was the right milieu. He arrived there no later than the end of the 1930s. He found a job working in the credit department of an industrial insurance company. This suit-and-tie sort of occupation, which would be the rule in his life from then on, very much set him apart from the other men of the Smeds clan, who proudly pursued blue-collar jobs. The contrast shows in the aforementioned photos of Walter visiting his cousins at their Reedley farms in the 1930s and 1940s. Walter is always shown in his formal ensemble, even though every other male is wearing work clothes or casual wear, or at most sports jackets and ties. Walter must have found his sartorial aspect so vital to his success in life he didn’t care to dress down even during his “off-duty” moments. The photograph of him at left, taken when he was in his late teens, shows he had a metrosexual grasp of stylishness even at a young age, though at that point in life the statement he was making was different -- he appears to have wanted to cast himself as the debonair rogue or trendsetter. This is probably his high school yearbook senior picture. Back when Walter was in high school, it was almost a given that young men would wear suits and ties for their yearbook photos, and yet here he is without a jacket or tie and with his collar casually open.

In the spring of 1940, Walter married Joyce Darlynn West, daughter of railroad engineer Hershel Lea West and Edythe J. Storjohann of Omaha, NE. Joyce had been born in Omaha 5 Sep 1919 and had been raised there. Rather than staying in Nebraska and becoming a housewife, she appears to have determined she would be happiest as a career woman. She had come out on her own to San Francisco and obtained a job as a key punch operator at a cold storage warehouse. She would continue to be involved in the cold-storage industry (as in fresh produce, milk products, and meat) for years to come -- in part because nature conspired against her hopes of becoming a mother. Walter and Joyce made a beautiful and spectacularly well-dressed couple. It is easy to imagine they would have produced incredibly good-looking kids, but that did not happen.

Walter and Joyce would both continue to be employed in San Francisco, she in cold storage administration and he as a sales manager for Westinghouse, the large home-appliances manufacturer. Eventually, though, they chose to reside outside the city. Before the end of the 1940s they became based at 817 Kathryne Avenue in San Mateo, CA. The town also became home to Joyce’s parents and brother Robert, they having followed Joyce’s example and given up on Omaha.

Walter and Joyce separated in 1956. This brief article from the society-news section of the 6 June 1956 edition of the San Mateo Times and Daily News provides a glimpse of the event: “Mrs. Joyce D. Johnson and her mother, Mrs. Edythe West, moved from Shoreview to their home at 1757 Washington on May 29. Mrs. Johnson is with the Pacific Fruit Express in San Francisco and moved in on her three-day vacation. Mrs. West is formerly of Omaha, Neb.”

The couple did not manage to patch things up, the end result being a full divorce. It was not as bitter as some divorces can be -- for example, Walter remained on good terms with his brother-in-law Robert Lea West and the two and their households got together occasionally in the years to come. Joyce went on to marry warehouse manager Anthony John (aka Antonino, aka Tony) LaTorre (1917-1997), son of Phillip (Filippo) LaTorre and Mary Grazia Alioto, which among other things made her a stepmother. However, she played no active role in the upbringing of Tony’s kids as even the younger of the two was coming of age before Joyce became a member of the family. For that matter, Joyce was not entirely able to be an active part of their lives later. Her health (perhaps in the sense of mental health) took a major turn for the worst in approximately 1970. She stopped travelling and in fact often did not leave the confines of her home. She passed away as Joyce LaTorre 13 December 1996.

Walter spent a couple of years single, then wed Irene Louise Gammond, daughter of Walter Charles Gammond and Edith Eleanora Owre. Irene -- sometimes known by the nickname Ronnie -- had by that point lived a varied and well-travelled existence. Born 15 May 1907 in Sedgewick, Alberta, Canada, she had gone on to be raised in Alberta province. Over the first fifty years of her life she became a wife at least twice, first in young adulthood to Philip Lorimer Bergh, another native of Alberta, with whom she had produced at least one child, a daughter. After their divorce, she went on to marry Joseph Rafael Phillips, that wedding taking place 8 August 1942 in Maracaibo, Venezuela. Whether this union ended in divorce or in Joseph’s death (he was fourteen years older than Irene) has not yet been determined. In any case, her last name was Phillips when she wed Walter 4 October 1958 in San Mateo County. How she and Walter met is not obvious. The marriage certificate is chronologically the first public record found that places her within a thousand miles of the San Francisco Bay area.

Walter and Irene remained husband and wife for seventeen years, slightly eclipsing the length of time he was married to Joyce. Some time during the first half of this period the couple left the San Francisco peninsula in favor of Santa Barbara County, CA. In Santa Barbara, Walter took charge of the local Bix Service Company outlet. Bix was a franchise specializing in the stripping and refinishing of furniture. This was quite a left turn in terms of professions -- or maybe not. Walter is unlikely to have been engaged in the manual-labor aspect of the business. He was surely still a salesman. The difference was that now he was selling services rather than manufactured goods.

One of the lures that may have brought Walter to southern California was the presence of his half-brother James Johnson, who had moved out with his wife Dagmar to the greater Los Angeles area in the late 1940s after an interval spent in the Deep South. James died in 1969 in Oceanside, Dagmar in 1970 in Woodland Hills. Two of their four children had become Californians, though, so as Walter continued into his sixties, he at least had the comfort of a couple of biological nieces within short driving distance, though how much he kept in touch with them or not is unknown.

Ultimately the marriage with Irene faltered. They divorced in Santa Barbara County in October, 1975.

Walter passed away 8 May 1978 in Carpinteria, Santa Barbara County, CA. As mentioned above, former wife Joyce survived him. Former wife Irene did so as well, though only by a bit more than three years. Irene does not appear to have married again after the 1975 divorce -- the last name on her death record is Johnson. She left California in favor of Vancouver, British Columbia, which is probably where her daughter was based. She died in the Vancouver suburb of Langley 11 October 1981.

This group photograph was taken in 1949 during a visit Walter’s mother, sister Esta, and niece Margaret Ness (not shown) made to the west coast. The venue is the farm of Roy and Mildred Smeds north of Reedley. The four men left to right in back are Billy Smeds, Jack Smeds, Charley Strom, and neighbor A.A. Westerlund. Left to right in the front standing row (the row immediately behind the squatting younger members of the family) are Mildred Smeds, possibly Fred Malm, Mary (Smeds) Johnson, Marie (Rautiainen) Smeds, Amanda Strom, Annie Smeds, Mildred (Malm) Lieber, and Opal Smeds, with an unidentified boy, possibly Kyle Lieber, off to the far right by the car. Left to right squatting in front are Esta (Johnson) Ness, Bob Quinney, Lillian Quinney, Alfred Smeds, Gayle Jost (the toddler), Erwin Jost, Frances Jost, Walter Johnson, Jo Smeds, and Joyce (West) Johnson.

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