It’s not often, one appreciative colleague said of Teri Thalhofer, that you meet a person with equal parts zeal and compassion.
Some version of that apt description of Thalhofer, the recently retired director of North Central Public Health District, was repeated over and over by those who worked with her.
Christa Rude, director of the Four Rivers Early Learning Hub, worked with Thalhofer for years, and described her balance of zeal and compassion.
“Teri Thalhofer is such a professional,” Rude said. “Her heart for children and families and the wellness of our community fuels her strength in advocating for rural Oregon as well as her tenderness in understanding daily challenges. Teri will be missed in her role, and also we are still lucky that she lives in our community. Retired or not, she is champion for families- she just can’t help it.”
Thalhofer wanted to be a lawyer when she was growing up in Scappoose, but her parents wanted her to choose a more traditional career, such as nursing or teaching.
“So I chose nursing,” she said. “I love it, and it’s offered me lots of different opportunities to work, full-time or part-time, and I’ve been able to do lots of different things.”
After graduating in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from the University of Portland, Thalhofer spent 11 years as a labor and delivery nurse at Oregon Health & Science University.
There, she would meet an eventual colleague of hers, Dr. Miriam McDonell, who is health officer for the public health district.
McDonell said, “I met Teri when I was a first-year ob/gyn resident at OHSU and she was an all-powerful labor and delivery nurse. She terrified me then, it’s true, but we went on to have a great working relationship full of trust and humor.”
In 2013, Thalhofer offered McDonell the health officer job, telling her it was just three hours a week. “So I said, ‘Sure, what could go wrong?’” she joked.
Her hours and duties grew. And now, McDonell said, “I owe my career in public health to Teri.”
McDonell said Thalhofer “is passionate about the people she serves and cares deeply about providing the best quality of life for all residents in our area. She’s always passionate about the underdog.”
Thalhofer announced her June 30 retirement last December, just as COVID-19 was being discovered in China. Her last months on the job were overtaken by the pandemic.
She delivered meals to people in isolation, negotiated with motels for lodging for those in isolation or quarantine, and attended countless meetings as local agencies, businesses, orchards and healthcare providers prepared their response.
“It has raised the profile of public health,” Thalhofer said of the pandemic. “I think that for such an under-resourced part of our infrastructure, public health has really done an amazing job of coming together and protecting communities and really giving the information that needs to be there so that people know how to fight this.”
She said anybody visible in public health has gotten a nasty phone call or email related to COVID-19. “I’ve never seen a disease politicized the way this has been. When we had H1N1, we said, ‘This is what you should do and people said, Ok, we’ll do that because we want to be safe and we don’t want to get sick.’ And how wearing a mask became politicized is beyond me.”
Thalhofer came to the health district in 2000 as a nurse home visitor. She was named director in 2009. She was most surprised by “how political this job was.” And by that she means “that people wanted to argue with facts and the value of making people healthy. I naively believed that I would be able to present evidence and people would accept it and want to act on it. And I was incredibly naïve.”
What she will miss is the “incredibly dedicated staff,” who she said “want to leave the community better than they found it, they want to make a difference, they want to make people healthier.”
Former Sherman County Commissioner Mike Smith served on the board of health overseeing the three-county health district, which serves Wasco, Sherman and Gilliam counties.
He said of Thalhofer, “Quite simply, I have never met anyone who cared more and put more of themselves into their mission. Calling what she did a job, or a career even, makes it sound less than it was to her.”
While others were asked what they thought made Thalhofer tick, her own answer to the question was this: “I think I have a responsibility to leave the world better than I found it.”
And she feels she has. She helped individual families find resources they needed, “and I feel this community is better off and in a better position in a lot of ways around public health than when I came into it, and I’ve raised two really amazing human beings that will continue that work.”
Not that she’s doddering off into the sunset. She plans to keep her nursing license active and after relaxing for the summer, doing gardening and cooking, she’ll be back to doing something “very part-time,” maybe consulting, or working with the elderly. “I don’t know.”
Kathi Hall, finance manager for the public health district, worked with Thalhofer for over 20 years.
She said Thalhofer helped the district weather many storms, and was a decisive leader and a quick thinker who made it fun to brainstorm ideas.
“Teri is definitely a visionary,” Hall said. “She is able to see the big picture and come up with solutions and processes that have been very successful. In particular, she was instrumental in the formation of the regional Eastern Oregon Modernization Collaborative.”
That collaborative of public health entities and healthcare providers has been instrumental in creating a smooth regional response to Covid, McDonell said.
Thalhofer is known for her impeccable memory. As Grace Anderson, a registered nurse with the health district who has worked with Thalhofer for 15 years put it, “Her brain is this humungous vault where all this information goes in and nothing ever leaves.”
Thalhofer demurred, “I have an amazing memory for useless information. I think I get it from my mother.”
Saying Thalhofer was her “favorite boss ever,” Anderson noted, “she’s a very compassionate person and she realizes that people have stuff going on in their lives and she has always been so supportive as a boss and as flexible as she can be to accommodate whatever her staff needed. I’ve always felt that we’re more family here than we are co-workers.”
Anderson said Thalhofer is “extremely intelligent and she’s very strongly opinionated and outspoken, she doesn’t shy away from stirring the pot and she really sticks to her guns when she strongly believes in something, and has the best intentions for her staff and the community.
“I think those qualities about her are awesome but often not seen by other people in a positive manner, especially if you’re a woman.”
She said Thalhofer has dealt with a lot of criticism and negativity, and has had to have a thick skin to deal with it, “but she’s definitely a softy on the inside. She’s a really good person with a really good heart, and she’s just looking out for the best.”
Reflecting on the global health crisis that overtook her last few months as director, Thalhofer said COVID-19 is “nothing like we’ve ever seen before and the more we learn about it and how it behaves in different people’s bodies, the more frightening it becomes.”
“Nothing has changed about the virus; It’s still that scary and if we want an open economy we have to do what we can to protect one another from that, and it takes all of us.”
And so, when Oregon Gov. Kate Brown announced the day before Thalhofer’s retirement that masks would become mandatory in indoor public places statewide, Thalhofer posted the governor’s press release on her Facebook page and crowed, “It’s my retirement gift from Governor Brown!!”
Commented