Priscilla Lussmyer

Priscilla Charlotte Johnson Lussmyer

April 24, 1927 – May 16, 2013

The third child of George Frederick and Dana Humphrey Johnson, Priscilla was born on April 24, 1927, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After graduating from Lowell High School in 1944, she attended Oberlin College, earning her B.A. in physical education in 1948. After teaching elementary P.E. for three years in Ashland, Ohio, she earned her master’s degree from Northwestern University.

Married in 1952 to Ralph Lussmyer, Priscilla had four children—Priscilla Ann, Janis, Robert, and John. She returned to work as a single parent in 1961, teaching six years in Grandville, Michigan followed by twelve years in Saugatuck, Michigan.

In 1979, Priscilla retired early from teaching to build an earth berm house in Lowell, Michigan, where she was very active in the United Methodist Church, the Fallasburg Historical Society, and the Lowell Women’s Club until her move to Greenbank, Washington in 2001. There she put her energies to gardening and cleaning up brush in John’s twenty-acre forested property, despite failing vision from macular degeneration, a bout with stomach cancer in 2005, and hastening decline from Alzheimer’s Disease. She spent the last fifteen months of her life in a superb memory care facility, Home Place of Oak Harbor, where she died peacefully in her sleep on May 16, 2013.

She is survived by her three younger children, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. A memorial service was held on May 20 at Whidbey Presbyterian Church in Oak Harbor, Washington.