Agnes Wolohan Smuda Von Burkleo, a mother and teacher who devoted her life to music and was known for her passion and generosity, died on Aug. 10. She was 79 years old.
Agnes grew up with four siblings who reveled in the time they spent during summers in Inverness. Agnes either visited or lived in Inverness for much of her adult life, where she taught music lessons, swam avidly in Tomales Bay and spent time with her own children. With tremendous success as a pianist and an opera singer, she obtained several higher degrees later in life, including a doctorate in Irish musicology.
“She exuded music, art and kindness,” Meg Cadiz, her daughter, said. “She was a very happy person. She wasn’t mean, or unhappy: She was always polite and kind with the ‘How are you doing?’ and greet-you-with-a-warm-smile-kind-of-spirit of generosity. She was just a darling mom. There might not have been food, but there were always art supplies.”
Agnes was born in Berkeley on Jan. 5, 1941 to John and Margaret Wolohan. John, an Irish Catholic who was thought to be a musical prodigy as a boy and was classically trained in piano in Manchester, immigrated to San Francisco, where his jazz orchestra played at the El Patio Ballroom for four decades. He married Margaret, a violinist and grammar-school teacher from Ferguson, Mo., in 1938.
In 1943, Margaret and John purchased a property in Inverness that had been a six-bedroom inn known as the Highland Lodge. It became a beloved second home. “We’d take a U-Haul, and we’d take the ferry over from Richmond,” Margaret Hope, Agnes’s sister, remembered. “Back in those days, there wasn’t a bridge. We’d get to Inverness around midnight and eat grilled cheese and tomato soup. We hated to go back to Berkeley, and we’d count the days until September.”
Margaret said their days at the lodge were full. “Agnes kept these diaries of all the people who came and went, and it was really such a wonderful time they had,” she said. “There was plenty of room for all the cousins who wanted to come and stay. My dad worked five days per week at the ballroom in S.F. but on Monday and Tuesday nights, we’d have music.”
All five children would often perform for their guests, singing and dancing while their father played the piano. Margaret said they all learned to play the piano but that Agnes “had been the shining one.”
Everyone stayed up late playing music, which meant they all liked to sleep in and the family was chronically late. “We just always had a good time,” Margaret said. Yet, she added, “We also had to behave. We were Catholics and we would say the rosary around the fire at night. We’d go to church in Point Reyes on Sundays and afterward go have breakfast somewhere. We were always late for everything. We’d go to the 11, not the 9 a.m. mass. And sometimes it was in Bolinas, and my dad would be driving so fast, so worried we wouldn’t get there in time. But we would.”
Agnes attended Holy Names College and met her first husband, Jim Smuda, who was attending St. Mary’s College, at a dance. They were married at the Sacred Heart Church in Point Reyes Station in 1961. Agnes threw her bouquet to Margaret, who was three years younger, honoring a secret agreement.
Agnes had all five of her children before the age of 30, and in 1970, she moved with her young family to Minneapolis, where Jim had grown up. Jim, a real estate developer, retired from the industry young and bought a car wash, where Meg said she and her siblings all worked at one time or another.
The family would visit Inverness regularly, though Agnes didn’t move there full time until her children were grown. In 1965, Agnes’s father died tragically when he was hit by a car during a nighttime milk errand in Berkeley; around that time, the family sold the Highland Lodge. But by 1980, Agnes and Jim bought a home on Rannoch Way, honoring the family tradition of summering on the bay.
Meanwhile, Agnes found herself in a thrilling music scene in Minneapolis, linking up with many musical collaborators and lifelong friends. A mezzo-soprano, she often sang the lead for the Minnesota Opera. Minneapolis City Pages named her artist of the year in 2006.
In addition to performing, Agnes produced three CDs with her own compositions—Inverness, Songstories, and O, the Days of Kerry Dancing—and collaborated on numerous other projects, including several operas. Her friends describe her as constantly creating through all types of mediums—singing, writing, poetry and painting.
At a virtual service for Agnes, which included several musical performances put on by family and friends, one friend spoke of Agnes’s influence.
“She made a huge difference in my life. She really had an impact on my life creatively and emotionally almost beyond anyone else ever,” said Larry David, a pianist who started out as her teacher at MacPhail Center for Music in Minneapolis and would perform with her for many years.
“Right away I remember having such a good time teaching Agnes and laughing about certain observations I’d make or she’d make, that I thought to myself, ‘Who is this person?’ I felt like after a few lessons that I should be paying her because I felt so much joy being with her,” he said.
Agnes had forgone her undergraduate degree to marry, but once her children were older, she began pursuing degrees in music at the University of Minnesota. She earned a B.A. in piano, and a master’s and a doctorate of musical arts, with a focus on Irish musicology.
Sean, Agnes’s son and an artist and photographer who collaborated with his mother on many projects, said her dedication to music reflected her dedication to her relationships. “She came from an enchanted childhood, half-Catholic, half nature-mystic, that led her to reflect on the reality of emotions and the importance of relationships. And she was like that with music: She was always on a mission to fully and deeply express, be it with teaching children piano, playing Christmas standards or singing John Cage. No one who ever met her didn’t feel that.”
Agnes’s daughters Sophia and Caitlin shared a similar perspective on the powerful support their mother offered them.
“We, her children, knew that she wasn’t like other moms, and I’m sure it was the same for everyone who got to know her well. You just don’t meet people with her endless capacity for love and kindness and giving every day, or even in a lifetime,” Caitlin said at the memorial.
“She gave and she gave and she gave—you all know what I mean,” Sophia said. “A present for everyone for every occasion: A song for a new baby, a poem for a wedding, easter baskets full of chocolate bunnies, candy eggs, a book, a kite. And all things wrapped exquisitely, with multiple colors and ribbons.”
Caitlin noted her mother’s more devious side, including her habit of stealing flowers out of other people’s gardens, and a love for shopping even when there wasn’t anything she needed. Keeping food in the house was not her specialty. “The woman never made a grocery list in her life. Once in a while we’d clean out the kitchen [in our house] on Circle Downs [Street], only to find 10 poultry seasonings, eight cream of tartars, six jellied cranberries, and five baking sodas. There was always so much food in the refrigerator and cupboards and yet very little to actually eat.”
Although most of her children and siblings settled elsewhere, Agnes’s sister Margaret and brother John and her daughter Meg lived in Inverness, keeping Agnes company for the later years of her life. She moved full time to Inverness in 2005, after Jim passed away in 1993.
Once in Inverness, Agnes married Robert Von Burkleo, a sailor who had worked in the circulation department for the San Francisco Chronicle in his earlier years. “They were goofy and cute together,” Meg said. “They would paint together. They wrote a cute book about Spain and he painted and she wrote it. They enjoyed being together.”
Agnes taught piano and voice lessons at West Marin and Inverness Schools and continued to publish her poetry. Toby’s Feed Barn would host recitals by her students in the gallery space.
The life she built in Inverness was filled with many of the same joys of her childhood. She sang; she gathered her friends and family; she swam.
“She loved Inverness, she loved West Marin, she loved Tomales Bay—she loved the jellyfish,” Meg said. “This was her spiritual place.”
A song she released in 2013 describes that love: “Inverness, Inverness, you are in my eyes and heart/And Inverness, Inverness, I have loved you from the start/ Inverness, Inverness, you lie down beside the bay/ Summers come and summers go/ You’re still in the fog of memories/ For in your sunlit, salty breeze/ You play with me, stay with me/ Inverness, Inverness.”
Agnes spent her final years in Portland. She is survived by three of her siblings, John, Margaret and Rosemary; her children Sean, Sophia, Meg, Bebhinn and Caitlin and her stepchildren, Christian and Peggy; and her grandchildren, Kamela, Alexandra, Falon, Ianto, Connor and Declan. Find Agnes’s album, called Inverness, at johnwolohan.bandcamp.com/album/inverness.