[2] She first met her future husband, Robert W. Straub, during the early 1940s while she was a Smith College freshman working as a camp counselor on Mount Moosilauke in New Hampshire.
[2][3] The couple married in 1943, shortly before Bob Straub was sent to the European theatre with the United States Army Quartermaster Corps during World War II.
[1] In 1974, shortly before becoming the state's first lady, Straub published, "From the Loving Earth", a book which covered organic farming without chemicals, cooking, food preservation.
Straub, by then a veteran of organic gardening, grew and cooked the produce for official dinners and baked bread on the farmhouse's wood-burning stove.
They proved so popular that Barbara Hanneman, Governor Straub's personal assistant, had to keep a record of who had received the first lady's organic chicken eggs.
[3] Straub publicly supported her husband's environmental policies and initiatives, including Senate Bill 100's land-use plans, originally conceived by Governor Tom McCall) and a series of innovative state energy efficiency programs.
[3] After leaving office, Pat and Bob Straub owned and operated several farms scattered throughout the Willamette Valley, specifically the Mid-Valley, of central Oregon.