The Nurse and Her Blades

In the prime of her skating career, Sheila Ellgaard was on a first-class ride to glamour. As a headliner 35 years ago for Holiday on Ice, she toured the world, performing before audiences that ranged from European royalty to Eskimos. Newspapers called her a “graceful blond goddess” and an “ice queen.” Ed Sullivan even brought her to the United States from England on the Queen Mary.

The ride ended in 1968 when she retired from skating and enrolled in the nursing program at Valley College. “Going from skating to nursing was a difficult adjustment at first,” she said. “I went from a glamorous job to emptying bedpans. Skating had also spoiled me. People had applauded everything I did. In nursing, nobody is going to clap for a good performance.”

But Ellgaard, 57, must have been doing something right as a nurse. She was recently named director of nursing at Valley Presbyterian Hospital in Van Nuys, in charge of 700 nurses.

Because of her duties, she hasn’t been able to skate for the past 12 years, but she has had time to get involved in her hometown. A year ago, she was named Tarzana woman of the year by the Tarzana Chamber of Commerce.

It was just as unlikely for Ellgaard to wind up in Southern California as in a nursing career. Born in Brighton, England, she was a teen-ager during World War II, surviving German bombing raids.

“The Allies were billeted in the ice rink where I practiced,” she said with a gentle English accent, “and I would skate for them after school. One day there was an air raid right in the middle of practice. But at that age it wasn’t scary. We had all those wonderful soldiers around to protect us.”

In 1955, she and her husband, Ron Priestley, were driving through the West, sightseeing and looking for cowboys, she said, “and we fell in love with a house in Encino.” They bought it and discovered, ironically, that the biggest cowboy of them all, John Wayne, was a neighbor.

After she became a nurse, she and Priestley were divorced and she married Torven Ellgaard, a Dane from Copenhagen. Why choose nursing?

“I had been a great fan of Albert Schweitzer,” she said. The good doctor probably would have liked her, too.