Winifred Ruth Smith was born October 20, 1922 in Enid, Oklahoma to Walter and Alice (McNeely) Smith. She put herself through York College (graduating Summa Cum Laude) and medical school, becoming one of the first women to graduate from the University of Nebraska School of Medicine. She planned to become a medical missionary to China, so after graduation she went to Yale to study Chinese. There she met her future husband, Lester Bradford. When China was closed to missionaries, she was redirected to Red Bird Mission in Kentucky and then Sierra Leone, all the time exchanging letters with Lester. He joined her in Rotifunk, Sierra Leone, where they married on December 23, 1952. During their 16 years of service in Sierra Leone, she delivered thousands of babies and treated thousands of children, and they had five children of their own: Dorcas, Julie, Joel, Ethan, and Melinda.
On return to the US, she did a second residency at Earl K. Long Memorial Hospital in Baton Rouge. Lester’s job brought them to Mount Vernon, where she got back into the baby business, performing home births and founding the Mount Vernon Birth Center. Her compassionate approach to birthing revolutionized the whole birth industry in Skagit County.
After she retired from the birth center, she joined Lester for further overseas assignments in South Sudan and Pakistan, continuing her medical work there.
She was an active volunteer all her life. She was a deacon for Mt. Vernon’s First United Methodist Church (where she also sang in the choir and rang in the bell choir). Skagit Adult Day Program named the Bradford House after her in thanks for all her work. Every year, she helped people prepare taxes through the AARP. Most recently, her favorite project was Skagit County’s Family Promise.
In 2011, Winnie published her memoirs, "A Life Remembered".
Since she wrote that, she continued to be very active in her church. She eventually lost enough of her voice that she had to give up singing in the choir, but she continued in the bell choir, with a pause for several month after she broke her arm in May of 2017 after taking a misstep during bell choir practice. She continued to be active in all of her charity work and her church community.
On March 3, 2019, Lester passed away after a couple of years of slow decline due to Parkinson's disease. Winnie handled his funeral arrangements, even managing to get his brain donated to further Parkinson's research. Because of the intensity of Lester's care towards the end, we hired Gie Roa (who had worked for Winnie on the care team for Dr. Hildegaard Kretchmer) to help out, and later Amanda Morrison.
They continued to help after Lester's passing. We were very glad to have them after Winnie had a severe stroke in June, 2019. Unfortunately, the stroke happened in the evening, after her caregivers had gone home; she owned a life alert, but it was in its charger, not with her, so she didn't get treatment until Amanda found her the next morning. Immediately after the stroke, she was totally paralyzed on one side, and lost all speech. Through hard work with therapists at Warm Beach Health Care Center and after she returned home, she recovered enough strength in one side to walk short distances with a walker, and several tens of words of speech.
She took a sudden downturn (maybe another stroke), then Winnie passed away a couple of days later, peacefully at her home the afternoon of July 19, 2020. She was attended by one of her long-term care givers, Amanda Morrison.
Please go to this blog post to find links to add to a page of remembrances, see her photo gallery, read her memoirs from 2011, and find other links related to Winnie Bradford.