Dorotha Mae Smith

Long-time Chadwick resident and community booster, Dorotha Mae Smith, died April 17, 2013, at Manor Court in Freeport at the age of 101. Born in Dixon, Illinois, in 1911, Dorotha lived almost her entire life in Chadwick and the Northwest Illinois region except for a number of years in Butte, Montana, and Harlan, Iowa, and the years of her service in the Coast Guard during the Second World War.
As a result of that service, Dorotha, known to many of her friends and family as Dot, was for a time the oldest living war veteran in Carroll County. She was the first female commander of the Chadwick American Legion Post, and the second woman commander in the state of Illinois.




Honored for community service by the Masonic Lodge and the DAR, she was instrumental in establishing the Chadwick Public Library and served as trustee of the library for a decade. She compiled the Chadwick High School Alumni Directory, served as co-Chairman of the Bi-Centennial Celebration, and as Coordinator of the Chadwick Centennial.
A graduate of Frances Shimer College, Dorotha taught school for a number of years in the Chadwick – Milledgeville area, and following her military service was employed at the Savanna Army Depot for 26 years. She served on the board of directors for the Farmer’s State Bank of Chadwick and Mount Carroll, the Rolling Hills Progress Center, and Timber Lake Playhouse. Visiting actors and directors at the playhouse frequently lived with her in Chadwick during their time at the theater. In 2010 she was elected to the Timber Lake Playhouse Hall of Fame.
With former Chadwick High School teacher, Frank McCann, Dot was an important force in the Chadwick Boosters Association, which provided lights for the high school baseball field using poles from the defunct ski jump at Terrapin Ridge.
She was a 50-year member of the Eastern Star and served as Worthy Matron, and she was an active member of the Carroll County Council on Aging, the Carroll County Historical Society, and was a charter member of WIMSA (Women in Military Service for America) and the Oakville Country Club.



She was preceded in death by her husband Jewell Reynolds Smith, Sr., her parents, W. J. and Eva (Brink) Schreiner, and a sister Bethel. She is survived by a sister, Jean Unzicker, of Rockford, IL, a son, Reynolds, and his wife, Linda, of Durham, NC, and a grandson, Lincoln, of Boston, MA.
A funeral service will be held at 10:30 a.m., Saturday, April 27, 2013, at the First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Chadwick. Burial will be in the Chadwick Cemetery. A memorial fund has been established in Dorotha’s memory.

---------------------------------Dorotha Mae Smith Biography--------------------------------
Dorotha Mae (Schreiner) Smith was born November 24, 1911, in Dixon, Illinois, the first child of William John (better known as W. J. or Will) Schreiner and Eva Elsie Brink, whom her grandchildren called Naneen. Her parents had been married in Dixon, and they held the ceremony at the Brink family home, 627 N. Ottawa Ave., on a Saturday, as her mother recorded in her diary. The day was December 3, 1910, and on this date Eva also began her diary, which gradually turned into many diaries that she kept on and off there are some missing decades for another 35 years. Reading this diary with my mother, Dorotha, was a great source of pleasure in her later years. These diaries were transcribed and typed by Everett Brink, to whom our family owes a great debt of gratitude.
Dorotha’s grandparents were Wilson Brink and Caroline (Floto) Brink. Wilson was a builder and constructed the family’s large grey-block house where Eva and W. J. were married on the corner of Ottawa Ave. and McKenney St. The house is still standing and looks the same, though the house number is slightly different.
Wilson also had an interest in mechanical fabrication that he shared with his friend, John Deere. He and Deere created Deere’s first invention, the self-scouring plough. When Deere moved from nearby Grand Detour to faraway Moline, great grandmother Caroline decided this would be a good time for Wilson to end his “tinkering” with John Deere, and he did.
On January 22, 1911, Eva and W. J. moved from Dixon to Chadwick and spent their first night in their new house. Ten months later Dorotha arrived, weighing 7 ½ pounds, at 2:15 a.m., as Eva reported twice. “Babe and myself doing just fine. Like nurse very much,” she said. Four days later “Aunt Maggie and mother named babe Dorothy Mae.” The name “Mae” came from Eva’s sister Mae who had died suddenly the previous spring. The name “Dorothy” was more mysterious, and pretty early in the diary “Dorothy Mae” turns into “DM,” and then sometime before January 1, 1939, Dorothy becomes Dorotha.
Eva’s diary is very detailed about what was done each day ”DM did sweeping, I baked, cleaned two chickens, finished ironing”--punctuated by special events¾made pineapple sherbert. Everyone excited,” . . . “hard road celebration--Savanna.” “Will and Geo. learning to work auto” and by tragedies like Mae’s death. Everyone in the diary traveled everywhere by train, and often it seemed they were riding the train daily. When they talked about taking a drive, they often meant in a horse and buggy.
Dorotha’s father worked at the Farmer’s State Bank of Chadwick, and eventually became the bank’s president. Dorotha told people later in life that she had “savings account number 1.” In later years, after the bank had been sold and resold, the new owners would always want to meet the person who had had “savings account number 1.”
She graduated from Chadwick High School in 1929, and shortly thereafter enrolled in Shimer College, which in those days was a two-year school for women. She was expected to contribute toward paying for her own education out of her savings. When she completed her studies at Shimer, she became a schoolteacher and taught for several years in a one-room country schoolhouse between Milledgeville and Sterling.
After her years teaching school she made her first big departure from the northern Illinois area by heading off to Butte, Montana, where she got a job on a ranch as a cook’s helper. She told friends that the owner of the ranch often joked that he now “had a cook and a cookie.” Eventually she left the ranch to work as a desk clerk in a Montana hotel. It was while she was working at the hotel that she met her future husband, Jewell Reynolds Smith, Sr., who traveled through that area as a representative of a bus company, which I believe was Burlington Trailways, a company that was expanding in the late 1930s to compete with Greyhound. Pictures of Jewell posed by a car next to a Montana snowdrift were annotated “Smitty, 1937.”
They had a long courtship as a result of their separation during the Second World War in which they both served. Her mother’s diary reports my father first showing up in Chadwick a few days before Christmas in 1939. Eva wrote, “took girls [Dot’s sisters Bethel and Jean] to Shimer then went to Freeport to met J. R. Smith. Came down in bus from Milwaukee.” By the next day Eva was referring to J. R. Smith as “Smitty.” After that first Christmas and a very festive New Year’s (“Smitty, Dorotha, Scrub [Bethel’s husband to be Marshall DeMey] and Bethel didn’t get home from Davenport until about 5 o’clock this morn.”), Smitty begins appearing regularly in Chadwick, and grandma reports that he helped build a new chicken coop and do other useful stuff. Then the war intervened. For most of it Smitty was stationed near Blackpool in the UK with an Army Air Force squadron (he was a radio operator and trainer of radio operators). Dot enlisted in the Coast Guard (a branch of the Navy during wartime). She spent several days in a Chicago hotel drinking cream in order to gain enough weight to meet the weight requirement. She was eventually stationed in San Francisco where she “kept track of every Coast Guard vessel, including all the lifeboats, in the Pacific.” She saved my father’s side of their wartime correspondence in a large leather notebook the family still has.
A little more than a month after he returned from England they were married August 8, 1945, in LaCanada, California. They moved to Harlan, Iowa, where Jewell was hired to manage a small bus company (Davis Bus Company), which made regular trips to Kansas City, St. Louis, and other Midwestern destinations. In November of 1946, I was born. Most days I stayed home with my mother, and also attended a preschool where she taught and which, I believe, she created with one or two other mothers.
Jewell worked long hours, and when the owner of the bus company died suddenly, control of it passed to his wife. She was stubborn and inexperienced (my mother often said, “She didn’t know how to write a check!”) and the business deteriorated. Work became extremely stressful for Jewell and, combined with being a heavy smoker, contributed to a heart attack nearly as severe as the ones that killed all but one of his nine brothers and two of his three sisters. When the heart attack struck, his doctor claimed he did not send my father to a hospital because he did not expect him to live long enough to get there. His heart was ninety percent damaged, and he did not work full-time the rest of his life.
While Smitty convalesced, the family moved to Chadwick to live with Dorotha’s parents. Dorotha got a job at the Savanna Army Depot and became the main breadwinner. She would eventually work at the depot for 26 years.
In a few years the Smiths purchased the home they still own at 215 Plummer Ave. in Chadwick. Over the years Dorotha increased her career skills, taking community college courses and advancing in the civil service ranks. She also became active in the community as a member of the Eastern Star, the Carroll County Council on Aging, the Carroll County Historical Society, and was a charter member of WIMSA (Women in Military Service for America) and the Oakville Country Club.
Our family enjoyed many trips to see the Smith side of the family in Missouri, and enjoyed regular contact with my mother’s sisters and their families, as well as the families of my grandparents, the Schreiners and the Brinks. Some years we would have giant vacations at various Wisconsin lakes with both branches--the Schreiners and the Brinks--present.
After Jewell died in June of 1967, Dot became even more involved in community affairs. She became the first female commander of the Chadwick American Legion Post, and the second woman Legion Post commander in the state of Illinois. She served on the board of directors for the Farmer’s State Bank of Chadwick and Mount Carroll for 19 years. She also served on the boards of the Rolling Hills Progress Center and Timber Lake Playhouse. Visiting actors and directors at the playhouse frequently lived with her in Chadwick during their time at the theater. In 2010 she was elected to the Timber Lake Playhouse Hall of Fame.
She was instrumental in establishing the Chadwick Public Library and served as trustee of the library for a decade. She compiled the Chadwick High School Alumni Directory, served as co-Chairman of the Bi-Centennial Celebration, and as Coordinator of the Chadwick Centennial. With former Chadwick High School teacher, Frank McCann, she was an important force in the Chadwick Boosters Association, which provided lights for the high school baseball field using poles from the defunct ski jump at Terrapin Ridge. Both the Masonic Lodge and the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) honored her contributions with awards for community service.
She enjoyed traveling, either alone or with her sister Bethel, or with other friends like Mildred Miller, Velda and Emmert Zumdahl, and Jim Quest. With Bethel she went to Florida, to Hawaii, to Switzerland, and took a cruise through the Panama Canal. With Velda, Emmert, and Jim she visited Australia and New Zealand. She went to Alaska by sea, landed on a glacier in a single-engine propeller airplane, and traveled to Europe by herself and not as a part of any organized tour¾solely to visit friends in Paris and friends of Jewell’s in England during the war. She had never met these people before, but they became such good friends that several years later they visited her in Chadwick and drove to the Black Hills and Mount Rushmore together.
The voyage to Europe on which she met these people, the Rileys, shows what an intrepid traveler she was. She flew the discount airline, Icelandic, to Luxembourg, arriving nine hours late after delays and missed connections, with the banks and money-changers all closed and the only train to Paris leaving at 1:30 a.m. She forged on. After Paris, on another a train to London, a man in a fake police uniform forced her to produce her documents and open her bags. He ended up stealing her wallet and identification. Again she forged on. People always seemed ready to help the white-haired lady.
Regularly, she made the 1000-mile drive by herself to visit her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in North Carolina. Arriving she would produce gifts from her travels, coffee mugs from the Canal Zone, giant T-shirts from Australia, a cuckoo clock from Switzerland, and a little kilt and toy bagpipes from Scotland for her grandson. Once she had unpacked her bags, she began cleaning, and weeding, heedless of poison ivy. As a trip chaperone, she accompanied her grandson on a 5th-grade school trip to Quebec with poison ivy rash on her legs. At the age of 86 she did not hesitate to grab a paddle and head down a whitewater river. And later she used up her frequent flyer miles by traveling alone to Lima Peru.
For a number of years she was the oldest living World War II veteran in Carroll County, and for a shorter time was believed (at least by some of us) to be the oldest in the Northwestern Illinois area. Her health was good almost her entire life and was no doubt a major contributor to her great energy and many accomplishments. She lived on her own in her own house, and able to drive, until she was 97. Although she frequently quoted her father”it’s hell to get old”she set a great example of facing aging with humor, self-deprecation, and an upbeat attitude.