- Date Of Death: October 31, 2016
- State: Idaho
GRANGEVILLE: HELEN THERESA (TRUKOSITZ) NUXOLL, 104, was born on the Fourth of July,
1912. Everyone in the United States, she said, celebrated her birthday. A widow for nearly 30 years after
almost 55 happy years of marriage to Ralph L. Nuxoll, she died on October 17,2016 of heart failure in the
home in which they raised their family in Grangeville. In recent years she stayed winters with their oldest
child, Adonna Yuse, in Spokane, but insisted on living in Idaho for the summer so she could tend her garden.
When her children wanted someone with her in case she might fall, she made it clear that she did not want
that someone to be a stranger. “There are five of you,” she said. “If you insist on having someone here, then
you deal with it!” So they took turns. Adonna and Hospice were with her at the end, but she was ready.
She had already carefully taken care of her most important concerns, especially voting for the nation’s first
woman president. She insisted she be taken personally to the Idaho County Courthouse to turn in her
absentee ballot but her choice was not secret. She always believed women should eventually run the world.
Born in the back woods of Forest, Idaho, as the oldest of five children of Austrian and Hungarian
homesteaders, Julius and Agnes Trukositz, she spoke only German until starting grade school. She recalled
being at first teased and called “Dutchie” in the one room school in Forest. By then her father, who had
become “boss of the woods” for Winchester’s Craigmont Timber Company, had seen to its building and
staffing for the children of his crew. When high school time came she worked at ironing and housework for
her room and board in Winchester during the week. She often walked through snow and woods eight miles
home on the weekends and back to school on Mondays. She became so convinced ofthe value of education
that she decided to become a teacher and continued on to Lewiston Normal School, graduating in June 1931
with her teaching certificate. She began teaching that Fall in the long ago disappeared one room Icicle Flats
school at the headwaters of Lawyers Canyon creek. But at age 19 during the depression a contract of six
hundred dollars for the entire school year was quite respectable. She carefully kept her copy of it her entire
life.
Shortly after starting to teach she met Ralph, a dashing young farmer in his twenties.
