Martha Smith, teacher who received star treatment; 85

"She was a person who could not be stopped," William F. Smith of Mount Vernon, Maine, said yesterday of his mother. "You could cripple her legs, kill her husband, give her son rheumatic fever, and she endured it all and kept right on going."

He said she held four jobs to work her way through school. "Basically, she earned a master's degree while scrubbing floors," he said.

Mrs. Smith was born in Charlestown and grew up in Watertown. When she was 12 years old, she contracted polio and was partially paralyzed. After overcoming the paralysis, she graduated from Rosary Academy in Watertown, Cambridge City Hospital School of Nursing, and Lesley College, where she earned a master's degree. Mrs. Smith became a teacher and nurse in the Watertown public schools, where she remained for many years. She later taught in Everett for several years.

The second nurse from the Boston area to be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Nurses Corps, in November 1941, she was assigned to duty at West Point, where she met her husband-to-be, William Smith, who was recuperating from an appendectomy. They were married on May 30, 1942.

Three years later, her husband died when the plane he was piloting crashed into Empire State Building in New York City.

In 1958, her brother, John Molloy, wrote to Ralph Edwards, the host of "This Is Your Life," and suggested his sister as a subject for the show.

When she appeared on television, Mrs. Smith was a kindergarten teacher at the Cunniff School in Watertown. "This is Your Life" depended on the surprise of the guest on each week's show, so Watertown school officials told Mrs. Smith that she had been chosen to participate in a conference on visual education in Los Angeles and she took the train to the West Coast, where the show was filmed. When she disembarked from the train, she was met by Edwards, who informed her, "Martha Smith, this is your life," and she was whisked to a television studio.

As Mrs. Smith exclaimed "It can't be me" over and over, her 12-year-old son, two brothers, and several school officials who had flown to the West Coast stood behind a curtain and said a few words about her. Mrs. Smith was asked to identify them before they emerged before the cameras.

Reading from the "This Is Your Life Book," Edwards explained to the television audience how Mrs. Smith discovered her 7-year-old son had a rheumatic heart, how for eight years after her husband's death she was a nurse in the Watertown school system and studied nights and weekends at Boston University, where she earned a degree in education.

"She got a lot of rocks thrown at her, but she never asked for any help and she never got any," said her son. "You've heard of women's liberation? She didn't have to be liberated. She just did it." Besides her son, she leaves a sister, Mary Cadwallader of Concord; a brother, Philip Molloy of Princeton; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

A funeral Mass was said Thursday.