Helen D. GUNDERSON

GUNDERSON, ABBOTT

Posted By: Sarah Thorson Little (email)
Date: 7/29/2008 at 10:27:15

Helen D. Gunderson

Helen is a fourth-generation Iowan who grew up with five siblings on a farm near the small town of Rolfe in northwest Iowa. Her mother, Marion Abbott Gunderson, grew up in Utah and graduated from Iowa State where she majored in applied art and met Helen’s father, Deane Gunderson, who has two degrees in engineering from ISU. Helen’s ancestors in the Rolfe area include the Gundersons, who were farmers, and the Lighters, who published the Rolfe Reveille newspaper in the early 1900s.

Helen received a bachelor's degree in physical education from Iowa State in 1967, a master's degree in instructional technology from the University of Wisconsin-Stout in 1975, and a master of divinity degree from San Francisco Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school, in 1985. She has taught junior and senior high physical education in Duluth, Minnesota, and Eagle Grove, Iowa; worked in sports information at North Dakota State University; and directed the YMCA of NDSU in Fargo. In 1980, Helen produced a major slide/sound show for the all-class school reunion in her hometown of Rolfe. In 1981, she left the Midwest to attend the seminary. In 1988, she produced two slide/sound shows for Rolfe's 125th anniversary. After that, she intended to stop photographing Iowa and get on with life in California. However, she began returning to Iowa on photo forays.

Out of these trips emerged The Road I Grew Up On, a project exploring rural life in Iowa through video, photography, and oral histories. It has received grants from Humanities Iowa, the Iowa Arts Council, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. Helen is writing the last chapter of a book that has evolved from the project. In 1993, Helen moved back to Iowa and lived in Gilbert, just north of Ames, until moving to Ames in the fall of 2006. In the mid-1990s, under the auspices of the Media Resource Center at Iowa State University and the Iowa Sesquicentennial Commission, Helen and a colleague conducted video production workshops in preparation for the state's sesquicentennial.

Currently, Helen is a communications generalist who likes photography, video production, and conducting interviews about local history. She has created three web sites: one for the alumni of her hometown high school that had its last graduation in 1990; a website for the community of Gilbert where there is no newspaper or radio station; and a site for her business that goes by the name of Gunder-friend Productions.

From 2000 to 2002, Helen served on the Gilbert City Council. Later, she convened the Gilbert 125 Group and was a key member of the organization during the planning and administration of an extremely successful celebration to honor Gilbert's 125th anniversary in 2004. She was also active with the Gilbert Main Street Association in its first year of organizing following the G125 celebration.

Helen is interested in sustainable agriculture and has two prairie projects on farmland that she owns near Rolfe. She gardened in pots on her apartment deck in Gilbert and envisions many garden projects in her large yard in Ames. She believes in purchasing, cooking, serving, and eating locally-grown food. She likes to walk, do yoga, and attend an occasional barn dance. She also likes to read biographies and memoirs, watch documentary films and an occasional mainstream movie, and corner friends to play the card game Royalty, a blend of rummy and Scrabble.

Helen learned the basics of film production with a Super 8mm movie camera. She bought it in 1968 to film classroom and intramural activities while teaching junior high physical education in Duluth. Two years later, she was frustrated with her Kodak Instamatic still camera when the flash cubes did not work consistently. She went to Yoho Photo in Duluth, where the salesperson sold her a 35mm Canon for $200. Helen was leery about the settings on the new camera, but the staff at the store taught her to use it and their darkroom.

For many years, Helen has enjoyed the benefits of digital technology for audio and visual productions. In 2001, she equipped her computer for digital video editing and completed a program called Growing against the Grain. It interprets the work of the Audubon County Family Farms in the areas of sustainable agriculture and direct marketing their food products. Also, she did the black and white photographs for rural sociologist Mike Bell's book, Farming for us All, about the Practical Farmers of Iowa organization. Helen is a long-time member of PFI.

Helen continued to use film technology for still photography, but in the spring of 2004, she got her first digital still camera, a Canon Rebel. She says it is lots of fun and does extremely high quality work. She would never want to go back to the days of editing movie film with a razor blade and splice tape nor return to developing her own black and white negatives and printing them. Then again, she is glad she learned the basics of photography and film production long before the digital era.

Helen finds great satisfaction in being able to look at something ordinary and see beauty or meaning in the scene. She says, “I feel privileged to be able to shape what I see into works of art and to share them with other people. Whatever the medium of artistic expression, I hope that some of what I produce is soulful and helps others reflect on life beneath the surface of things.”

http://www.gunderfriend.com/hdg_biography.htm.
 

Wright Biographies maintained by Karen De Groote.
WebBBS 4.33 Genealogy Modification Package by WebJourneymen