The first specific memory I have of Helen was attending her wedding, where she made me feel like quite the special guest. The wedding was held in her parent's home on Gore Ave. in Webster Groves, MO, which still stands little changed with its big front yard (croquet court), elaborate back garden, and the play house that her father Otto Brandhorst built with and for his children. I suspect Helen spent long hours in that elegant little house. From many visits for sleepovers with my grandparents I have a sense of what Helen experienced as she grew up in that house: summer evenings eating dinner on lawn chairs in the garden (trying to ignore the mosquitoes), hunting for toads and moths around the gold fish pond, drinking cream soda from the Nashville IL bottling plant where August Brandhorst had worked, and eating grandmother Eunice's (thawed, hard as rocks) molasses cookies with ice cream or aunts Meta and Alvina's apple butter on toast.
Helen and John Krumboltz were married by Helen's mentor Nate Kohn, a psychologist and ordained minister. Nate became a close friend of my father Bill Brandhorst, Helen's brother, and we spent many weekends with the Kohn's at their farms in the Ozarks. Coincidentally, Nate was a Soldan High School buddy of my mother Emilie's brother Jack.
Helen's career in psychology took her away from St. Louis, but I always enjoyed her visits home. When I did graduate work in San Diego, I started visiting Helen in Palo Alto. During that period I as an adult got to know her as a friend. We talked a lot about her mother, whom I knew to be kind and loving but quite demanding. As a psychologist, Helen was analytical about her sometimes strained relationship with her mother and prone to comparing her own parenting style with that of her mother (often concluding that she was repeating the same things in spite of her intention not to). There were indeed some similarities between Helen and her mother Eunice, but I doubt that Eunice had the deep introspective and analytical insights that Helen had about herself and her family. And I don't remember Helen's ironic sense of humour and appreciation of silly puns in her mother. Moreover, Helen had an adventurous, sometimes rebellious, spirit and a liberal mind, quite different from her mother. In any case, Eunice and Helen both raised thoughtful, engaged children who were inspired by nature and a sense of duty to the world, so both got parenting mostly right (with some help from their husbands).
Helen and I shared some common experience as Ph.D.'s working in universities. More than any other relative, I could talk to her about the strange and demanding world of academia. On my first visit to Palo Alto, when I was a beginning graduate student, Helen and John kindly invited me to attend a New Years holiday party they threw for their departmental colleagues. It was certainly not what I was expecting. There was an extended game of war that involved running around the house and yard shooting one another with dart guns and dramatic death scenes. The guests got very excited about the game and took it quite seriously (probably releasing professional aggressions built up over the year). For me, this was a different vision of academic life than I had imagined, and it made me feel a little more comfortable about my career choice (though I have never attended another party of academics remotely similar to that one).
I sure will miss Helen.
Bruce Brandhorst, oldest nephew
