A few years ago in Washington Hall at Centralia College, Rev. Alta Smith swapped one hat for another, including a long white wig, as she spoke of the many roles her friend Doris Wood-Brumsickle has held in the community.
At the time, I thought, what a fun lady with a great sense of humor.
That first impression remains true after I recently interviewed the former special education teacher at her home in Centralia to learn more about the woman who led the Centralia United Methodist Church for six years. She received the second annual United Way of Lewis County’s Woman of Excellence Award in 2014 because of her humanitarian efforts, strong leadership skills and ability to mobilize women to make lasting community change.
Now 86, Alta keeps doing what she can to improve the community, as do her daughters, Centralia Mayor Kelly Smith Johnston and Stacy Ridgley, office administrator at the Centralia Church of the Nazarene since 2014. Although a retired full elder, Alta still teaches, as she did in October when she led a four-week study at the Centralia United Methodist Church on “Bringing Hope Through Kindness.” Topics included the power of kindness, finding common ground, malice toward none, and Jesus, politics and religion.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in early August 1939 to Ernie and Lois Dyer, Alta shared a few recollections about growing up in a nation at war, such as living in Norfolk, Virginia, where her father worked at an airplane manufacturer, and gathering vegetables from a Victory Garden with her mother and brother.
“My mom had a salt shaker with her, and we put the salt on the tomato and ate it,” she said.
She especially remembered a trip to pick up her father from work.
“We were going up this hill, and everybody was stopped and out of their cars and yelling and screaming and jumping up and down,” she said. “It was VJ Day. Absolute joy.”
Since she was the first granddaughter in her family, her parents named her Alta after her maternal grandmother and Samantha after her paternal grandmother.
“I’m really proud of my name,” she said.
Her parents added another son and daughter to the family, making Alta the oldest followed by Richard, Arnold and Elaine. Her father started a painting business with a good friend, Earl Sovereign, and they moved to Bingen, Washington, where business thrived with the lifting of restrictions on paint after the war. The Dyers, who raised their children as Christians and joined the United Methodist Church in 1968, moved to Vancouver, Washington, where they settled.
Alta attended Harney Elementary School and Shumway Junior High in Vancouver, which is where I attended ninth grade, and Hudson’s Bay High School, also my alma mater.
“My class was the first class to go to that school,” Alta said. “So we got to choose the mascot, the Eagles.”
She dated a young man in high school. In fact, they became engaged, but apparently, she found out only a few years ago, her father took him aside and told him he couldn’t marry her. She left for the University of Puget Sound to study home economics, graduated in 1961, and taught middle school girls in the Tacoma area, focusing on food while another teacher did the sewing instruction.
For a parent-teacher night, the teachers displayed sewing and food projects in a case, and Alta placed a cinnamon stick inside a cup of cider.
“Well, about an hour into the evening, our principal came down and said, ‘Alta, why do you have a cigar?’”
The cinnamon stick had expanded in the liquid.
While serving as a resident assistant in Anderson Hall, Alta answered a call from a young man stationed at McChord Air Force Base near Tacoma. He was seeking her former roommate, whom he’d dated. After that first conversation, Willis Smith kept calling because he liked Alta’s voice.
“I was actually engaged to a guy in the Navy,” Alta said. “He asked me to marry him before he went, and then he was a twit. He never wrote to me. And of course, in those days, you couldn’t call. Long distance cost too much.”
The fellow on the phone, Willis, a Missouri native who grew up in Idaho, where his father ran the company store for a paper mill, kept calling and inviting her out for a Coke, even though she was engaged to someone else.
“He didn’t give up, so finally I said, ‘All right.’ And the first moment I saw him, I thought, ‘If I feel this way about you, I can’t be engaged.’”
She broke off her engagement to Preston, despite attempts by his family to keep them together.
“As it turned out, I liked the family more than him,” she said with a chuckle.
Ten months later, on June 3, 1961, she married Willis, an easygoing friendly man with a great smile who worked as an Air Force auditor assuring quality control. In August, he was reassigned, but Alta had already signed a contract to teach at Baker Junior High.
“He wanted me to come, and I was scared to death to break that contract,” she said. “My co-teacher said, ‘Well, Alta, just tell them you’re pregnant.’”
At the time, pregnant women were prohibited from teaching. We’ve certainly come a long way.
“But I didn’t do that,” Alta said. “I wasn’t going to lie, so I just went and talked to the principal.”
They released her from the contract, and she moved with her husband to Kyushu Island in Japan, where they rented a small house across a grassy area from their landlord.
“It was just so much fun,” Alta said. “The people still were dressed in traditional dress. The house had tatami mat floors. It’s woven rice shaft.”
Everyone slipped off their shoes in the home’s entry and donned slippers to wear on the raised mat floor.
“So we had this little dog. We couldn’t train him. We would put him outdoors to pee, and he wouldn’t bother with that until he came back.”
