Longtime Western Producer food and lifestyles columnist Emmie Oddie died July 6. A funeral is planned for July 17 in Regina.
I’d Like to Know, a weekly column she wrote from 1949-1995, offered help with day-to-day living and activities in the farm household.
“In my writing, there was a great feeling of this is one of us, not someone sitting in the city in an office, but someone on the farm, doing the work and the canning,” Oddie said in a 2007 interview.
Emmie Ducie was born in 1916 and grew up on a farm at Dundurn, Sask. She married Langford Oddie, an agrologist and farmer, and raised two children, Rosemary and Will, on a farm at Assiniboia, Sask., and later Tregarva, Sask.
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Oddie had an undergraduate degree in household science and a master’s degree in home economics.
She worked as a nutritionist for the Red Cross and in extension work and taught home management classes at the University of Saskatchewan.
She and her sister, Rose Jardine, a former Western Producer editor and gardening columnist, were strongly influenced by their feminist mother, Emma Ducie.
Oddie served as president of the Saskatchewan Women’s Institutes and the Federated Women’s Institutes of Canada, led 4-H clubs, judged country fairs and served on boards such as the Saskatchewan Arts Board and the Advisory Council for the Status of Women.
She also compiled a cookbook, From Prairie Kitchens, and worked to provide educational information on nutrition, food preparation and home management to the under-privileged in the Regina region.
She received life memberships in SWI, FWIC and the Saskatchewan Home Economics Association. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 1984.
