Page 59 - People & Places In Time

Recept for my birth at Visalia Hospital
Dr. Feldmyer coming to our house with his black bag when I was sick. Main Street, officially named Pine Street, continues as the downtown of today, though commerce has spread to newer segments in a town that has grown.
One block north of Main or Pine Street is Palm, the street where my par- ents’ first home sat within sight of my grandparents’ home on ‘B’ Street. That was the home my father, along with his sisters was raised in, and it’s the house where I will be spending much time throughout my early years. Grammar school, friends, the movie theater and anything else that could define my first ten years lay with in this small world of a few blocks. Later on, I will begin high school just two blocks from these homes. The same high school that my dad and his two sisters walked too for four years.
So, this is the quiet, protected landscape I was brought into; a small town
in the center of the San Joaquin Valley, in the middle of California. I was born to my father, Emerald (Bot) Smith and mother Dolores Annette Mitchell-Smith.
Begining at Visalia Municipal Hospital
Gerald Alan Smith would be introduced to life at Visalia Municipal hospital, for the grand sum of $122 and 36 cents. This happened on one day in July of 1945, a Wednesday, the 16th day of the month, a day that would change the world for all time; on this day the first atomic bomb was exploded in the Nevada desert. As my birthday there is little of significance, but as the start of the atomic age, the signifi- cance is forever. The world through no fault of my birth, lost something on this day and I’m not sure we yet know if anything really good was gained for mankind.
You can say that I haven’t gone far in seventy-five years, as I now live less than a mile from the hospital where I was born. My mother and my grandfather were born in the same hospital, though in older buildings. As for my father, a mile- wide circle would surround his birthplace, several homes, schools, a business and
a burial plot in Exeter. The intimacy of these circumstances is not a concern to me because of the heritage left by the Mitchell family that first settled in Tulare County in the middle 1850’s and the Smith family coming to Exeter in 1909. When the heri- tage of my extended families in Fresno, Visalia and Exeter is considered, along with their part in the history of the San Joaquin Valley and not just Tulare County and Exeter, then this place in the middle of California is as much a part of me as few that live here can say. For any of us our family history began in places beyond this valley, it’s only a matter of from where and when they came. Time will find me buried here. Many of my closest family have passed on and are buried in Tulare, Fresno, Visalia or Exeter. Others have moved on to places outside the area, even beyond this valley and state. I will always wonder if I might have been better served by moving on . . . I suspect that I’ll never know.
I was brought from the hospital in Visalia to the first home I would know. It was a small house in Exeter that was rented from our neighbor Mrs. Carroll by my dad while mom was in the hospital giving birth. When dad returned from the war, they had initially lived in a rented house near Visalia High School. Now they will join other young families of the greatest generation returning to a new life in Exeter
the post war baby boom is begun.
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