Lynette Matyshock passed away early in the morning of August 21, 2025, eleven days shy of her 82nd birthday.

She had spent the day before visiting with Linda Sovndal, who had driven north from Sebastopol with her husband, Karl Smith, to say goodbye to her lifelong friend.

It was a good day.

“Lynette and I were friends from birth,” Linda says. “Two little farm girls born 29 days apart — I’m the elder — into Danish families in rural Ferndale in the summer of 1943. Our lifelong friendship embraced three-hour phone conversations filled with endless laughter. My family tells me my giggling with Lynette was unlike any other laughter, coming from a place in my soul where she and I shared our kindred spirit, our ‘friends forever’ bond.”

Lynette was the first child of Harry and Evelyn (Hansen) Christensen; when she was born, on September 1, 1943, Harry was working for dairyman Alex Aggeler at Willowbrook Dairy in east Ferndale. Harry was soon to have his own dairy on Church Lane in Waddington.

Lynette (and, born four years later, her brother Marv) attended Coffee Creek School. Classes went through the sixth grade. For junior high, she took the bus into town to attend Ferndale Elementary, from which she graduated in 1957. She quickly became a major figure in the Ferndale High School class of ’61 (then, with 52 students, the largest class to pass through the Ferndale school system).

She excelled at everything in which she took an interest and ignored the rest. As a freshman she was tapped (in a co-appointment with Linda Sovndal) to be the eventual co-editor of the Tomahawk. She joined the clarinet section of the school band and was selected three times for the Humboldt County Honor Band. She excelled academically, graduating as a Life Member of the California Scholarship Federation (CSF), and excelled as well in the professional classes, including typing—key for a woman to get a job in those years—and bookkeeping. She was a long-time participant on the Danish Dancers team coached by Erla Chance. It was the Danish Dancers who gave her perhaps the biggest and happiest surprise of her life: a “sweet sixteen” birthday party—dinner and dancing, held at the town home of her uncle, Clarence Hansen.

In the fall of 1961, she married Aaron Matyshock. Three years later, when Lynette was 20, and Rick and Terry, the elder two of her three sons, were toddlers, her mother Evelyn, 48, died of cancer. It was a loss that never healed.

A few years after the birth of her third son, Randy, it was necessary for Lynette to join the work force. A very smart woman with no work experience outside the home, she parlayed her FUHS business skills into a career with what was then called Pacific Coast Farm Credit (it merged with American AgCredit on September 1, 1999 — Lynette’s birthday, a coincidence that did not escape her). In the mid-‘00s, after nearly 25 years in the world of agricultural finance, she retired from paid employment—and then spent the next decade fully engrossed in what she loved: watching her grandchildren play sports, gardening, beautifying her home, and shopping.

She also spent those years giving back to her beloved community. She became a docent at the Ferndale Museum, and then a board member, and then the co-chair for five years of Sweet Memories dessert auctions—for which the museum named her Volunteer of the Year in 2016. She served on the board of directors of the Ferndale Cemetery, and she kept up her Danish connections as a 60-year-plus member of the Fjelddronning (“Mountain Queen”) Lodge #131, Danish Sisterhood in America. She became an active member of the Village Club.

And then, she agreed to showcase her landscaping on the Ferndale Garden Club tour.

Her son Rick rolls his eyes. “Not a rock could be out of place!” he said. And it wasn’t. Her “backyard” where her large garden stretched to the edges of the pastures off Ferndale’s frequently flooded Frog Alley was — after months of reaching for perfection — a paradise of fountains and flowers and color.

She loved her garden, and she loved her home. And, to a professional level, she loved to shop, often on a near-daily basis with her enthusiastic colleague, Edna Borges.

Lynette’s well-trained shopper’s eye also brought her a large measure of regional fame, as she became the powerful voice of annual Christmas shopping advice that featured Ferndale’s Main Street businesses in yearly seasonal spreads in the Ferndale Enterprise.

Her shopping partner, writer Wendy Lestina, introduced 2008’s shopping guide with this explanation of the selection process: “All the items below are unanimous decisions. We reach these decisions applying skills of logic and aesthetic debate, and then I give in.”

Giving in to Lynette was always rewarded with lively conversation and much laughter. We’re all unique, but Lynette was more unique — if you listen, you’ll hear her agree — “You got that right!”

Lynette is survived by her sons Rick (Stacy), Terry, and Randy (Misty); her brother Marv Christensen (Nancy); her sister-in-law, Gloria Chambers; her grandchildren: Andrew, Ashley (Eugene), Kayla, Tyler (Gaby), Rylan (Cara), Cheyenne (Robert), Kendra & Maddux; and great-granddaughter, Blayke. She was predeceased by two grandchildren, Kyle and Stevie Matyshock.

A celebration of Lynette’s life will be held on Saturday, September 27, at 2 p.m. at Our Savior’s Lutheran Church on Shaw Avenue in Ferndale, her home church, where she was baptized, confirmed, and married. A reception in the church social hall will follow the service.

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