ASHLAND, Linda Rae

ASHLAND

Posted By: Pat Ludeke (email)
Date: 6/26/2013 at 00:04:33

Linda Rae Ashland, 67, formerly of Clear Lake, died Jan. 9, 2010 at Calvary
Baptist Hospital in the New York City area after courageously battling ovarian
cancer for over eight years.

A funeral service will be held at 1 p.m. Friday, Jan. 29 at the Ward-Van Slyke
Colonial Chapel in Clear Lake. Pastor Michael Nash will officiate. Visitation
will be one hour prior to the service. Interment will be at the Clear Lake
Cemetery. Memorials should be given to the Clear Lake Arts Center.

Linda was born in Waterloo, Iowa on Oct. 22, 1942 and adopted in infancy by
Pearl and Irving Ashland of Clear Lake. She graduated from Clear Lake High
School in 1960 and attended the University of Iowa and the University of
Arkansas at Fayetteville. She majored in speech and theater in Arkansas,
appearing in the lead role of Anne Frank in the "Diary of Anne Frank." Linda
Ashland's November 1960 performance in the title role was "stellar", wrote a
University of Arkansas newspaper columnist.

She moved to New York and worked in the executive training program at Saks Fifth
Avenue and then was a personal shopper at the exclusive Henri Bendel Store.
Linda, who as a high school senior said she loved to travel, "prepare fancy
foods" and wanted to get into fashion retail buying, was soon writing freelance
articles for Vogue Magazine and the New York Couture Group. She parlayed her
fashion and writing skills into becoming a staff writer and editor for Women's
Wear Daily, a fashion-industry trade journal sometimes called "the bible of
fashion." She traveled to Nassau, Venice, Paris, St. Moritz, Switzerland and
other glamorous locations to cover fashion shows and high society weddings. She
interviewed many celebrities including Dustin Hoffman and Lynda Bird Johnson.

She then worked for the renowned Town and Country magazine for nearly 15 years.
In her position as Contributing Editor for the oldest continuously published
general interest magazine in the U.S, she traveled the world and interviewed
well known business and social figures. In her stories, she often interwove
historical and travel information with the powerful personalities vacationing
there. "Waterskiing with the Philippines president or chatting with Britain's
Princess Margaret is part of a day's work for Linda," wrote a 1972 Mason City
Globe-Gazette newspaper columnist. She used a skill she learned at Clear Lake
water skiing to join then Philippines President Fernando Marcos. "I went
water-skiing with him in the South China Sea," she was quoted as saying. "He
had frogmen underwater and other guards in boats all around. He fell in the
water but I stayed up," she said. "I should have fallen, too, so as not to
upstage him, but I heard there were sharks. I was more concerned with shark
teeth than presidential dignity."

To prepare for interviews, she often did astrological and numerological charts
on her interviewees. Under the tutelage of noted New York area numerologists and
astrologers, Linda later became a professional astrologer and numerologist for
socialites she met during her Town and Country days as a writer. With an
apartment residence on the famous Park Avenue in midtown Manhattans' fashionable
east side, Linda became the sought after "Park Avenue Astrologer".

In a time when the national media was buzzing about former First Lady Nancy
Reagan's reliance on an astrologer to help with the presidential schedule, Linda
was featured in New York Magazine, the New York Post and on Bloomberg
Information Radio and the Joan Hamlin Show, among others.

She had "an all-star, power-broker clientele," according to one New York
columnist. New York City media regularly consulted her around presidential
election time. For example, she had warned that President Clinton needed to
postpone his inaugural swearing in at noon because of "adverse astral
influences" at that hour. The last presidents to be sworn in under those
conditions, she said, were John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

"Perhaps the secret of Linda's success lies in her philosophy that a person
shouldn't be afraid to plunge ahead don't be afraid to try something new,"
wrote a local reporter after interviewing the globe-trotting New Yorker who was
back in Clear Lake visiting family.

Linda is survived by step-brothers, Maurice Ashland of Albuquerque, N.M., Roger
Ashland of Kensington, Maryland and Frank Ashland of Forest, Virginia and
cousins. She was preceded in death by her parents and step-brothers.