Thelda Naomi Callihan Smith
1/15/19 – 4/25/15
She came to class one day and realized that she had forgotten to memorize a poem for recitation and told the teacher so. But during the course of the other children reciting their poems, she succeeded in memorizing hers and, at the end, asked to recite it, which she did perfectly. The teacher told her to stay after class.
She told Thelda that anyone with that good a mind needed to have it challenged and that she intended to do that from then on out.
The teacher, Ms. Colwell, became a mentor and a model for Thelda. She bought Thelda’s dress for her senior prom. She brought Thelda home overnight to memorize her graduation poem.
Thelda was voted most valuable student her senior year and was the editor of both the school newspaper and the yearbook.
She was the first woman in the family to complete high school, an achievement which happened despite strong skepticism within her family about formal learning, especially when a farm had to be run during hard times. Some late evenings, Thelda went into the cold back room with a lantern, after having come home from school and having done all her household chores, to stay up late and do her homework before going to sleep. Some winter days, she walked behind Grandpa Leson, stepping in his footprints in the snow, as he made a path for her to the school house.
Of all the wonderful teachers throughout Thelda’s life, Ms. Colwell was the magnet and the muse who drew her toward the self-expression that Thelda so evidently desired.
She loved to learn. Just as the ocean everywhere tastes of salt, says one scripture, so, the truth tastes everywhere of freedom. The truth sets free, but it is not freedom to chase the pleasant or avoid the painful nor to idle while others still have burdens to bear. Rather, it set her free to engage more fully in the sorrow and suffering, as well as joy, of those around her. She cared for all of her brothers and sisters, with a special tender spot for Alton, born with severe impairments that had taken many long hospitalizations to alleviate.
The hard times of the country and region, and the family misfortunes, gave Thelda a sense of the needs that we all have and the importance of doing her part – and then some – for the shared good.
She often quoted her father, Leson, reassuring Hazel, that, as long as they had spicewood tea, potatoes, and applesauce, the family could make a dinner. She always remembered herself and Anna being stood up on Grandma Miller’s tea boxes to do dishes, before they were able to reach the sink on their own. She and a friend, Betty Hammer, when they had 1 cent between them, would go to the store and buy a stick of gum to share.
She worried and fretted about all whom she loved, beginning with her family and extending outwards a considerable distance. She was a famous and faithful correspondent with innumerable people, and she enjoyed the process of keeping in touch in this way. She kept her brothers and sisters close through the years and added some of their children as friends.
Ms. Colwell married Judge Wright of Bedford, who became Thelda’s first employer, where she served as his legal secretary during the war.
Thelda married Kenneth Leroy Smith in December 1947. In January 1949, Alton died in an auto accident; Grandpa Leson died in December of the same year. Thelda could not imagine then how Grandma Hazel and the remaining children would survive. Miraculously, they did, and flourished, too, bringing children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren into the world.
From her early years, she developed a strong sense of the injustice done to outsiders and to the oppressed. She transmitted to us the grief she had felt in 1927 at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian anarchists. She deplored the state execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Jewish intellectuals. She imbibed from her parents – and passed along without cease – a sense of hospitality and compassion. She exchanged herself with the other person, and immediately sympathized. One of the enduring lessons of her young years was the family opening its door to “Old Mosey,” an itinerant Jewish peddler and tinker, every time he would show up on his travels. He would sleep behind the kitchen stove. The entire family would go to church on Sunday and leave him behind, like a visiting uncle.
Over the years, it seemed that the world come to her. And these visitors saw, each of them, something of themselves reflected in her. Often they thought they identified their own heritage in her. “She is good peasant stock! She must be Italian, to be that strong!” Or: “She is a Yiddisha Mama.” She provided hospitality and friendship to young men from Northern Ireland, Catholic nuns from northern Mexico, Israeli pacifists, U. S. war resisters, and South Korean pro-democracy agitators.
She had a deep and abiding relationship with Annie, a French woman who chose the path of Islam and married a man from Yemen. She loved women who stood up for themselves and did not let others decide on their limits or self-definitions. That is surely a tradition that Marcy has carried on, much to Thelda’s pride.
Her connection with South Korea began when two little guys entered her life in 1983 and 1984. Noh Wan Kyu (our Caleb) came on the scene like a little tornado, moving too fast for himself and all the rest of us, literally butting heads with walls in his haste to get at life.
Lee Chae Hoon (our Galen) entered more thoughtfully and carefully, developing quieter relations with people, based on imagination, a slower pace, a certain kind of winsomeness.
She loved learning, and she loved teaching. Through Galen, she came to know the Han-Heng family. The need of the older girls (Isabelle, Oliva, and Madeline) to be tutored was a gift to the teacher in Thelda. She also saw in their family the close-knit and supportive ties that had marked her childhood on the farm.
Galen also brought Aiden into Thelda’s life. She always told her only great-grandchild that “You could not be a better boy!”
The other great, late opportunity for her to teach was the Jennersville Church of the Brethren, a congregation that Thelda and Kenneth entered, surprised by the joy of the relationship, a group of people striving to have “the mind of Christ,” a spirit of mutual love. Her talents were recognized and welcomed there as warmly as she loved having found a home for them.
She is remembered for her creative lessons and her enthusiasm and for the deep personal relations she fostered. Children were known to refuse to graduate from her class. Khalil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.” This was she.
She heard the ocean of truth moving in others. She had an abundance of truth in her, a super-abundance of love. People recognized that when they met her. It is the truth that transcends boundaries, words, definitions, cultures. It is a fluid thing that cannot be contained, only allowed to move in and out of us, to and from us.
Even her non-harming was like that. She did not have an agenda or strategy or ideology. She just fundamentally, in her depths, knew – and acted on the realization – that we are all transient creatures, headed too soon out of this life. How then can we ever hurry another creature along? (You only had to watch her persistently herding a fly out the door of a summer afternoon to gain this insight for yourself.)
She would occasionally quote a variation on the Middle Eastern proverb: “What comes from the mouth reaches the ears, but what comes from the heart reaches the heart.”
The truth transmitted heart-to-heart, in loving-kindness, in tender-heartedness: This was the practice of her life, her beautiful career.