Voices of EPUMC: Linda Strandberg

By Sarah Gardner

When Linda Strandberg lost her voice in a tracheotomy-gone-wrong in 2020 her doctor told her he could take some of her body fat and use it to rebuild her damaged voice box. Strandberg didn’t lose a beat. “Can you take a whole lot?” she shot back. 

Strandberg’s humor and determination helped her recover her voice following a near-fatal car crash. Not fully, but enough that she can hold an hour-long conversation about how a girl from Kansas ended up traveling the world. 

Strandberg’s story starts in Wichita. When she was young her father traveled five days a week selling janitorial supplies in western Kansas and surrounding states. She and her sisters always hoped he’d get home Friday night to be with the family. 

Linda Strandberg has attended EPUMC since moving to Estes Park in 2007.

(Photo credit: Wendy Rigby)

“If not,” she recalls, “I would always look out the window Saturday morning to see if my daddy was home.” 

Strandberg’s parents eventually started their own janitorial supply business. They wanted her to take it over someday, but as an adventurous, independent young woman in the 1960’s, Strandberg had other ideas. 

"I loved to travel and my parents loved to travel. With their help I’d been to all but four states when I went overseas.” 

Instead of heading up Huber Janitorial Supply, Strandberg ended up teaching in Asia and Europe for 10 years. She taught American children on U.S. military bases in Japan, Germany and Turkey. 

“I learned a lot about people and different cultures,” says Strandberg. “We were paid well, had a good time and we got all the federal holidays off.” 

Those federal holidays were a godsend for a curious young woman who wanted to know the world. Strandberg happily recalls spending some of those free weekends exploring one of the world’s oldest cities, Aleppo, Syria. (less than 200 miles from her school in Turkey) Aleppo was nearly destroyed in Syria’s civil war, but in the 1970’s when Strandberg walked through its famous Al-Madina Souk, the city was a thriving tourist destination. When she taught in Japan Strandberg spent her vacations exploring Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, among other countries. Sometimes she even got to fly free on military planes, a perk enjoyed by Department of Defense employees.

She loved her life overseas, she says, even as her parents fretted she’d never marry. But when Strandberg returned to Kansas’ Emporia State to get a master’s in library science, (she could earn more overseas with a master’s) she met someone special.

“By the time I got my master’s I was almost 37 years old. Dwight was two years younger,” says Strandberg. She went back to Germany to finish out her teaching contract. Dwight stayed behind and got a second master’s degree. “We said goodbye. I was going back to Europe, and we didn’t know what would happen,” says Strandberg. “I figured he’d meet some sweet young kid at Emporia, but he didn’t!”  

Instead, they exchanged a flurry of heartfelt letters. Sometimes she’d receive more than five a week. Her friends began to notice all the mail, wanting to know who the mystery letter writer was. “Boy, they were nosy,” she recalls with bemusement. The letter writer visited Strandberg that spring. By the end of the year, they were married. 

While her husband worked as an archivist and librarian at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Linda taught elementary school. In the mid-80’s she switched things up and took a job as a librarian at Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina. In an aside, Strandberg grumbled about college kids misplacing cards in the card catalogs. (Google it if you’re confused, youngsters) 

Teaching proved more satisfying to her.

“Just being able to see how the kids learn and help them in the manner in which they can learn,” Strandberg says. “Because they don’t all learn alike at that age. And to take them from what their parents may have taught them and go further.”

Strandberg and her husband Dwight retired to Estes Park in 2007. She had come to Colorado as a child to visit relatives in Boulder and Breckenridge and fell in love with the Rockies. The thought of retiring in Estes Park was always in the back of her mind, she says. 

After joining EPUMC that same year, she soon joined the choir and bell choir. But the 2020 car accident on Highway 34 put a sudden halt to all of that. 

Both Strandberg and her husband were badly injured. But Strandberg’s injuries were so serious that she spent six months in hospitals and rehab facilities. She needed a respirator to breathe. Broken bones needed healing. She had to learn to walk again. Her husband’s own injuries landed him in the same rehab center for a while.

“It was the pandemic so we could only wave at each other,” she says.

Strandberg eventually transferred to a rehab facility in Greeley where she made more progress.  

“At Greeley I could sit outside with Dwight and visit,” Linda recalls. “Going outside with a mask we were fine. And when it got cold, we would sit in our car and visit and then he’d take me back.”

“I just wanted to live. I wanted to live.” 

Strandberg had battled cancer before this, so she was no stranger to adversity. But fighting for her life in the midst of a pandemic was overwhelming. What sustained her through such a physically and emotionally wrenching time? 

Strandberg says she just tried to be as positive as possible. “One little positive piece of thinking each day. What was good today? What did I learn?” 

And there was something more primal as well.

“I just wanted to live. I wanted to live,” Strandberg says with as much force as her vocal cords allow. 

Despite some physical setbacks since, Linda is back in the choir, singing quietly but with determination in the alto section. It’s good therapy for her voice. “I feel like I almost need to go to tenor!” she jokes.  

She ends with a secret. “If the notes go too high, I just mouth it!”