Ellen Louise Straus

Ellen Sulzberger Straus, who was active in Call for Action and other nonprofit organizations and in the communications industry, died on Friday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. She was 69 and lived in midtown Manhattan. The cause was cancer, said her husband, R. Peter Straus.

At her death, Mrs. Straus was president of Executive Service Strategies, a management and consulting firm that she founded in 1986. She and Mr. Straus were for some years co-owners of WMCA, a Manhattan-based radio station, which they sold in 1986.

In 1963, Mrs. Straus founded Call for Action, the nation's first telephone help line, which was intended to aid individuals in solving their problems with officials, corporations and landlords. That activity, using office space at WMCA, became the prototype for similar organizations in nearly all major United States cities.

Mrs. Straus was born in Manhattan and graduated from Smith College in 1945. She worked as the executive secretary of the New York League of Women Voters and on the staff of the Atomic Energy Commission, becoming assistant director of public information. In 1949, she helped to manage Gov. Herbert H. Lehman's campaign for the United States Senate.

Later, based in Switzerland while Mr. Straus was an executive with the International Labor Organization, she worked as a Geneva correspondent for several upstate newspapers.

In addition to her husband of 45 years, who is chairman of Straus Communications, Mrs. Straus is survived by her mother, Louise Mayer Blumenthal Sulzberger of Longboat Key, Fla., and Saranac Lake, N.Y.; four children, Diane Tucker of Bedford, N.Y., Katherine Caple of Wellesley, Mass., Jeanne Tofel of Manhattan and Eric Straus of Rhinebeck, N.Y.; two sisters, Jean Sulzberger and Ann Sand, both of Manhattan, and eight grandchildren.

-- New York Times, February 26, 1995