Harriet H. Smith

LONG BEACH, CALIF.—Harriet Hull (Dr. Terry) Smith, M.D., 87, died peacefully February 21, 2007, at her home on Alamitos Bay, surrounded by her large and loving family.

She was born July 21, 1919, in Petersburg, N.Y., the daughter of Stanton Perry Hull, M.D. and Bessie (Cowee) Hull. She graduated from the Emma Willard School, took her BS in chemistry from Wellesley College in 1940, and her MD degree from Cornell University in New York City in 1943, where she met and married her husband, Stephen Smith III, M.D., of Pasadena, Calif.

In 1952 they left the East Coast permanently for Pasadena, where she practiced with her husband at Las Encinas Hospital and raised five children.

Her haven, however, was the beach house at Alamitos Bay, where she retired after the sale of Las Encinas in 1982 and her husband’s death in 1983. She loved reading, music, the theater, travel, and watching the wildlife in the bay, especially her beloved shorebirds.

She managed to tear herself away from the beach to come visit her two daughters in Vermont, mostly in the summers, but once in a while in the winter, too. She joked that her New England blood had thinned out after so many years in southern California, but she cherished the new friends she made in Vermont. She also took time to visit the Hull family plot in Berlin, N.Y., and sit a minute at the graves of her mother and father and twin sister.

Survivors include her five children: her daughter Vance Rutherford Smith and fiancé Al Wilker of Brookfield, her son Stephen Smith IV, M.D., and wife Elizabeth of Visalia, Calif., her daughter Alexandra Smith Maclay and husband William of East Warren, her daughter Michelle Smith McLeod and husband Michael of Fallbrook, Calif., her daughter, Margaret Farwell Smith of Long Beach, Calif; and by six grandchildren.

In July her children will scatter her ashes inside the Long Beach breakwater to join those of her husband.

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