Pat Straub (March 11, 1923 – September 24, 2016) was an American author and environmentalist. Straub pioneered organic gardening during the 1960s and 1970s, years before the concept became well-known. She served as First Lady of the U.S. state of Oregon from 1975 until 1979 during the administration of her husband, Governor Bob Straub. She was later appointed to the Oregon Forestry Council. Biography Straub was born Pat Stroud on March 11, 1923, in Villanova, Pennsylvania. She was the youngest of the five children of Willa Bolton (née Dixon) Stroud and Morris Wistar Stroud. One of her brothers, Dick Stroud, later founded Stroud Water Research Center, a freshwater research group based in Avondale, Pennsylvania, in 1967. She first met her future husband, Robert W. Straub, during the early 1940s while she was a Smith College freshman working as a camp counselor on Mount Moosilauke in New Hampshire. Bob Straub, a then-sophomore at Dartmouth College, was hiking up the mountain at the time. The couple married in 1943, shortly before Bob Straub was sent to the European theatre with the United States Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II. In 1946, following the end of the war, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon, where Bob Straub worked at a new Weyerhauser facility there. The couple had six children. Pat Straub pioneered organic gardening years before the term or concept of organic horticulture became widely known to the general public. In 1974, shortly before becoming the state's first lady, Straub published, "From the Loving Earth", a book which covered organic farming without chemicals, cooking, food preservation. First Lady of Oregon Straub served as the First Lady of Oregon from January 1975 until January 1979 during the single term of Governor Bob Straub. During her tenure, Straub edited Governor Straub's speeches. She also wrote a regular column in The Oregon Statesman and other newspapers, which focused on her official and personal experiences as the state's first lady. Straub also planned official functions, menus, and guests, at their private residence, a farmhouse built in 1860 in the west Salem Hills outside Salem, as Oregon did not have a governor's residence or provide official residential staff for state governors or first ladies at the time. (Mahonia Hall, the present-day governor's home, was not acquired until the late 1980s.) Straub, by then a veteran of organic gardening, grew and cooked the produce for official dinners and