Paula Smutny Michel passed away peacefully late on January 22, 2023, in Harmony, Minn., following a long battle with Alzheimer’s Disease. She was 83.
Paula was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on August 8, 1939, to Alice (Miller) and Ralph Stutsman, a registered nurse and an office equipment and business forms salesman. She was an only child.
She described herself as a “painfully shy and mousy child” who was “afraid of everything.” At 15, her Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Paul Schweikher asked her to spend the summer in Europe with them to help keep her 9-year-old cousin, Paul Jr. company. The trip was a life-changing experience, exposing her to the art, architecture, and history that she fell in love with and referenced the rest of her life. It instilled the desire to prioritize exposing her family to travel and culture. All of Paula’s family vacations involved learning about other cultures, historical sites, architecture, and art.
Paula graduated from high school in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1957. Two of her good friends were a black student and a gay student, who left her with a life-long commitment to civil rights, social justice, personal freedom, and sympathy for the underdogs in society. Her progressive nature and belief in the value of education and cultural enrichment drove many of her community efforts in Harmony.
She graduated from Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, with a BA in History. It was at Cornell that she met and fell in love with fellow history student, Michael Smutny who’d followed his older sister to Cornell College from their home on the south side of Chicago. She and Michael were married just after graduation on June 17, 1961.
Paula spent the summer before her senior year working as a waitress in the restaurant in the Chicago Art Institute, where she spent many hours browsing the galleries. Paula also spent a semester studying in Washington, D.C. at the Library of Congress. She loved research and the value of organized access to information which led to her decision to pursue a master’s degree in Library Science. She was accepted at the University of Chicago as well as the University of Minnesota where she attended and graduated while Michael attended the University of Minnesota law school. She gave birth to Michael Sheridan Smutny II in July of 1963 while they finished school, living in an apartment just west of campus in Minneapolis.
They decided that they wanted to raise their family in a small town, so they began the search for law firms looking for young associates. They landed in Adams, Minn., where they lived for two years and made a lifelong friendship with the very creative and musical Winkles family. In 1965, Michael was offered a partnership with George Frogner in Harmony, Minn. They quickly adapted to small town life, joining the Harmony Golf Course and Country Club where Michael’s creative inclinations and Paula’s skills as a seamstress fueled many years of elaborate costumes at the annual Halloween parties. Michael participated in several community theater projects, and Paula created many of the show’s costumes. In November of 1965, Paula gave birth to David Forrest Smutny.
Wanting to utilize her degree, Paula joined the local library board and was instrumental in helping to get the new library included as part of the construction of the Harmony Community Center. It was relocated from its cramped, former home in the fire station building. She was also instrumental in the development of SELCO (Southeastern Libraries Cooperating), which coordinated multiple area library collections together to allow for integration and intra-library loans so that small towns could greatly expand their access to more material. Paula took over as librarian in September of 1979, where she stayed until her retirement in 2001. She loved her role as Harmony’s librarian. Few things made her happier than being able to find the information people were looking for or helping students locate research material. She was “Google” to the Harmony community before the internet made information so easily accessible. She was an avid reader and loved recommending books. Her favorite genre was mysteries. She read several a week. One of the saddest aspects of her dementia diagnosis is that it robbed her of the ability to enjoy books.
In 1975, the family had finally saved enough for a real vacation, and Paula, who had always been fascinated by archeology and anthropology, wanted to visit either the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, the Inca ruins at Machu Picchu, or the Mexican Aztec and Mayan pyramids. She landed on the Mayan sites of Chichen Itza and Uxmal in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and the resort island of Cozumel. Decades later, she would volunteer to participate in an archeological dig at a native American site in northern Minnesota.
The Mexican vacation led Paula to suggest hosting a summer foreign exchange student. This led to another lifelong friendship with the Bravo family in Mexico City. The family hosted Alejandro Bravo for a second summer when Paula suggested taking the family to Washington, D.C. and Williamsburg for the Bicentennial. The following summer, Paula encouraged son Mike to spend the summer in Mexico City and Alejandro’s brother Luis visited Harmony. The family spent many vacations with the Bravos in Mexico until Michael Sr.’s death in January of 1981.
Being widowed at 41 was a devastating blow. She was supported by many friends in the community, most notably, Bunny Michel and Betty Jaeb, both of whom she would lose soon after in 1982 and 1987 respectively. In the spring of 1983, Paula was asked out by recently widowed Vernon Michel and they were married soon after, on August 6, 1983. They enjoyed many years of travel including to Hawaii, Alaska, the Caribbean, and the Panama Canal. Coming from a small family, Paula relished being part of Vernon’s large family and became an enthusiastic stepmother, step-grandmother, and eventually step-great-grandmother.
Paula had been active for several years promoting the charm of southeastern Minnesota’s burgeoning Bluff Country as a Midwest tourism destination. She and Vernon made a good team as Vernon became interested in the tourism opportunities associated with the local Amish community, and forged relationships with several Amish families, prompting the formation of Michel Farm Vacations of which Paula was a board member, and spent many years helping to develop and promote the tour and retail businesses. Vernon expanded his vision by developing the Edward Allis farmstead between Preston, Minn. and Lanesboro, Minn. as the Old Barn Resort, opening in 1990.
Always interested in the theater, Paula was a long-time supporter of the Commonweal Theatre in Lanesboro, Minn., both financially and as an avid patron and vocal champion. Paula also invested in the Quarter/Quarter restaurant to help bring more varied dining options to Harmony.
One of Paula’s proudest endeavors was a mischievous prank. She and two of her closest friends, Marietta Dennstedt and Marilyn Trouten, “kidnapped” Marvin Wilt’s scarecrow (wearing a marching band uniform), created as part of Harmony’s Fall Foliage Festival event, sending elaborate ransom notes and eventually returning it “unharmed” when their “demands” were met. The team successfully kept their identities secret for over a decade until they finally decided to reveal themselves after the years of speculation had become local lore.
As Vernon’s health declined before his death in 2010, Paula maintained her love of the arts by continuing to write local arts grants to bring visiting musical, cultural, theatrical, and educational events to Harmony. Those efforts lead to her nomination to the committee that evaluates and recommends selection of the grant applications to receive the dedicated funding from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. She also provided editorial support for the Harmony Area Historical Society’s publication of the book, “Let’s Have Harmony,” a history of the city. Paula loved Harmony dearly and would volunteer for almost any effort to better or promote the community.
Paula was endlessly proud of her sons, their spouses, and children. She loved hosting her grandchildren for their annual summer visits to experience the joys and freedoms of small-town life coming from the big cities of Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. One of her last trips before her diagnosis was to Washington, D.C. for her granddaughter Caroline’s high school graduation from the Washington International School. She visited Smithsonian museums and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water and took David and Kathleen’s two rescue pit bull dogs on endless long walks.
Paula is survived by two sons, Michael II (Jane Theodore) of Chicago and David (Kathleen Benway) of Seattle, and four adult grandchildren: Connor Smutny, Caroline Smutny, Mia Smutny, and Eli Smutny.
The family suggests that memorials in Paula’s honor be dedicated to one or more of the following:
• The Harmony Public Library (harmony.lib.mn.us);
• The Commonweal Theatre (commonwealtheatre.org);
• The Animal Humane Society (animalhumanesociety.org);
• Mayo Clinic Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center (philanthropy.mayoclinic.org)
Memorial services are pending for later this spring. Lindstrom Funeral Home is assisting the family.
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