Trude Wenzel Lash, Was Children's Advocate

Trude Wenzel Lash, a longtime child advocate and seasonal Vineyard resident, widow of the biographer Joseph P. Lash, died Wednesday, Feb. 4, at her home in New York city, after a long illness. She was 95.

Born Gertrud Wenzel in Freiburg, Germany in 1908 to Emma von Adam and Friederich Wenzel, she was the oldest of five children. With no money for milk, she survived on watered wine and, while tutoring children to earn money to buy milk for her youngest brother, acquired tuberculosis. Thus, she was a battler from the beginning.

In 1931, after acquiring her Ph.D in philology at the University of Freiburg, she taught at Hunter College as an exchange student. In Berlin she put in four eventful months on an anti-Hitler newspaper, infiltrating Nazi meetings, before she married Eliot D. Pratt, a member of a prominent New York family, and moved to the United States. Before their divorce in 1943, the couple helped many people opposed to Hitler flee Germany.

In 1944 Trude Pratt married Joseph Lash and together they formed a strong friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt. It was Mrs. Roosevelt who recommended Trude Lash to the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York (CCC) in 1946; there she eventually served as executive director from 1952-72. Later she recalled that she hadn't felt ready for the job; she had three children in school at the time, and an infant son from her marriage to Mr. Lash, but "Eleanor told me that if we wait until we're ready, we'll never do anything, and then it will be too late."

Her leadership brought citywide reforms in day care, juvenile detention and foster care, all of which were underscored by Mrs. Lash's primary and deeply-rooted belief in the power of volunteers.

After her retirement from CCC, she continued her advocacy at the Foundation for Child Development, where she continued to do what she felt she was best at - getting other people to do their best, stick to it and believe in themselves. After Mrs. Roosevelt's death in 1961, Congress established the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute; and in 1984 Mrs. Lash, after working to combine the Eleanor Roosevelt Institute with the Franklin Roosevelt Institute, became its chairman. She continued in this position until 2000, when she and Arthur Schlesinger, together, became honorary chairmen.

She was honored at Hyde Park in 1997 as a recipient of the Val-Kill medal, an honor created in 1987 to honor activism and advocacy.

Trude Lash rose early to do yoga before her busy days in the 1950s and 1960s, decades before the value of this was generally understood.

The Lashes started coming to Menemsha in 1945, and Mrs. Roosevelt visited them here in 1950.

The home that they built in Menemsha in 1955 was for years the place where Mrs. Lash most enjoyed her love of cooking, creating dinners for family and friends. She also enjoyed vegetable and flower gardening and swimming. Mr. Lash once told the Gazette: "It has been a successful home indeed, lived in and loved by three generations."

Almost until her death, Mrs. Lash was a valuable consultant to many in New York, as well as those seeking first-hand experience of the Roosevelts. She continued to read widely, and perused the newspaper daily, and she could still be enraged by injustice and George W. Bush.

She is survived by a brother, Heinz Wenzel, and her four children: Peter W. Pratt, M.D. of Bridgewater, Conn.; Vera C. Pratt, MLA, artist, in Washington D.C.; Roger S. Pratt, architect, in New Milford, Conn.; and Jonathan Lash of Washington D.C., president of World Resources Institute. In addition, she is survived by 11 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests a contribution to one of her many interests, including the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, the Citizens Committee for Children of New York, or the Foundation for Island Health on the Vineyard.