Linda Ziedrich sits in her living room, an assortment of books scattered across the table in front of her.
The titles included “The Curious Kitchen Gardener: Uncommon Plants and How to Eat Them.” “The Joy of Pickling: 300 Flavor-Packed Recipes for All Kinds of Produce from Garden to Market.” “The Nursing Mother’s Guide to Weaning.” “Cold Soups.”
They, and others, all carry her author’s credit.
Those books, which represent significant research and experience in food-related fields, are only the tip of a quiet but persistent leader whose interests and involvement in Lebanon are widespread.
Ziedrich is a founder, leader or otherwise involved in the League of Women Voters, Build Lebanon Trails, the Lebanon Museum, The Linn County Cultural Coalition, the Santiam Food Alliance, Lebanon Pioneer Cemetery, Lebanon Garden Club and the Linn County Master Food Preservers, which is a local arm of the Oregon State University Extension.
Frankly, she isn’t one to turn heads when she walks into the room.
“I’m only motivated to do things that other people are not doing, will not do, or cannot do,” she stated, matter-of-factly, which is her way. “If other people are handling things, then I’m glad to take a back seat or not be involved in a particular organization at all. I only step in when I see a need.”
Oh, she did volunteer to join the museum, but that’s because she has a deep interest in local history.
All this while she writes and, occasionally, edits, which was her line of work long before moving to Lebanon in 2015, from Scio, where she and her husband Robert had operated a farm for 22 years.
Ziedrich, 68, grew up in Sonoma County, Calif., north of the Bay Area. She attended U.C. Davis, but didn’t like it there, so she ended up at U.C. Berkeley, where she graduated in 1979 with a degree in social anthropology.
After graduation, she got into book publishing, working first for a small publisher on the Stanford University campus.
“Robert and I decided we wanted to experience a different part of the country, so we moved to Massachusetts,” she said.
There she wound up at Harvard Common Press, a fledgling publisher specializing in culinary, parenting and other lifestyle themes.
“The company was so small that I did everything,” Ziedrich recalled. “So I did all phases of editing, acquisitions, development, copy editing, and also book design and managed production and did marketing too. It was kind of fun, but also kind of crazy.”
After a couple of years, pregnant with their first child – of what eventually were three, she started freelancing as a book designer and editor, focusing more heavily on the latter as publishing moved into the digital age.
After six years in Sommerville, Mass., they decided to return to the West, so they moved to the Santa Cruz Mountains, south of the Bay Area, for six years before relocating to Scio after Robert got a job with Entek.
Before long, Harvard Common Press contacted her, asking if she would write a cookbook featuring cold soups.
“Instead of doing library research on, you know, ‘what kind of cold soups are there in the world?’ I just started inventing them,” she said. “ So that was the way I began. And then I did the library research.
“And so the book has lots of traditional kinds of soups. It started out with experimentation, and I used my own garden, because book publishers don’t pay you for the food.”
After that first book was published in 1995, a second, on pickling, followed in 1998; it’s still in print.
“I got the idea for the pickle book when my eldest got interested in eating pickles,” Ziedrich noted.
Eventually, she decided to focus just on writing, rather than editing, especially as she started getting involved in non-literary activities.
Living six miles out of town in the Scio community, she said, opportunities to get involved were somewhat limited.
“Our family was very involved in the Sheepskin Revue, which put on plays at Christmas and during the Lamb Fair,” she said.
She also got involved in an attempt in the early 2000s to establish a countywide library district after being encouraged to do so by the then-state librarian.
“We held regular meetings, we dealt with politicians, we hired consultants, and we had this whole plan put together,” Ziedrich said. “And then the Albany City Council ended up being against it.”
She recalled that Albany had just acquired a building to house its city library.
“We actually had a city councilor say that she didn’t want country people to come get their new carpets dirty.”
She said one outcome of that effort, though, was the creation of a countywide library consortium, which allows local library members to borrow books from other libraries for free.
But, she said, rural residents still have to pay to use city libraries, which is why she wanted to establish the countywide district.
“Some people aren’t willing to do that, and that’s fine if they don’t read books, but it’s not fine for their children,” she said.
After moving to Lebanon, she got involved in the Garden Club, partly because she had once presented a program for the members. She had become a Master Gardener in Suffolk County, Mass., and in the Santa Cruz area had had a “big garden” when she wrote her “Cold Soups” book.
When she arrived in Oregon, she completed OSU’s Master Food Preserver Program, and in Scio farmed about seven acres of land with “subsistence” crops.
When she moved to Lebanon, she dialed it down to her new back yard in town and a community garden plot, first at Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church and then at Porter Park.
“It’s a great challenge to grow in a small area, because you have to be very choosy,” Ziedrich said. “You have to make sure what you plant is going to have a good chance of working, and that you fit in everything that’s important to you.”
Less gardening has given her time to chair the Linn County Cultural Coalition, which distributes funds provided by grant money from the Oregon Cultural Trust, supplemented by local donations, to a wide range of local cultural activities.
In 2008 in Scio, the Ziedriches and two other couples founded a League of Women Voters chapter to hold forums for local political candidates “because we were tired of getting these ballots with all these names that we’d never heard of; we didn’t know who these people were.”
The local LWV, which remains small, continues to organize such forums, she said.
“I would love to have somebody else step in and take over and run with that one,” she said. “There’s no end of work you can put into the League of Women Voters, and we keep it very limited because we only have so much time.”
She’s also become “very passionate” about the effort to establish a historical museum in Lebanon.
“We’re the only good-sized town in the county without a museum, right? We’re still looking for a building, and I know that once the museum gets a building, that things will take off.”
But then, she said, docents will be needed, as well as people with design skills to help set things up.
Since the organizing group came together in 2018, she’s organized “close to 20” programs on local historical topics for the membership.
“I’m not leaving that,” she said.
Her latest “big thing” has been trees, which has allowed her to coordinate efforts by the Garden Club membership – “which exploded” during the pandemic, providing funds and manpower – and others to plant trees at the Pioneer Cemetery and Riverview Park.
She formed a Garden Club Community Projects Committee, which has taken on some of those efforts, placing a wide variety of trees and shrubs along the bank of the South Santiam River at the park, which is suffering “serious bank erosion,” she said, as well as three “big shade trees” by benches along the riverside trail.
On March 12, she and other members of Build Lebanon Trails, with employees from Weyerhaeuser, will plant 36 trees donated by that company along the Marks Slough trail.
Ziedrich acknowledges that she needs to dial things back.
“I’m doing too much,” she said. “I need to spend more time on my own work, and so I need to step back from some things.”
There is a lot of opportunity to get involved, she said, particularly in summer watering efforts.
“We need people to water those trees,” she said, referring to the recent plantings at Riverview and the cemetery and the ones that will be planted in Marks Slough. “The river bank project seems to be a success so far. So I really look forward to those trees growing.”