by: DrBillTellsFamilyStories
Pete came from a larger family. His mother had died in 1923, and several of his siblings were still at home with their father, in 1938, when Pete and Eileen got married. These included, Toots, Irene, LVene, and Betty. Sisters Pauline and Max were already married and lived separately from the Smith family.
Eileen was the daughter of Paul and Dorothy (Sorensen) Kinnick. She had an older brother, Leo (recently married to Ida Marie Bell) and a younger brother, Edward - always called Buzzy (or Bussy, as she wrote in her diary).
Pete and Eileen (Kinnick) Smith were married on St. Patrick's Day, 17 Mar 1938, and lived on a farm north of Coon Rapids, Iowa.
Pete was a farmer. Born in 1915, he was a farmer all this life. He viewed himself as a farmer and nothing more. In his mid and later years, of course, he was very active in the community, serving on the School Board, and as an REC Director. In his younger years, he was part of the group that brought in telephone lines and consolidated the rural one-room country schools into the nearby town. He was much more active in community affairs than he would ever admit. Cancer took him from us at much too young an age, in 1977.
Eileen was a "Coon Rapids girl" - she lived in and around Coon Rapids her entire life... and was very proud of that. He Dad worked in the local bank, so she first thought of herself as the "banker's daughter." When she married Pete, the farmer, she considered herself the "farmer's wife." She had some other ambitions in her mind, I believe, but she was almost loyal to those two roles, even after those two men in her life were long gone. She loved music, played the piano, taught piano lessons for many years. Later in her life, this was her life and her identity, to herself.
I was there first-born son, on 1 Jul 1939. The photo is a year or so later, of course.