By Andrew Cohen
To say Reidun Stromsheim ’82 took a unique path from Norway to UC Berkeley Law would be a serious understatement. “I was not intellectually ambitious growing up and had mediocre grades,” she says.
But Stromsheim — who shifted from nursing to a successful bankruptcy law career — says her recent $1 million unrestricted gift to the law school and concurrent $500,000 gift to the university’s Goldman School of Public Policy are a testament to hard work, keeping your options open, and self-advocacy. After all, she had to make a powerful oral argument just to attend UC Berkeley Law.
“I was turned down everywhere I applied in California on the grounds that I didn’t have a bachelor’s degree,” Stromsheim recalls. “But the degree they were looking for wasn’t available in Norway.”
So she went to the admissions office at UC Berkeley Law — which hadn’t rejected her yet — explained the situation, and pleaded her case: “I said I know very well that some foreign UC Berkeley students who earned master’s degrees didn’t have bachelor’s degrees from their home countries because they didn’t exist.”
With that successful persuasion, strong marks from nursing school and Norwegian law school and stellar recommendation letters, Stromsheim was admitted at age 32.
Finding her niche
The seeds were planted much earlier, when after one year of sewing school and one year of secretarial school in her native Norway — “neither of which lit a fire under me” — she visited an aunt who lived in Los Gatos, Calif. Paris was next, selling The New York Times on the street and seeing Maria Callas singing Norma at the Paris Opera. Then came three years of nursing school in Oslo, where Stromsheim became president of the Norwegian Student Nurses Association.
She worked as a registered nurse for the next three years, including one year at Norway’s Health Services Nursing Office while she took night classes to obtain the academic certification qualifying her for university studies.
In 1973, Stromsheim returned to California and worked at UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. There, she met the love of her life, a British nurse named Angela Benson. They moved to Norway, with Stromsheim starting law school intending to combine nursing and law and Benson working as a nurse.
Missing California, Benson persuaded Stromsheim to move back and apply to law school there. After graduating, Stromsheim spent two years clerking for a federal bankruptcy judge in Oakland and eight specializing in bankruptcy at a firm in San Francisco, then ran her own practice from 1992 until her retirement in 2004 — with Benson working as the office manager.
“I was interested in commercial law, and one thing people suggested because of my background was medical malpractice,” says Stromsheim, who now lives in Arizona. “I did it for a semester during law school and found it very distasteful. I know malpractice occurs and I know people are injured and die from errors made by physicians, but as a nurse I saw they have to make a lot of very hard decisions in stressful circumstances and like everyone else, sometimes they make mistakes.”
Staying connected
Despite the physical distance from her home country, Stromsheim maintained close ties through her civic activities. She served as president of the Norwegian-American Chamber of Commerce’s Northern California chapter, and was involved with the Norwegian Sailors Home — established during World War II to house stranded sailors from Norway.
“Norway had one of the largest commercial fleets in the world,” she says. “When Hitler invaded Norway and the Norwegian king and shipowners went into exile in England, they took care of the fleet to the extent they could. They bought a nice building in the Pacific Heights area of San Francisco where Norwegian sailors stranded could sleep and get food until a new ship came in.”
After the war ended, Norway House became a social center for Norwegians until an unhappy neighbor learned there was no permit for such activities, and the building was sold. Pursuant to California law, the proceeds were turned into another charity named Norway House Foundation, and Stromsheim served on its board for many years.
Still active today, the organization has helped send numerous students from Norway to UC Berkeley.
“It is little known that one of UC Berkeley’s founders is a Norwegian immigrant: Peder Sather, who became a banker after the gold rush and one of the richest men in California,” she says. “Sather Gate is well enough known, I’m just taking baby steps after him.”
Gratitude in action
Stromsheim describes her recent gift as an easy decision and a mark of gratitude for her own Berkeley education, which she points out “made doing this a possibility … Angela and I have no children, both our families are financially comfortable, and Berkeley Law launched my very rewarding career.”
As for giving to the Berkeley Law Fund, which allows the school to deploy funds where and when they’re most needed, she says: “I’m gay, and life for gay people isn’t always easy, so initially I did explore seeing if any of the money could be positioned to help gay people have a chance to benefit from it.” But when she learned about the school’s diversity (55% of the current 1L class are people of color, 37% identify as LGBTQ+, and 17% are the first in their families to attend college), she chose to make her gift unconditional, “which was my preference.”
With rising threats to the rule of law around the world, Stromsheim adds that “Berkeley Law needs the money these days more than at any time before.”
“I am deeply grateful to Reidun Stromsheim’s very generous gift,” UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky says, noting that it will make “an enormous difference” for the school. “By being an unrestricted gift, it allows us to direct the money to our areas of greatest need.”
While retired, Stromsheim has hardly slowed down. She ran a half-marathon at age 75 and another at 77, and still gets in 10,000 steps a day. An enthusiastic cook and traveler, she also recently spent six months earning her sommelier certificate from the North American Sommelier Association.
“I live by the Italian motto, ‘Wine is food,’” Stromsheim says with a laugh. “Years ago I started reading Jancis Robinson’s weekly wine column in the Financial Times, and now I have a wine cellar bigger than I could finish up. I’ll be back in San Francisco soon for a celebration dinner for the 25th anniversary of her website and am very much looking forward to it. The Bay Area carries a lot of warm memories for me.”