Helen Blakeslee, a former English teacher who was known as the Gracious Grammarian when she wrote a column on language usage and syntax for the Marin Independent Journal, died Nov. 2 in Tomball, Texas. She was 98.
For nearly a decade, she and her imaginary colleague, Mr. Wampazoo, schooled IJ readers on what she called “the mystery of the apostrophe, the puzzle of the subject-predicate agreement and the quicksand of the dangling participle.”
A native of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia who grew up in Mentor, Ohio, she graduated from Ohio State University and she returned to Mentor to teach English and Spanish at her high school alma mater.
Her late husband, Ted Blakeslee, an entomologist, the son of a friend of her father, was a childhood acquaintance. As World War II concluded, the newly married Blakeslees traveled overseas in Asia. When her husband was posted in Washington, D.C. she taught Spanish at George Washington University before moving to Japan for several years.
In 1959 the Blakeslee family moved to San Rafael, where the couple would live for 50 years. Mrs. Blakeslee earned a master’s degree in education from Dominican University in 1966. She taught English at San Domenico School and later English as a second language at College of Marin.
Active in classical music circles, she sang in church choirs in Japan, Maryland and California, and performed aboard a ship sailing from the U.S. to Okinawa in 1949.
She participated in the Winifred Baker Chorale, served as president of Marin Music Chest and the Thursday Musical Club.
She is survived by a daughter, Carol Cernosek of Tomball, Texas; a son, Michael Blakeslee of Sacramento, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her husband, Theodore Edwin Blakeslee in 2008 and by her sisters Effie, Mary Lew and Annie and brother Northcraft.
Memorial donations may be made to the American Heart Association or Bible Study Fellowship International.
