Memories of a Father: Leo W. Schmidt
Before this weekend's Father’s Day, the Forum talked to the children of Leo W Schmidt, who passed away on May 26 at 98.
He is survived by his daughters Doris Schmidt Michaels and Barbara Schmidt Cruz, his son Leo H. Schmidt, five grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren.
Schmidt was born in 1925 in Poland. As a teenager, he fought on the Russian Front. His daughter, Doris Schmidt Michaels, said her father witnessed firsthand the terrible atrocities of war as a young soldier who suffered in the trenches in the freezing cold winter of 1945 and somehow survived.
“After World War II ended, he somehow found his sister Edith, a nurse in West Germany, and together they found their parents in a small town called Müden in northern war-torn Germany,” Schmidt Michaels told the Forum. “After the destruction of war and family losses, my father wanted freedom in America.”
In 1947, Leo W. contacted his uncle, Pastor Roleder, who had married his father’s sister, Selma, and was living in Lodi, California. Leo W. moved to Lodi and brought his family over from Germany. It was there that Schmidt met his future wife, Mathilde Apelt, who was studying the production of cotton for her thesis IN 1952.
“The first thing she experienced in America was riding a donkey to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back up again,” Schmidt Michaels said. “Next, she took a Greyhound bus to meet her friend’s family in Lodi.”
During that time, Leo became smitten with Mathilde. He took her to Yosemite and then to San Francisco, where he proposed to her on the Golden Gate Bridge after knowing her only three days. The two were married on January 30, 1953.
After starting their family of four in Lodi, Schmidt found a new job opportunity as a Tool and Die Machinist in San Lorenzo and settled down in Castro Valley in 1963 in their new home on Walnut Road.
Schmidt’s son Leo H. remembers his father’s involvement in Boy Scouts, multiple family trips to Yellowstone, Washington State, to visit family and one memorable trip to the Lick Observatory on top of Mt. Hamilton.
“We drove up there on the steep road, and we came across another car coming downhill,” Leo H. said. “My father was so kind. He decided to find an open spot to let the other car pass, so he backed up a bit. I was looking over the edge of the window and could see the steep drop-off, so I was scared. But he found an open spot, and the car could go by.”
In 1975, Leo W. bought a place up in the mountains. He and Mathilde spent weekends working inside and outside the cabin. “It was a refuge and a lovely place to go,” Leo H. said. “In the last 10 years, while they could still walk, we would walk to Lake Alpine and hike in the surrounding hills as far as we could and then come back.”
In 2013, Leo W. and Mathilde lost a son and grandson. Marty Schmidt and his son Denali died together in an avalanche on the K2 Mountain in Asia on July 27, 2013, while attempting to be the first father/son team to summit the second-highest mountain in the world.
Mathilde passed away at the age of 100 on January 4, 2022.
The family is now preparing to lay their father’s ashes to rest next to their mother’s ashes at the family gravesite in Murphys, California, sometime in July.
“Now they can rest in peace together again as a married couple just shy of 70 years, along with our dear brother Marty and his son Denali,” Schmidt Michaels said. “Their spirits surround us and are in our hearts forever.”