For 53 years, family wondered what happened to Modesto maverick. Now DNA gives an answer
Nearly 53 years ago, an eccentric, off-the-charts-gifted snow skier from one of Modesto’s prominent pioneering families seemingly fell off the face of the earth.
Gardner Smith, then 39, had been elusive even before the last time anyone heard from him in late 1969. A free spirit and former Olympics hopeful, he had embraced a nomadic pursuit of winter between Earth’s hemispheres. He forsook the Modesto family that raised him, and another that he’d started, to travel the world in search of the best snow and the next heart-pounding adventure.
Nearly 53 years ago, a metal placard with the words “Unidentified Male, May 1970” was installed at an obscure grave containing the remains of a partly decomposed body recovered from a ditch near the summit of a Colorado mountain.
The modern reader can see where this is going, but putting the pieces together back then was next to impossible. Gardner’s survivors today are working through emotions of sorrow and final farewell thanks to the miracle of forensic genetic genealogy, with an assist from a cemetery groundskeeper.
“Relief,” said Stacey Elving, his niece, describing the family’s mood at discovering the truth after five decades of mystery. “Closure, relief and mourning.”
Born in 1930, Gardner Paul Smith was the son of Paul and Bernita Smith, descendants of a proud family with roots reaching to Modesto’s founding. Gardner’s younger brother was Armour Smith, a respected Modesto city councilman from 1998 to 2002 and Stacey Elving’s father.
Skiing was a big part of the Smith family culture. Paul and Armour created Boreal Ridge Ski Resort near Donner Summit in 1965, and their families still hit the slopes to this day.
But for Gardner, skiing was more than a passion. It was his life.
His racing exploits stretched from the University of Nevada at Reno to the Olympic trials to friendship with Warren Miller, whose adrenaline-laced films popularized the sport. Another ski buddy and fellow maverick was Dick Buek, whose story was featured in the Hollywood hit “The Other Side of the Mountain,” based on a book featuring anecdotes with Gardner.
The Smith family recalls stories of Gardner and Buek flying small airplanes to South America, where it’s winter during our summer. Out of gas, the pair landed on a Mexican beach and found themselves cliff diving for change from tourists to buy more fuel. During a 1954 revolution in Guatemala, their plane was seized and they were jailed for a time, according to a Ski magazine column by Dick Dorworth, who considered Gardner something of a skiing mentor.
One of the best
Dorworth wrote that piece in 1983, long after Gardner disappeared. Reminiscing, Dorworth said Gardner held his own “against the world’s best racers” and described him as “a maverick, a blessed and at the same time cursed man” who was “ahead of his time” and “a natural foe of the status quo.”
“Gardner managed to tap that best and deepest source of life energy,” Dorworth wrote. “Everybody would like to have a few drops of what Gardner had.”
Dorworth ever so briefly referred to “a marriage, a daughter, a divorce.” That mention was validation for Jeanne Smith Gaida, Gardner’s daughter, when decades later she Googled her father’s name and ran across the column.
“I never saw him, ever,” said Jeanne (said with a French pronunciation) in a telephone interview from Austin, Texas, where she lives and works.
Jeanne was born in 1962, after her mother, from England, met Gardner in Argentina. Although he left them, the family who raised him — the Modesto Smiths — welcomed young mother and baby with open arms, and Jeanne has fond memories of holidays and summers spent at the ivy-covered brick family home on Sycamore Avenue where Armour Smith lived until his death in 2004.
Jeanne still has a box she was given of her father’s ribbons, trophies and newspaper clippings. She holds to the narrative that he was “100% devoted to skiing, to being the best at his craft,” she said.
Gardner came up with improvements for ski grips and double-lens goggles, but he lacked the business savvy to market them. And his athleticism peaked about a decade before professional skiers could make a living at it, Dorworth said.
Gardner apparently resurfaced in Modesto in 1968 long enough to sign divorce papers allowing Jeanne’s mother to remarry, but the child apparently wasn’t allowed to meet her father. Her mother, who died in 1994, probably “didn’t want him to see me because she knew he wasn’t going to be part of my life, and it would be too painful,” Jeanne said.
At that point, Stacey — Armour Smith’s daughter — was about 10. She remembers her brother jumping into the arms of Uncle Gard, and was told that her mother was livid that Gardner gave little Stacey a motorcycle ride.
“When he was on, he was extraordinarily charismatic,” said Stacey, who lives now in Oakdale.
Were there times he was off?
Mental health struggles
Well, the family said he left in his old Porsche that had orange crates for seats, leaving behind his skis, clothing and meds, Stacey said.
A great-aunt once told Stacey that Gardner, when he was about 10, fell from a Modesto ash at the Sycamore home, landing on his head, according to a neighbor who saw it happen. They said he was never the same after.
Dorworth said Gardner seemed down on his luck the last time he saw him, when he crashed on Dorworth’s couch for a week in 1968. Dorworth didn’t agree with others, he said, who speculated that Gardner had “slipped over the line of sanity.”
“Everyone has got somebody in the family with mental health strains,” Jeanne said. “He left because he was obsessed with skiing and not with his family. Whether that was due to mental health or not, I don’t know.”
His parents hired a private investigator in an attempt to locate Gardner. His best friend growing up did, too. Both came up empty.
Meanwhile, authorities in Colorado were stumped when hikers in June 1970 (the grave marker indicates that death was estimated around a month earlier) found a one-armed body without identification, thinly clothed and wearing three pairs of socks, with another sock pulled over one shoe. They found $7 and a razor in his pockets. A month later, a highway maintenance worker discovered the missing arm nearby, and authorities figured damage had unwittingly been done by a snowplow after the mystery man’s death.
The remains were buried in a cemetery in Leadville — at 10,158 feet, the highest incorporated city in the United States — until a man clearing an overgrown section noticed the lonely marker, according to The Herald Democrat, a local newspaper. He contacted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which called in Silvia Pettem, who has written books about cold cases. In 2013, the local coroner disinterred the body, and bones were sent to the University of North Texas for DNA extraction.
In March 2016, The Herald Democrat issued a report on “Independence Pass John Doe” detailing speculation on the man’s origins, ranging from an escaped prison inmate from Nebraska or an AWOL soldier to men missing from New York and Minneapolis. Pettem “believes it is still possible,” editor Marcia Martinek wrote, “for a member of John Doe’s family to be alive and missing him.”
Indeed.
Saying goodbye
Modesto Bee obituaries for both of Gardner’s parents — Bernita in 1994, and Paul a year later — both listed Gardner as a survivor. “They never let him go,” Jeanne told me, “because they didn’t know.”
She may never know just how her father met his end, whether as a crime victim or homeless wanderer caught in a blizzard. But Jeanne does know what will happen to his soon-to-be cremated ashes when they are finally reunited with his closest surviving relative: her.
“The universe made me realize he needs to be back with his parents,” she said. “Boreal was their happy place, so that’s where I’m taking Gardner. That’s what needs to happen.”
Spreading his ashes where Gardner Smith once thrived, his daughter said, will give family “an opportunity to get together, celebrate Gardner’s cool factor, and say goodbye.”
This story was originally published March 10, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
