God and Country
Her fealty to her God and to her country draw compound interest every day of her still vital and energetic life. She carries out her busy days as if aging merely has been an abstract distraction. Her tall twin towers of religious and patriotic belief expand daily in strength. To prove that religious devotion and patriotic duty are vitamin healthy for a body, Mrs. Smith, at 82, easily could pass for 62. To demonstrate that the vigor in her veins isn’t confined to mere appearances, she stood — didn’t even lean — for the first 45 minutes of a visit by thefrontpageonline.com. Her two sons, Lt. Greg Smith of the Culver City Police Dept., and Maj. Mark Smith, U.S. Army (ret.), have spent the entirety of their professional lives in uniforms of service to their community and their country. Those two noble accomplishments alone allow Mrs. Smith to swell with a reservoir of pride that has eluded tens of millions of other mothers. Mrs. Smith’s son the police officer has spent all three decades of his law enforcement career in Culver City. Major Mark of the Army lives in Thailand, and he is engaged in rescuing POWs and MIAs. Mother Smith is also outspoken. Of Major Mark’s work, she says: “Our government knows exactly where (the POWs and MIAs) are. But they don’t want the shame of being told that, hey, we left these people behind. Finding them has been Mark’s interest for the last 20 years.” The elder Smiths also are the parents of two equally successful daughters, Nan Nordella and Jackie Staley. In the same week the far-flung Smiths were preparing to celebrate Veterans Day, a true family holiday in their homes, three Student Trustees at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa banned the Pledge of Allegiance from their meetings. The Smiths and the community college boys both probably would be horrified by the other’s way of life.
Memories at Home
Mrs. Smith’s Torrance home is sui generis, a veritable military museum, a paradise of precious artifacts. Family photographs and paintings densely cover the walls. In many, the men and women are in uniform. Scores of figurines and assorted mementos remind Mrs. Smith of her sunniest days, empirical evidence of the legacy that she sought, she taught, and she has won. The atmosphere in which the Smith children were raised, wreathed in devout, unswerving halos of their uncompromising parallel responsibilities to God and country, is the story of the Smith family. How did it happen?
Living a Portable Lifestyle
Mrs. Smith’s story does not necessarily start in the beginning. She was 17 and her husband was 20 when they married in 1941, and he already was serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps. During the next four years of traipsing from base to base, the Smith’s two daughters were born, and Mrs. Smith became increasingly fed up — “resentful,” she admits — with the gypsy lifestyle. “When the war was over,” she says, “I didn’t want anything to do with government, with flags or anything. I never thought anymore about it until… One day, I went to church, and not long after that, I found the Lord as my savior. That led me to (a non-denominational) Bible college, at The Great Commission School in Anderson, Ind. We went because the Lord called us, my husband and me. The theme of the school was to make missionaries who would go tell about Christ. At Bible college, our president, the Rev. Paul Bellheimer, was so adamant about our duty to vote. ‘Everybody has to vote,’ he said. ‘This is our Christian duty,’ he said. ‘If we don’t get out and vote, we will never have what we need in our country.’ That stayed with me.” Almost from the first ringing words by the college president, Louise Smith became a convinced believer. “My husband felt the same,” she said. “He would have voted because he knew that was what he was supposed to do, not particularly because of who was running. He had a sense of duty, and he thought like a military man.”
Separate Paths
During those post-war years in college, with a family to support that was fast headed toward four children, Mr. Smith took a part-time position as an insurance investigator. “The Lord really called me to (serve as a missionary to) the Indians, more so than my husband,” Mrs. Smith says. “He went along, and he agreed. But he didn’t have the real calling to do what I did,” at the Pilgrim Holiness Indian School outside of Albuquerque, where the family lived for a number of years. Mrs. Smith taught at the weekday school, led Bible classes on reservations and also taught Sunday school. Even though the Smiths left Bible college before graduation to accept a calling to New Mexico, they carried the main lessons about leading a Christian life with them. “Brother Bellheimer instilled in us that it was our Christian duty to teach our children what God and what America were about,” Mrs. Smith said. “America was built on God. Our laws were built on him. We are a unique people, very unique, and that is what we taught our children. That is what we believed, that we are unique.”
The Underpinnings of Their Lives
Mrs. Smith said her children were raised to be true to three central pillars — “Serving the Lord, the 10 Commandments and the laws you obey. Do not disobey the laws. That was one rule we had. We will stand behind you 100 percent if you are accused wrongly, we taught our children. But if you get into it, on your own, and you know it, we will not lie for you. You will pay the price.” Discipline and consistency were fused together as the dual spine of their child-raising. “We had the same standards for our girls as we did for the boys,” Mrs. Smith said. Crucial to their daily lives was the notion of concurrence between mother and father. “My husband backed me in what I was teaching,” Mrs. Smith said, “or I wouldn’t have done it.” Sure, the Smiths were strict, she said, but it wasn’t at all grim, and the four children remained on the moral and ethical paths recommended by their parents.
Choosing a Career
When her sons, Greg and Mark, were teenagers, was it her dream that they spend their professional lives in uniform, as testimony to the fundamental teachings of their family? “Being in uniform was not my dream,” Mrs. Smith said. “My dream was that all of them would become missionaries or preachers. On the other hand, if God leads, he does not call all of us. They can be a testimony, a missionary, in their own lives. We did not demand or encourage particular careers for them. That was up to them. Mark joined the Army at 17. I had to sign. I wasn’t happy. I was not happy. I wanted him to finish his senior year and go to college. Also, these were teen rebellion years. I remember one time… They were not allowed to run the streets, to go anywhere without permission. One night, Mark was so angry. He got mad about something. It’s hard on teenagers. It’s hard to raise teenagers. We did not have (the troubling conflicts others may have). What helped was that my husband and I held the line. We didn’t say, all of a sudden, ‘We are going to church every Sunday.’” Mrs. Smith’s unrelievedly animated voice dropped to a whisper for emphasis. “That was a way of life,” she stressed. “It started when they were babies. Well, the two girls were 2 and 4 when I first started going to church. That was the way it always was, for all of them.” She beamed. “And they all go to church today,” Mrs. Smith said proudly.
God and the Military
“The main lesson we wanted to teach our children was to make God the center of their lives. This life is only a place of preparation. Live for Christ, because one day heaven is going to be your home.” Mrs. Smith said that the concepts of God and military are complementary. “The Bible, you know, is full of battles,” she said. “That is the only way I can do away with whatever happens in the military. God says, ‘Okay, here is the enemy. Destroy the enemy.’ God also says, ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ But ‘thou shalt not kill’ allows you to defend yourself. Look at what is going on today with all of the killings, killing wives, killing husbands, killing or children. And abortion. We kill them before they even pop out. The minute they pop out, then it’s wrong. We have to draw a line someplace. The ‘someplace,’ in my opinion, is the day of conception. So we have a double standard. In fact, we have a double standard for nearly everything. My goal has been that all of my children, and all of my grandchildren, would make heaven their home, in the end.” Speaking of double standards, it annoys Mrs. Smith that Major Mark’s daughter, who is leaving the Air Force after 8 years, is responsible for covering the moving expenses of her husband — because those are the rules for women. Expenses would be taken care of by the service if her husband were the one leaving. “Double standard,” hmphs Mrs. Smith.
A Matter of Custom
Maj. Mark Smith, who learned the precepts of patriotism well from his parents 50 years ago, follows an important custom on periodic visits from overseas to see his mother. First thing every morning, he proudly raises two American flags in front of her home. Family customs/laws that the Smiths taught their four, have been passed down the generations. At parades on Veterans Day and other patriotic occasions, her grandchildren, quite without prompting, stand when the American flag passes by.
What Used to Be
When Louise Smith was a young girl in the Middle West, growing up around Lima, Ohio, in the 1930s, she remembers selling poppies, which used to be a staple around the holidays formerly known as Decoration Day, Armistice Day and the 4th of July. “Everyone in that generation was thrilled to be American,” she said, while grousing about the way that many contemporary Americans give a pass to Veterans Day. “They didn’t want to be Germans. They didn’t want to be French. They didn’t want to be hyphenated nothing. They wanted to be Americans.” Nearly 90 years after the War to End All Wars concluded, and more than 60 years after the most popular war ended, an extraordinary citizen and churchgoer such as Mrs. Smith is the subject of a holiday story because her experiences are so different from millions of other modern Americans. What happened? “I’ll tell you,” Mrs. Smith said. “Americans began to let down, as far as their faith is concerned. Faith is what our country was built on. I am convinced the United States is the only Christian nation. This land was built on God. Our laws are based on the 10 Commandments. Some people don’t like to admit it, but it is true. One problem is that Christians don’t get up and say anything.” Mrs. Smith’s expression softened into whimsy. “I wish I was 30 years younger,” she said. “I really do.”
Postscript
If she were in charge of America for a day, Mrs. Smith said she would restore the Bible to public schools. “It is time for us to get back to the old basics,” she said. “We don’t have to teach religion, but prayer should be allowed in our schools. We must allow the discipline that the Bible requires of us. Obey. Obey. Obey. Nobody wants to obey today,” Mrs. Smith said, ruefully. “When you teach, ‘You obey me or else,’ I don’t care. That builds respect, which is something else that is missing. If students know they have to obey today, and you are not going to change tomorrow or the next day, they will be fine. You can’t do any discipline today. That’s a problem. If we got back to the basics of disciplining our children at home — the school doesn’t have to do it — we would be fine. Kids can stand up today and call you names. And we are not supposed to do anything about it. That is the old, old devil, coming right out of the pits of hell. Isn’t that ridiculous?”
Postscript II
Louise Smith is the subject of a Veterans Day Eve story because, in a climate of anti-religious and anti-patriotic fervor, she stands, almost singly, as the quintessential traditional American. She executed the most fundamental duty of a parent, to teach her children the rewards of right and the consequences of wrong. Her four children have passed those identical moral values to their children. By secular and religious yardsticks, this is the human definition of a successful parent.
