Back in the 60s and 70s, Dottie Harper was a Highline community household name. She was the dynamo personality who was determined to put Burien on the county map long before it became a city, and her own name popped up regularly in the Highline Times.

It was her inspiration to get County Commissioner Ed Munro to buy the Howie Guynn property on the waterfront that we know as Seahurst Park, and she even ran for the County Council against Paul Barden when he couldn't buy the idea of making the turn-of-the-century Morasch house into a Highline museum.

She led the fight to build Sunset Park in the airport clear zone and held forth in an office in a former Highline grade school directly under the flight path of screaming jets, directing the development of hundreds of acres that once were covered with houses.

When Barden got her the money to move the ancient house to a resting place on the property, vandals put it to flames and her dream went up in smoke. That dream is now underway again, led by another dynamo, Cyndi Upthegrove, who leads the Highline Historical Society plan to build a museum on the corner of Ambaum and Southwest 152nd Street.

Incidentally, Dottie and Cyndi are close friends and lived door to door on Lake Burien till Dottie and Paul moved to Wenatchee.

Dottie's plans for a performing arts center in downtown Burien in the 90s wouldn't fly with Barden, who provided the space for county senior housing now called Burien Park.

But the performing arts idea did not die and it eventually became a splendid reality next to Highline High.

In her pursuit of impossible dreams she was not afraid to step on toes and she fought like a pit bull.

She now lives in Wenatchee near her daughter Claudia and not long after Burien was finally incorporated she was honored when city council members named the wooded acreage next to the Burien Library Dottie Harper Park.

(Editor's Note: Paul Harper, Dottie Harper's husband, passed away recently. His obituary is on page 10.)