Smith: How they will miss Dr. David Smith and his PB&Js

Tears flowed and laughter crackled Friday at the retirement party near Memorial Hospital for 39-year pediatrician David Smith.

A printed booklet listed ?39 reasons why Memorial nurses will miss Dr. Smith, founder of the pediatric hospitalist program and also a baseball player, grape stomper and a most comical and caring guy.

Among the nurses’ reasons: He is the kindest pediatrician they know. He remembered your name. He was never judgmental. He believes in doing the right thing.

And he’d appear at meetings and gatherings with a platter of rare, doctor-made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

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QUEEN SHYLY: It took some persuading, but Donna Peterson has vowed she will return to Santa Rosa High on Friday night to crown the new homecoming queen.

Donna’s last name was Dennes when she was bestowed that title in 1966.

In the intervening years, she co-founded the Santa Rosa High School Foundation and worked a full career in the district’s personnel office and as the secretary at Hilliard Comstock Middle School.

The former queen’s mother, 93-year-old Peggy Leiser of the SRHS Class of 1940, will be among the family members present at Friday’s game to witness her return and her role in the homecoming coronation.

Donna says she will take along her crown from 50 years ago but she may be too shy to wear it. Her mom, one suspects, may have a talk with her.

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ARNIE IS GONE, bless his soul. Now that the remarkable run of America’s most beloved golfer has ended, Marti Hoeft feels free to say what’s been on her mind for much of her life.

“I am the true inventor of the beverage that shares his name,” she declared.

Marti is a retired Safeway employee and a member of Santa Rosa High’s Class of 1969. Of course, she remembers Donna Dennes as homecoming queen.

Marti said it was like yesterday when, as a child of 8 in the summer of 1959, the inspiration came to her to stir a few spoonfuls of instant iced tea into the pitcher of lemonade she’d made from a can of frozen concentrate.

Imagine that first sweet, but not too sweet, taste.

“I was so proud of this concoction,” she recalls, “and shared it with my family.” Only she knows how frequently over the decades she’s heard someone order an Arnold Palmer and she’s repressed the urge to scream, “That’s not his drink, I tell you. It’s mine! It’s mine!”

Google the beverage, as I did, and you’ll find that it’s far from conclusive who first thought to add to iced tea not a slice or wedge or squirt of lemon, but a dose of lemonade.

You may discover also that Arnie recalled it was in the mid-1950s, some years before Marti stirred her first batch of the summery drink, that he said to his wife, Winifred “Winnie” Walzer Palmer, at lunchtime: “Hey babe, I’ve got an idea. You make the iced tea, make a big pitcher, and we’ll just put a little lemonade in it and we’ll see how that works.”

Marti Hoeft doesn’t plan to make a federal case of this. Whatever history decides about the advent of the lemonade/iced-tea combo, the Santa Rosa woman feels certain of this: She really was first to blend lemonade and cranberry juice.

She said, “I would like to name it the Smartie Marti.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@press?democrat.com.