Zeller Westabrook went home to rest with her personal Lord and Savior Jesus Christ on Sunday evening, November 22, 2020. She was 83.

She was born Sandra Elizabeth Troescher to Fred Z. Troescher, a newspaper advertising salesman, and Gladys Mae Riddle Troescher on November 7, 1937, in Youngstown, Ohio.

In 1992, she legally changed her name to Zeller Westabrook, a pen name she had used for many years as a published writer.

She was a charter member of Boardman Baptist Temple in Boardman, a Youngstown suburb, and assistant teacher of the first Sunday school for disabled children in the greater Youngstown area.

She progressed to Silver Bar Dance with the Roller Skate Rink Operators Association of America and was part of the first freestyle pair to train at the Rollerbarn in Boardman.

After graduating from Youngstown's Boardman High School in 1955, she attended Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, then enlisted in the Navy.

She served from September 23, 1957, to January 7, 1959, graduating from training schools in Jacksonville, Florida, and Memphis, Tennessee, with subsequent duty as an aviation electronics technician at Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado, California.

She married Roderick Bruce Woolever on August 14, 1958, in Youngstown. They divorced in 1968. They remarried October 26, 1970, in Oak Harbor, Washington, and divorced December 31, 1977.

She was very active in church activities at the Joyce Bible Church in Joyce, Washington, and in Oak Harbor, particularly at the Naval Air Station Whidbey Island Chapel and New Covenant Fellowship Foursquare Church. She was a charter member of the Whidbey Island Women's Aglow Fellowship and was active in Lay Witness Missions.

Although a student-level trombone player and violinist, her preferred musical outlets were piano and lifelong singing with groups ranging from 200-voice choirs to gospel quartets.

She participated in Oak Harbor community events, including Garden Club flower shows, Holland Happening, the Old-Fashioned Fourth of July, and hosting live-in college students from West Pakistan and Bangladesh as well as producing an annual Living Nativity for Christmas at her home on Highway 20.

She was a Brownie leader, and a team mother and official scorekeeper for Little League teams.

Among other endeavors, she sponsored Women-to-Women Vietnamese Relief for refugees processed through Fort Lewis in Tacoma. She distributed modern-language New Testaments at movie showings of "The Exorcist" and organized a community showing of Food for the Hungry founder Larry Ward's film "I Was Hungry."

In 1976, she received an associate degree from Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington.

From 1975 to 1982, she was a Realtor with R. Tull and Associates Better Homes and Gardens in Oak Harbor and, for two years, a loan packager for Farmers Home Administration. She also conducted interviews for Response Analysis of Princeton, New Jersey, in conjunction with George Washington University.

She was in federal civil service from 1980 to 1987 as a clerk-typist, an equal employment opportunity assistant and as a management assistant. In 1983 she was honored as a Civil Service Equal Employment Opportunity Employee of the Year.

As a freelance writer, she won recognition for juvenile fiction and a historical novel from the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. She was a charter member of Whidbey Writers in Oak Harbor and Quill 'n' Query in Mount Vernon.

She taught creative writing at Skagit Valley College, sponsoring several seminars with established authors. She was a member of the Romance Writers of America and the author of a how-to book on recording family history, "Legacy Laboratory: A Springboard to Writing Personal History. "

She came to the North Olympic Peninsula in September 1987 and made her home at Lake Crescent and Whiskey Creek Beach before settling in Port Angeles. She worked as a freelance photographer and as a secretary and was active in the Society for Creative Anachronism as Sister Luke Elizabeth, a medieval nun.

From June 1992 until her retirement in January 2012, she worked at the Peninsula Daily News as a news assistant. She prepared a weekly recipe column, wrote community news stories and obituaries, maintained newsroom files and kept track of letters to the editor and contributions to the newspaper's Peninsula Home Fund.

For more than 10 years, she was responsible for designing and decorating Peninsula Daily News' auction trees at the annual Festival of Trees in Port Angeles.

She assisted with meetings in Port Angeles and Seattle for the White House Conference on Aging in 1995; she had helped organize a meeting in Bellingham, Washington, for the White House Conference on Families in 1980.

She donated Puget Sound specimens from her extensive seashell collection to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., at its request, and also donated Navy uniforms and photographs for exhibits at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial in Arlington, Virginia.

Her survivors include her sister Shirley Mae Troescher Young of Los Osos, California; four of five children, Robert B. Woolever of Landisburg, Pennsylvania; Elizabeth Dawson of Springfield, Oregon; Derek J. Woolever of Hurst, Texas; and Ryan S. Woolever of Shermans Dale, Pa.; 11 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

She was predeceased by her parents, her brother Fred Z. Troescher Jr., her former husband and her son Curtis C. Woolever.

She had been a member of the St. Andrew's Place assisted living community in Port Angeles since September 2019.

Drennan and Ford Funeral Home in Port Angeles handled her arrangements. A family-only memorial service was held on Whidbey Island on Nov. 27, 2020. Due to COVID-19 concerns, no other services are planned.

Memorial contributions may be made to the Joyce Bible Church, P.O. Box 4, Joyce, WA 98343.

Please sign the online guestbook for her family at www.drennanford.com .