Gifted storyteller Pam Smith dies at 93
On Sunday, Yuma lost a gifted storyteller. The longtime writer not only inspired and influenced her readers and others in journalism, she touched virtually everybody she came in contact with.
Pam Smith died Sunday after suffering a stroke in February. She had recently celebrated her 93rd birthday. She was born April 1, 1925, in Jordan Valley, Ore., to Edward and Minnie (Cook) Ogren. She was the 13th and last child of the family.
Her mother named all her children after flowers and Pam’s birth name was Pansy. She changed it to Pam when she first married.
Smith grew up in the rural area of Boise, Idaho, and has childhood memories of “being short, having freckles and having to wear long stockings to attend Cole School ... Just getting to and from school was a challenge because we did not have school buses. And yes, we did walk through snow.”
During high school she worked at Murray’s, a drive-in restaurant. “I had more than one spillover when the driver thought it was fun to raise the window about the time I was ready to put the tray on,” she wrote.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Smith was hunting jackrabbits with her nephew and his friends. They heard the news on the radio.
During the war Jimmy Stewart trained at Gowen Field Army Air Base and Smith served him coffee at Murray’s. She interviewed him years later when he was in Yuma to film “The Flight of the Phoenix.”
She did her part during the war. At Gowen Field, she drove in the motor pool and had a two- and a half-ton truck checked out to her.
She began her reporting career in high school, taking a journalism class and writing school news for a local paper, the Boise Capital News. “I always wanted to be a journalist,” she told then Yuma Sun reporter Darin Fenger for a story on her retirement in February 2009.
When she was a high school junior, she interviewed Eddie Rickenbacker, an American fighter ace from World War I. The story ran on the front page of the newspaper the next day.
She graduated from high school in 1943 and went to college, but her father died suddenly and she dropped out.
She went to work as a reporter for the Idaho Daily Statesman. Then a year later she moved to Honolulu, Hawaii, where her sister Vi lived. She met JD Morse, a sailor from Hailey, Idaho, and they married. They had a son, Vance, who was just over 4 months old when he was killed in a hunting accident.
Smith worked for the Honolulu Advertiser as a proofreader, then as a reporter for the Star-Bulletin.
She married Bill Messenger, a photographer, and in 1948 their daughter Pam-Anela, was born in Boise. They moved to Polebridge, Mont., during the winter of ‘49. Smith called it the “worst winter they had had in 40 years.” They were snowed in from December until May.
They loaded the children, a dog and a cat and headed south. “We shed coats along the way, and when we came down Highway 95 and I saw the palm trees in Gila Valley, I sighed a big, ‘Yes!’”
They arrived in town on Dec. 7, 1950. In Yuma, they ran a photography studio and camera shop in several locations, the last one at the old Lee Hotel. She also studied at Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, Calif., and become a professional photographer.
After she divorced Bill in 1959, Smith went to work at the Yuma Sun. It would be the first of several stints at the newspaper, the first one lasting 11 years.
She was editor of the women’s page and the food and church editor. She also worked for many of the newspaper’s weekly publications, including time with the Valley and Foothills News and The Prospector. Smith also wrote for a weekly called the Advantage.
She left the Sun after becoming frustrated with the low pay women received. “She was a feminist before they coined the term,” her daughter said, noting that she repeatedly asked for raises and the editor would dismiss them, saying, “Oh, you’ll get married again.”
Smith and a friend ran a weekly called Tiempo for almost a year.
“Smith earned quite a following with her articles about local events and activity listings. But over the years, Smith’s way with words blessed practically every section of The Sun, plus many of its publications that came and went as decades passed,” Fenger wrote.
She liked to focus on the common people. “I like to look around and find some different aspect about a person’s life. I don’t like car wrecks or politics. I don’t like violence. I prefer stories about people, talking to families and finding someone that has really accomplished something in their life. And maybe no one else even knows they exist. To me that’s fun. Too often the little guy does not get the pats on the back that he should.”
In 1965 she married Henry Smith on the same day she was born, April Fool’s Day, and they celebrated their 40th anniversary before he died.
She suffered other heartbreaks, her biggest being the death of her son Vance, who was killed by a drunk driver when he was 20.
Her daughter did well, earning a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. Messenger and husband Howard Martin have two sons, Jeffrey and Michael.
Life as a single mother raising two teens was not easy. Smith nearly always had second jobs. She had jobs tending bar and at the dog track, library, the hospital in community relations and briefly in a shop selling baby clothes.
She continued to work full time up into her 80s. “Some of it has been a necessity. But writing has always been a therapy for me,” she said.
She never wanted to leave Yuma and joked that there was “too much sand in my shoes to leave!” Smith remained active and in good health until she suffered a stroke in February.
“Somehow she always managed to not just do her job and maintain the society graces of life but do a lot for people,” her daughter said.
Smith supported many charities by regularly donating her time. She was a member of the Yuma County Fair Board until her death and an active member of the Beta Sigma Phi sorority for over 50 years.
Smith leaves behind many friends and colleagues who respected and admired her. They remember her as feisty with a sense of humor.
Vicki Pinkus first met Smith in 1971, when she went to work at the Sun in advertising. Pinkus describes Smith as “the grandest of ladies, the epitome of what it stands to be a great woman, way ahead of her time, and a damned fine reporter ... Her quick and witty sense of humor matched her compassion for other ... Age and time never diminished any of those qualities, and we are better people on earth for having known and loved her.”
During the time Cynthia Marshall worked at the Sun from 1989 to 2009, she and Smith forged a friendship. She would tell stores about being a female reporter in a male-dominated newsroom. “Pam had incredible stories and obviously perseverance to not let being a woman make her any less deserving of her place in the newsroom. She had a ‘zest’ for life and could get along with any generation ... I don’t think there was anyone who had a negative thing to say about Pam Smith.”
John Courtis, now executive director of the Yuma County Chamber of Commerce, recalled how they met in the fall of 2000. The Sun just quit doing Desert Farm & Ranch as a bi-weekly publication and she was out of a job.
“I wanted to restart the Prospector Magazine as a home-delivered Wednesday ‘tabloid’ that would also be a carrier for grocery inserts with local soft news ... So I set up a meeting with Pam, and within 10 minutes we are laughing and joking about the crazy newspaper business, real knuckleheads we’ve worked for, dumb and fun things we’ve done, our past lives, the works — having a ball ...
“Pam was simply the best partner I never had to manage, and we stuck with that Prospector Magazine for years after that! I love Pam and will miss her very much.”