PORTLAND, Ore. — Glenn Smith stood 6-foot-4 and Sherrie Ashcraft says whenever her dad walked into a room, he took it over. The attention turning away from the gentle giant and always focusing on others.
"He loved to ask people about themselves; what they did, what they liked. He was a kind of guy that took a lot of time with other people. He did a lot of mentoring," Ashcraft said of her dad.
Glenn Smith met his wife Shirley when he was 16 and she was 14. They fell in love and married after college. Ashcraft says her mom would joke that since they were married in 1949, they were 49ers and had struck gold.
"He loved my mom so deeply and so well for all those 70-plus years. He showed us how to love other people. How to love your spouse, how to love your children. There was just so much of him that was so deep that way," Ashcraft said.
Smith loved the outdoors. He used to fish at Hagg Lake. Ashcraft says her dad didn't catch anything, but would always scare the fish away when he dropped his line in. He worked for the U.S. Forest Service for 33 years and volunteered for the Coast Guard Auxiliary for 41 years.
"He was an amazing man. Gave us a home life that was really neat because he was with the forest service and got transferred a lot," Ashcraft said.
She describes her dad as a prankster and remembers one time when her dad played a harmless trick on her mom.
"He had this one time when my mom had a tube of toothpaste and they had their separate tubes. Hers was almost out and every day he would put a little dab of toothpaste on her toothpaste tube. So she thought she kept getting more and more out of it and it turned out, he was just kidding her," Ashcraft remembered.
On March 20, Ashcraft took her dad to a Newberg hospital to be tested for the coronavirus. They heard back later that evening that he had test positive. Eight days later, the 91-year-old died at 11:24 p.m. by himself. Side-by-side for more than 70 years, Shirley wasn't allowed to be with him.
"She couldn't be in the bedroom with him. Here's this couple that have been married over 70 years and the last week of their life they can't even be together. That's what tore me up the most," Ashcraft said.
In Portland, artist Jan Dwyer was painting a heart for each victim of the coronavirus and hanging them on the outside of her house as a way to honor every life lost to the virus.
"I'm just trying to represent humanity," Dwyer said.
Little did she know, the 14th heart belonged to Glenn Smith. She remembers painting it because it's her favorite colors. It also happens to be Glenn's, too.
"I was really hoping that the heart that turned out to be number 14 would feel right to the family, that it would actually honor their dad and granddad the way I would want mine to be honored," Dwyer said.
Ashcraft said the heart is a perfect symbol of her dad. The blue she feels represents his time in the Coast Guard. The green his time spent working for the U.S. Forest Service and the different mixed colors that look like Earth surrounded by a heart are her dad's personality.
"He had a love for everyone," she said.
The hearts on the outside of Dwyer's house represent a number, but one heart, number 14, will always be Glenn Smith's heart.
"I thought how blessed we were by her to have that representation that just captured him and she had no idea," Ashcraft said.