Lasting Memories

Hershel Dwight Smith
March 6, 1924-April 21, 2016
Palo Alto, California

Family and friends are mourning the loss of Hershel Dwight Smith, a retired doctor who died April 21 of heart failure. Hershel was 92 and lived in Palo Alto for 61 years. He practiced obstetrics and gynecology in the Bay Area for 34 years, retiring in 1988. He was a warm, generous, optimistic man whose great passions were medicine, science and technology. He served for many years as a volunteer for the Friends of the Palo Alto Library (FOPAL), where he and his late wife Helen were both known for their passionate love of books and reading. When rare books were donated to FOPAL, Hershel took great joy in selling them on Amazon to raise money for the library.

Hershel came a long way from his humble beginnings in Depew, Oklahoma, the small farming community about 50 miles southwest of Tulsa where he was born in 1924. His father, Aldon, worked in the oil fields and lived in a boarding house where he met Hershel's mother, Jessie, working there as a dessert chef. Aldon and Jessie raised Hershel and his younger sister, Vivian, on a farm, where everyone pitched in. Hershel had idyllic memories of growing up in rural Oklahoma and often regaled his family with stories about his beloved dogs, Bulger and Rex, the fates of various animals and crops each year and how fascinated he was with how mechanical things worked.

As a child Hershel suffered from bouts of rheumatic fever, which forced him to stay in bed for weeks at a time. He always said this was where he developed his love of reading -- adventure stories (his favorite was "The Swiss Family Robinson"), but also anything about science or technology. He also loved cartoons, Walt Kelly's Pogo strips and children's movies. He took no shame in watching all the new Disney features, sometimes on the same day he might be reading a new book by Richard Feynman or a tract about ancient religion.

When the dust storms swept through Oklahoma, the Smith family's crops failed three years in a row. Like thousands of others caught in the dust bowl, in 1938, Hershel's family packed up everything they couldn't sell and went west, heading for Liberty, Arizona (near Phoenix), where Jessie's brother Clarence lived. Vivian and Hershel rode in the back of their pickup truck, with canvas pulled over the top. Vivian remembered that when they arrived in Arizona and their father pulled the canvas back, Hershel sat up, looked around and said, "If this is Liberty, then give me death!" The family settled in nearby Buckeye, where Jessie ran a grocery store and cabins they called the Smith Motor Court and Aldon got work as a night watchman at a cotton gin.

In 1942, after graduating from high school, Hershel joined the U.S. Army Air Forces (later called the U.S. Air Force), in which he served as an armorer/gunner on B-29s. He was disappointed when the war ended just days before he was to be deployed to Okinawa. On the G.I. Bill, Hershel attended UCLA -- the first person in his family to go to college. He rented a room in the Beverly Hills home of Helen Virginia Rising, who had two children from a previous marriage, Philip and Paul de Barros, and was getting a teaching credential at UCLA. When they started dating, they thought it only proper that he move out! They were married in 1951 and the following year moved to Menlo Park, then to Palo Alto, in 1954. Helen worked as a school teacher and then as a district consultant in the Ravenswood School District while Hershel attended medical school at the University of California, in San Francisco, then did his internship and residency at Kaiser Permanente.

Hershel had wanted to be a doctor since childhood, but during his training discovered he preferred expectant mothers to people who were sick, so he chose obstetrics. He opened a private practice in 1959, first in Los Altos, then in Sunnyvale. Over the years, he delivered more than 4,000 babies at El Camino Hospital and always vied to deliver the first baby of the year -- which he often did. In 1964, with Philip and Paul off to college, Hershel and Helen bought a house on Hamilton Avenue, where they lived together for 50 years. A lifelong Republican, Hershel admired Dwight Eisenhower so much he changed his middle name to Dwight. He also admired Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, survived a near-fatal gunshot wound, in the summer of 1967, when a young man high on amphetamines shot him during a grocery store robbery. Hershel was in surgery for more than seven hours. (Age apparently mellowed his politics. In the months before he died, he said he was going to vote for Hillary Clinton.)

Once his medical practice gathered steam, Hershel and Helen started to travel, exploring Europe's great cities, museums and gourmet delights -- food and wine being two of Hershel's other passions. They also visited China, Mexico, Canada and various regions of the United States, often traveling with Helen's brother, Lucien, a career Army officer who was stationed at various times in Rome and The Hague. After retiring, Hershel became an avid wood worker and a passionate gardener whose backyard in Palo Alto boasted dozens of varieties of fuchsias. Their beautiful backyard and expanded, much-beloved den, where they sat in their big chairs reading and watching movies and TV, surrounded by Helen's paintings and art from around the world, became their sweet retirement redoubt.

Hershel and Helen wanted to have children together, but after two pregnancies ended in miscarriages, they realized their Rh factors were incompatible. Hershel, however, raised Helen's sons as if they were his own. When they were in elementary school, he took them to visit the farm where Vivian's family lived, outside Buckeye, an eye-opening experience those two suburban boys would never forget. Back home, he taught them how to play chess and poker and pinochle and always competed fiercely, never "letting" them win. (He loved to win at bridge, too.) He was a great talker and liked to explain things. (According to a personality test, he would have made a good preacher.) Once, when Paul was 10 years old, Hershel sat him down and explained in detail how electricity was generated by turbines in dams, then proceeded to explain how jet engines worked. (After they left home, both boys were shocked to discover that not everyone knew the earth was 93 million miles from the sun and that the speed of light was 186,000 miles per second!) He encouraged Philip's desire to collect stamps by taking him to stamp auctions, where Philip learned he could get some interesting stamps just by offering to pay the minimum bid. Hershel also had a way of calming down an anxious or worried child about health or other issues by being optimistic and by discouraging pessimistic views. He used that same bedside manner with his patients, and he was proud of it. He didn't like to write letters much, but during the Vietnam War, he wrote a long letter to Philip, encouraging him to come home from a year off in Europe, concerned that he might get drafted. Hershel could also be irascible and opinionated and loved to argue -- especially about politics. But when the argument was over, he didn't hold a grudge. Technology never ceased to fascinate him. When the computer revolution happened in Silicon Valley, he was eager and ready.

In 2001, Hershel and Helen hosted the extended family in Kona, Hawaii, for a wonderful celebration of their 50th anniversary and 10 years later reconvened in Palo Alto for a double celebration of their 60th anniversary and Helen's 90th birthday. Helen, who served as president of the Palo Alto Art Club, died in 2014. To be closer to family, Hershel moved this past November to a retirement community in Seattle.

Hershel is survived by his sister, Vivian, and her five children; and by his stepsons, Philip, of San Diego and Paul, of Seattle; four grandchildren -- Jason, Jessica, Jillian and Heleya; and one great-granddaughter, Payton.