Joyce Earldine Tostenson

Joyce Earldine Tostenson was born at home in Leavenworth, Kansas, the daughter of Earl William Smith and Pearl Rose Smith (nee Schuetz). Her mischievous humor and adventurous spirit were captured in her twinkling smile and antics throughout her life. The middle daughter, raised with four sisters and an older brother (a younger brother died as an infant) in a two-story house at 2013 Chase Street in Falls City, Nebraska until the age of ten. When asked, she could rattle off the address like it was yesterday and would recall giving her mom a scare, pushing younger sister Jean Ann in a baby buggy along a narrow plank over a drainage ditch…thankfully both girls survived those early years.

In 1936 the family moved to Washington state, driving across the country to escape the Dustbowl. After Pearl Harbor, while still a minor, Joyce and her girlfriends pleaded with their moms to apply to the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) program through the U.S. Naval Training Center (WR) located at Hunter College, The Bronx, New York City. This was met with a resounding “No.” However, workers were needed for the war effort. So, she left high school and amongst other jobs, bucked rivets for Boeing in Seattle on B-17s and B-29s—a genuine “Rosie the Riveter.” Joyce later returned to Yakima High School, a member of the class of 1946.

After the war, her mother and stepfather bought a restaurant in Campbell, CA, and the family moved to the Bay Area in 1946. Her mother and stepfather owned several restaurants in the Southern Peninsula, the last one being Howatt’s Barbecue on Middlefield Road in Menlo Park, across from Lane Publishing. Joyce worked in the family business as a waitress before managing their gift shop until her mother Pearl’s death in 1970.

On February 25, 1951, she married Orville Tostenson. She was introduced to Orville by her brother Joe, and they went on two dates before Orville left to work on a salmon boat in Puget Sound. Orville proposed via mail, and they went to Reno, Nevada to get married before he shipped out again. They were married for 64 years until Orville’s death in 2015. They raised four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom graduated from the University of California.

Joyce was a champion bowler, a member of the 1951 California Women’s Professional Bowling State Championship team. Representing the old “Indian Bowl” in Palo Alto, Joyce and Orville used her prize money to buy their first house, later settling in Sunnyvale in 1956. She continued to bowl well into her fifties and was a delegate to the International Bowling Conference in 1966.

During the ‘70s and ‘80s she served as an Area Representative of Youth for Understanding (YFU), a student exchange organization and hosted students from various countries in Europe and South America; she loved “her kids” who called her their American mom. Joyce was later invited to serve as a flight leader, accompanying students to and from Finland…through this and other travel experiences, she opened the family to a wider world.

Joyce died in Mountain View, CA after a short hospitalization. She was predeceased by her husband Orville, her son David, her parents Earl Smith and Pearl S. Howatt, her stepfather Lincoln Howatt, her sisters Rose Marie Roberts, Carol Pratt, and Betty Mensing, and brothers Joseph and Paul Smith.

She is survived by her sister Jean Ann (JC) May of San Jose, CA, her daughters Lucinda (Barry) Dreyer of Windsor, CA, and Kristin (Andrew) Munday of Sunnyvale, CA; her daughter-in-law Nancy Tostenson of Auburn, CA; her son Thomas (Martha Bauder) Tostenson of Phoenix, AZ; six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

The funeral will be at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto at 9:30 am on Wednesday June 7th, 2023.