Ellie Bluestein, Fresno peace activist and Raging Grannies member, dies at 91

Ellie Bluestein had a way of pulling people together, whether it was a a teacher, mediator, activist or community organizer.

“You never said no to Ellie,” says Pat Wolk, a fellow Fresno peace activist and friend who met Bluestein in the 1970s.

“She knew so much and she could get things done.”

Eleanore Bluestein died Tuesday at her home in Fresno. She was 91 years old.

“Dears: This morning Ellie left us,” Bluestein’s son wrote in a social media post. “She was calm and clear and loving to the end. We celebrate her life and her gifts to us all and her sweet departure and journey! Our family will post further remembrances, and when touching returns to us all there will be a chance for all of us to come together again to sing her songs.”

Though Bluestein didn’t play an instrument, she was the matriarch to a family of well-known folk musicians that includes husband Gene and children Joel, Evo, Jemmy and Frayda.

She was also instrumental in creating a movement of community activism in Fresno.

The Bluesteins had been in Fresno for less than a year when Ellie started a letter campaign to create a branch of the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom in Fresno. She wrote 47 letters, to community leaders, colleagues and friends of her husband along with people she met when she first moved to town.

The Fresno branch celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2015 and continues to this day.

Bluestein started her work with WILPF before coming to Fresno as the president of a branch in East Langsing, Mich.

“I went to the national meeting in Minneapolis and met fabulous women, many of whom were in their eighties and nineties, and still active intellectually, politically, and out in the streets demonstrating. It was incredible to me and I wanted to be like these women. This is one of the things that encouraged me,” Bluestein once remembered.

Fittingly, it was Bluestein, along with Wolk, who started Fresno’s chapter of the Raging Grannies. The group, dressed in aprons and armed with rolling pins and knitting needles, created songs and staged protests on everything from the war in Iraq following 9/11 to the proposed mining of Jesse Morrow Mountain east of Sanger.

Eventually Bluestein lost her voice and had to stop singing, Wolk said.

The pair also collaborated on “20 Fresno Women Committed to Change,” an oral history project in which Bluestein interviewed 20 woman who had worked to benefit the community. Wolk took their portraits and Bluestein wrote the caption text.

Readers of The Fresno Bee may remember Bluestein as a prolific writer, both of letters to the editor and columns in the Valley Voices section, as she advocated for a number of issues, including the need for an independent police auditor in the city.

“She lived her values,” Wolk says.

“She was the best friend anybody could ever have.”

Bluestein’s husband Gene Bluestein died in 2002. Bluestein is survived by her four children and grandchildren Jade, Masha, Sarah, Steven, Isaiah, and Rachel.

A celebration of life will be scheduled at a future date, the family said.

Thoughts and tributes may be left online at Caring Bridge. Contributions in her honor can be made to the Jade Battles Myasthenia Gravis and Lupus and RA GoFund Me campaign, Musick Creek Confluence, 10691 Madsen Ave. Clovis, 93612, or Fresno WILPF, P.O. Box 5114, Fresno, 93755.

This story was originally published April 9, 2020 at 1:22 PM.