1A Boy’s Life
1923–1945
I had a lonely childhood.
—Harry Smith
As Harry Everett Smith told it, he was born into a family of theosophists and Freemasons. Though his account of his family history was always sketchy, he did want it known that his was not your normal family, and that he attributed much of what he had become to their idiosyncrasies. His father, he said, was “deeply into Mohammedanism,” his mother, Buddhism, and that his father was a descendant of important Masons. If it was true, “to a degree,” as Harry once put it, it was perhaps not quite so exceptional. The early part of the twentieth century was an era when Freemasonry was widespread, theosophy was as trendy as other forms of esotericism and early New Age thinking, and they were both widely known in the same way that a somewhat exotic book like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet could become a bestseller and be found in even the smallest of backwater communities. On Orcas Island, near where he was raised, on Puget Sound in Washington, the Theosophical Society had (and still has) a family summer camp named Indralaya.
On the other hand, Harry said that he had been sent to different Sunday schools and was exposed to a number of religions. One of his grandfathers was Catholic, and Harry said he was influenced by the beauty of the church’s ceremonies. But then he also said his grandmother was a friend of the theosophists Annie Besant and Bishop Charles Webster Leadbeater. On yet another hand, he said that after lunch on Sundays the family would gather around the radio to listen to a pastor’s sermon, after which his mother would question him on its meaning. Both of Harry’s parents declared themselves to be Episcopalians, and were buried as such.
Sometimes he pushed the family story over the edge, as when he said he might be the bastard son of Aleister Crowley, the English occultist and magician, and then spun out the scene on a beach in Washington where this coupling might have occurred. Or when he declared that his mother might be Anastasia Romanov because she had taught at an Indian school in Alaska funded by the czarina of Russia. He seemed to be joking, and on another occasion said it was a fantasy of his mother’s. But a surprising number of people took his claims at least semiseriously. With a past as murky as Harry’s, any background scenery he might provide helped prepare his various audiences for something special, even when they didn’t always quite grasp what he was talking about. What little is known about his life between birth and his early teens is largely from a number of asides in school documents, brief local newspaper mentions, and comments he dropped in interviews or to a few friends who still recall them.
What is certain in Harry’s family history, and something he was proud to tell, was that his father was descended from the distinguished family of John Corson Smith, a brigadier general in the Union Army, and later the treasurer and lieutenant governor of the state of Illinois. The general had also revived the rite of the Masonic Knights Templar in the United States after a split with the Scottish Rite Masons. His son, Harry’s grandfather, Robert Ambrose Smith, was the assistant general manager of the Pacific American Fisheries, one of the largest canneries in the world, and later the president of the smaller Sehome Cannery, where Harry’s father, Robert James Smith, was an assistant foreman.
If Harry’s mother’s family was not as notable as his father’s, it was nonetheless noteworthy. His mother, Mary Louise Hammond, was born in Sioux City, Iowa, and when the family moved westward to the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington, Mary Louise’s mother, Esther, became a teacher and a political radical, and ran for county school superintendent for the People’s Party in 1900, a time when women were not allowed to vote. Mary Louise studied to be an artist and a teacher, and taught at schools near Bellingham, Washington, where she had gone to college. After a divorce, Esther moved to Alaska in 1907 to teach at the Native American school on Afognak Island, a few miles north of Kodiak. Afognak village was the third community founded in Russian America, and the school was attended by the Alutiiq (or Sugpiat), the Native people of the island. Over the next two years Harry’s mother and her sister, Constance, joined Esther as teachers at the school. The U.S. government had taken over previously Russian-run schools, and as government employees, the Hammonds were relocated frequently. In 1910, Harry’s mother was moved to the Inuit Native school in the tiny village of St. Michael south of Nome on the Norton Sound, and again in 1911 to an even smaller village, Eagle, on the Yukon River, where she taught Han Native American children. In 1912, she returned to the United States and married Robert James Smith, whom she had met on a boat between Orcas Island and Bellingham.
Harry’s father began working as a marine engineer at various canneries and also worked in logging. He and Mary first lived on a farm on Orcas Island, and in 1921 he joined his brother in running a hardware store in Estacada, Oregon. Two years later, Harry Everett Smith was born on May 29, 1923, in Portland’s Wilcox Hospital. The hardware business never prospered, and the Smiths returned to Washington in the fall of 1924, this time living with Robert’s parents in Fairhaven, in South Bellingham, along Puget Sound near the Canadian border. Before Euro-Americans arrived in the mid-1800s, it was the home of tribes of Coast Salish–speaking peoples such as the Lummi, the Samish, and, nearby, the Swinomish.
In the second decade of the century the prosperity produced by salmon fishing and canning declined drastically from overfishing and environmental issues, and many businesses closed or downsized. Harry’s father then began working for the Pacific American Fisheries, and the Smiths moved to a smaller house in Fairhaven, where their back porch overlooked Bellingham Bay and the company’s cannery.
At an early age Harry suffered from rickets or some form of digestive disorder that resulted in spinal problems and left him a foot shorter than most of the boys in his class. He was never fit for the games and sports of other children, but he could say that he began to read when he was four by a method his mother and grandmother had developed to teach Native Alaskan students. The first thing he recalled reading on his own was Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug,” a short story that impressed him with its use of two forms of arcane language—cryptography and a text version of the speech of the Gullah people of the South Carolina Sea Islands. Harry was free to read anything in a house stocked with books on travel, music, alchemy, adventure, art, and esoterica—but not his grandfather’s secret books on Freemasonry stored in the attic, which he was once caught reading. Throughout the house there were also a number of Asian relics, such as Tibetan prints and a Japanese wakizashi samurai sword. Harry recalled that he “insisted on dressing in Chinese style until I had to go to school. I can remember weeping and wailing. And I had all these Chinese things laid out.” Harry was forbidden to play with guns, even a cap pistol on the Fourth of July.
In fall 1930, seven-year-old Harry entered first grade at the Campus School of Washington State Normal School at Bellingham (now Western Washington University), an elementary school within a teacher-training college noted for its commitment to progressive education—a child-centered curriculum focused on creativity, exploration, and freedom of movement and thought. Students raised vegetables and animals; wrote books; learned photography; built teepees, Greek temples, and model cities; and staged children’s versions of nearby Lummi Indian longhouse ceremonies. It was a curriculum that shaped Harry’s activities for the next ten years and beyond.
I had built [the Emerald City] many times as a child. I had fairly severe hallucinations, and I had built something called my Fairy Garden for many years. I actually used to see little gnomes and fairies, and stuff until I was seven or eight. It’s a typical psychic phenomenon, I mean, I wasn’t nutty or anything. All children see that stuff. Up until I was 18 or so, I worked hard on my Fairy Garden and then started building Oz.
As Harry finished the second grade, the Smith family moved again in 1932, this time to Anacortes, a town on Fidalgo Island south of Bellingham, still on Puget Sound, an area where the Swinomish, the Lower Skagit, and the Samish were again the original inhabitants. Euro-Americans were late settlers, and there was no town recognized there until the late 1800s, when lumber, fishing, and canneries turned it into a boomtown. But by the time the Smiths arrived, the depression of the 1930s and the decline in salmon had slowed the town’s progress, and Harry’s father was a night watchman of what was left of the giant Apex Fish Company.
At age nine, Harry began third grade at the Whitney School but was absent with bouts of illness for three different weeks out of eleven in his first term, then missed almost half of his classes in the second term, and though he began to improve in the spring was still absent many days in his third. Despite his missed classes, he kept up with his work and, recognizing his interest in art, his mother and father joined with three other children’s parents to find a teacher to give their children art lessons. The teacher they found, Louise Williams, was a well-trained painter and poet who was part of an arts project for the Works Progress Administration. Harry first studied with her in her studio in a sailmaker’s loft in one of the abandoned cannery buildings and later in the Anacortes Hotel. Williams encouraged her students not to copy things photographically but to create their own images. Her focus was on fundamentals such as color and structure, and she left it to the children to use their individuality on whatever they chose. Harry was serious about art and had saved all his work from his first drawings at age two. By the time he finished high school they amounted to thousands. As he grew older, he copied designs from theosophical tracts and the forbidden Freemason books, and his father taught him to draw a geometrical representation of the Tree of Life, a map of creation, the central mystical symbol used in Judaic Kabbalah, also known as 10 Sephirot. It was something he would repeat for years in various configurations.
On Harry’s twelfth birthday, his father gave him a set of blacksmith tools that had been left behind at the cannery. “He had me build all these things like models of the first Bell telephone, the original light bulb, and perform all sorts of historical experiments,” Smith recalled. He learned how to play the piano, explored classical music, and taught himself how to write down the music that he heard. By his early teens he knew how to record speech and music on a 78-rpm disc-cutting machine. The first recordings he made were of his mother singing Irish ballads, and his father, cowboy songs. Songbooks like Sigmund Spaeth’s Read ’Em and Weep: The Songs You Forgot to Remember, and Carl Sandburg’s The American Songbag were among his parents’ favorites.
Over the next three years, Harry’s health began to slowly improve, though he was still absent from many classes. Nonetheless, his grades were high, with the exception of mathematics and spelling, and by the time he was ready to enter the seventh grade, the junior high school newspaper, Searchlight, would single him out as a “scientific genius” and one of the two best artists in the incoming class. By the end of the eighth grade his achievement tests showed him to be years above his grade level. He was also on the staff of the Searchlight, and in a list of students’ “Secret Ambitions” published by the paper, Harry said he would like to “break one of the fire alarms in the hall.”
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Copyright © 2023 by John Szwed