Viola Oursler, 92, Everett Activist

Although she retired as an Everett schoolteacher and counselor in 1971, Viola Oursler never stopped teaching or counseling.

The slim, bespectacled lady not only taught people how to get and use money for neighborhood improvements such as sidewalks, but she also counseled them on how to push ASARCO to clean up the arsenic-laced soil left behind decades after the company moved its Everett smelter.

Chairing the Northeast Everett Neighborhood, Mrs. Oursler was a driving force for community improvements for three decades.

"She was a very organized person and carried those duties out to the end," said David Simpson, a neighbor elected to the Everett City Council in November. "I never had her as a teacher, but the way she presented herself as chairperson of the Northeast Neighborhood, she was a teacher, and we were her students."

Mrs. Oursler died Monday (Feb. 16) of effects of a stroke. She was 92.

Born in Sultan, she earned a bachelor's degree in history at Washington State University in 1929. She began teaching in Index, then got married.

After her husband, James Oursler, died in 1944, she worked at Skykomish High School and at North Junior High School in Everett.

"I knew her from the time my children were in junior high, and she was a counselor at North in the late 1950s," said Mrs. Oursler's neighbor Anne Robison. "It was 1977 when the first block-grant neighborhoods were formed to get federal funds to help with sidewalks, parks and other improvements, and northeast Everett was one of the first of those neighborhoods."

Mrs. Oursler, who enjoyed taking cruises, had lived in her house in northeast Everett since the mid-1940s. She became active in neighborhood leadership after retiring, fighting installation of a garbage incinerator. Involved in Everett's 1979-81 growth-management study, she helped shape city zoning codes.

One of her biggest projects was trying to get ASARCO to clean up its arsenic-laced soil, uncovered in 1990. Living just beyond the fenced area where homes were leveled because of high toxicity on the property, she wanted the soil cleansed under the state's Model Toxics Control Act, which requires the polluter to clean up property it has contaminated no matter how long ago.

In 1993, Everett officials named Viola Oursler Viewpoint Park at 800 E. Marine View Drive in her honor.

Other survivors include a sister-in-law, Iola Lester of Monroe, and a nephew, Darrell Lester of Yakima.

Services are at 2 p.m. today at Purdy and Walters with Cassidy, 1702 Pacific Ave., Everett.

Donations may go to Everett Rehabilitation and Medical Center, 1919 112th St. S.W., Everett, WA 98204.