Helen Oppegard Stratte

(October 24, 1919 - January 15, 2022)

Helen Jane Oppegard Stratte, the daughter of a newspaper columnist and publisher, made a few things clear 37,337 days after her birth in Dallas, Texas, over 102 years ago.

The inspirational and vivacious woman with a beautiful mind and a wonderful life, steadfastly refused to allow her family to pay to have an obituary printed in any media (“That’s not how journalism works!”), did not want a public funeral (“I’ve been to too many bad funerals! Embarrassing!”) and insisted that her ashes be scattered in the Pacific Ocean in front of the family home in Trinidad, CA (“From ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Keep it simple!”)

The pioneering radio and print journalist in the 1940s, the sort who refused to be the society editor for an Ohio newspaper because “it wasn’t considered a real reporting job,” claimed to be “too exhausted to say anything wise” the day before she moved, eyes wide open, to her final address. But she wanted her five living children, 12 grandchildren and too-many-to-count great-grandchildren in France, Saudi Arabia and the United States to remember a few things just before she died of natural causes at 6:10 a.m. on Saturday, January 15, in the comfort of her home in Redding, CA.

“The key to a long life is Ghirardelli hot chocolate with Califia almond milk every morning for breakfast and two glasses of champagne every night at five,” she explained. “And the key to a successful marriage is to ignore (him),” she added. “And, oh yes, the key to being a good traveler is to immediately unpack the moment you reach your destination. Remember these three things and you’ll be okay.”

Helen regularly spun tales about her youth in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where her father, M.M. Oppegard, was publisher of the “Grand Forks Herald” and wrote a commonsense column called “It Seems To Me” while her mother, a college-educated dietician also named Helen, tended to their four-story home on the Red River and made the best tapioca and chocolate sauce in the American heartland.

Helen was valedictorian of the Central High School Class of 1935 before she attended the University of North Dakota where she majored in English and Journalism. President of the Delta Gamma Sorority and business manager of The Dakota Yearbook, she graduated Phi Beta Kappa and claimed to have a minor in French (though this was not obvious when she visited her grandchildren in Paris and the south of France in the 1980s).

Helen attended graduate school at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and received a masters degree in 1940 before becoming “the first female news writer hired by the CBS radio network in Chicago where, in December 1941, I ran down the stairs in the Wrigley building to break the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

She married her first husband, J. Warren McClure, in 1942 in Athens, Ohio, and worked for various newspapers while he was in the Navy, refusing to take a job as society editor of “The Columbus Dispatch” in 1943 “because it’s not real journalism.” Besides reporting for a variety of media, she also had jobs in public relations and teaching before her first two children were born in Grand Forks in 1948 (Joel) and 1950 (Kip).

She ended her first marriage in 1952 (“Don’t ask, don’t tell!” she insisted) and drove to San Francisco with her two sons in a Ford Falcon to begin a new life. She married Dr. Paul B. Stratte in Reno in 1954 and moved to Redding, CA, where she gave birth to two more boys in 1955 (Lars, a pilot who was killed fighting a forest fire in 2001) and 1956 (Tryg, a Redding urologist). She also became mother to Paul’s daughters, Scott (1942) and Lesle (1947), and raised the entire family at a spacious home on the Sacramento River with a sparkling view of Mount Shasta while working as business manager for Paul’s urology practice on Court Street.

An avid golfer, shrewd stock and real estate investor and keen fisherwoman and hunter, Helen regularly visited Europe with Paul every year for 35 years while amassing a library of more than one thousand books.

After Paul retired, they moved to an oceanside home in Trinidad, CA, in 1976 until Paul died in 1989 when Helen returned to Redding. Besides being a social butterfly (think Riverview Country Club and Nello’s restaurant), Helen was an early email and social media enthusiast, an avid bridge and gin player, an author of three family biographies and a political pundit who criticized elected officials of every stripe (she’s best known for her series of “Obama Rants”).

She gradually quit traveling (“This is the first vacation I’ve had in ten years,” she joked, at 99, when she had to evacuate to Sacramento during a wildfire in 2018) but constantly welcomed visiting family members to her home and annual birthday bash.

Her last wish?

“To come back and haunt you.”

We will always love her “A Bushel and a Peck” (one of her favorite songs from “Guys and Dolls” in 1950).

Forget flowers!

Gifts in Helen Stratte's memory may be mailed to:

Mercy Foundation North

2625 Edith Avenue, Suite E

Redding, CA 96001

Or made online at:

http://www.supportmercynorth.org