SHARRON HOLLEN
The North Platte Telegraph (retired)
When I was a young reporter, I had an editor who scoffed at young reporters who didn't like to do deaths and weather. He said that everybody talks about one and did the other, but only the good reporters could write them well.
Now I’ve been given the opportunity to write one last obituary. Mine.
I died at the age of 83 on November 4, 2026, at Great Plains Health in North Platte. My funeral will be at 2 p.m. Monday, November 9, 2026, at the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in North Platte with the Rev. Steve Meysing officiating. I will be buried in the North Platte Cemetery.
Visitation will be from noon to 4 p.m. Sunday at Adams & Swanson Funeral Home, which is in charge of arrangements, and at the church Monday until the service time.
I was born Sharron Kay Wilhelm on February 4, 1943, to parents Amye A. and Loren Charles “Bill” Wilhelm. While my mother, whose two sons were U.S. Navy pilots, worked at North Platte’s World War II Canteen, she brought me along in a basket that she set on a shelf in the Canteen room.
I started working for the Telegraph-Bulletin before I graduated from North Platte High School in 1961. When I retired from The Telegraph on February 3, 2011, I had covered all the beats at the newspaper including cops and courts, education, government and arts and entertainment.
After I retired, I wrote historical stories for the first year of The Telegraph’s former Revisited magazine in 2016 and the epilogue of the newspaper’s book “Canteen: As It Happened” in 2019.
I won more than 3,000 awards of various types during my entire career. I was inducted into the Nebraska Press Association Hall of Fame and Nebraska Press Women’s Marian Andersen Nebraska Women Journalists Hall of Fame, both in 2016.
But probably the most humbling and inspiring things I did along the way were during the time I was writing my “Reporter at Large” column from July 16, 1986, until my retirement.
That was the time I used what my mother and father referred to as “the gift of the third eye,” to see beyond what you looked at and the "gift of the fourth ear," to hear what wasn't expressed.
I married Gerald “Gerry” Hollen on May 2, 1964, and we had one daughter, Amye Louise. We later divorced but remained close friends until Jerry’s death from cancer on May 4, 1999.
On April 26, 1992, I married Dr. Robert K. Dellinger in North Platte. He also died of cancer on February 18, 1996.
Survivors include Amye and her husband, Scott Grams, of Kearney; my grandchildren Cameron Grams of Lincoln and Haley Renae Grams of Kearney; and many nieces, nephews and friends.
Others who preceded me in death were my parents; my brothers, William G. Braun and Eugene K. Braun; my infant son, Charles Wilhelm Hollen; and aunts Luella Waltemath, Vera O’Connell and Mildred Stromberg.
“Dying ain't easy.” I had these plans to do things, and people kept interrupting.
Telegraph reporter Todd von Kampen, a colleague from 1987 to 1988 and 1995 to 1997, contributed to this story.