Helen C. Peterson, 81, a writer and retired administrator with the University of Illinois, died at Carle Foundation Hospital in Urbana on Sunday, March 25, after a brief illness.

Friends are invited to gather at her home in Urbana between 3:00 and 6:00 p.m., on Saturday, March 31, for a celebration of her life. No other memorial is planned.

Helen Peterson held several positions at the University of Illinois before serving from 1967 to 1987 as an assistant dean in the Graduate College. An art lover, she served as a docent at the Krannert Art Museum and edited the museum's Member's Magazine after retiring from the University. She also launched a second career as a writer. In 2004, a writer's collective in which she was active formed Prairie Island Press and published Possessions: A Remembrance, a memoir she had written of her 51-year marriage to her late husband, Theodore B. Peterson, longtime dean of the University's College of Communications.

She was born Helen Clegg on August 20, 1925, in Altoona, in southeast Kansas. In college, she was the first woman editor of the Kansas State Collegian, the school newspaper at Kansas State University. In 1946, she married Ted, who had taken a job at Kansas State after completing his military service in World War II. They moved to Champaign-Urbana in 1948, and spent the following summer on a delayed honeymoon in Paris. A description of the honeymoon, the first of many trips to Europe the couple would take, serves as one of the early chapters of her book.

"In 1997 we were still the naifs of 1949," she wrote of the couple's last visit to their favorite city, three months before Ted's death. "[Paris] was still an easy city, a city to be walked and savored. She did not accept us, did not know we were there, but we accepted her, unequivocally, not needing to understand her or her language. It was enough for Monsieur et Madame Peterson to walk her streets, peering through wrought-iron gates at gardens we could not enter."

She is survived by a sister, Phyllis Bowersock of Richland, Wa., and four children, Daniel Peterson, director of program management with the product development firm Herbst Lazar Bell in Chicago, Megan Guenther, a lawyer and Pilates teacher in Champaign, Kristin Peterson, an artist and graphic technologies specialist with Sharper Image in San Francisco, and Thane Peterson, a journalist living in Waymart, Pa. Her son-in-law, Ron Guenther, is the University's athletic director.

Memorial gifts may be made to the Theodore B. Peterson Scholarship in Communications at the University of Illinois' College of Communications, via the U of I Foundation, 1305 W. Green St. MC-386, Urbana 61801. The family hopes to rename the fund the Helen and Theodore Peterson Scholarship in Communications.

Condolences may be offered at www.renner-wikoffchapel.com.