The job description simply called for a caretaker, someone to take out the garbage, keep the trails clear, maintain the gardens and raise the animals.
Over the past 18 years, though, the Lively Environmental Center got much more than that from Phill Thorleifson, who took the volunteer position after 31 years of teaching in the Everett School District.
“He’s a teacher, and he can’t help himself,” said Nancy Sunderland, a second-grade teacher at Cedarwood Elementary School who was in Thorleifson’s sixth-grade class many years ago.
Now, after more than 50 years of working with children in the area, the 75-year-old Thorleifson is calling it quits. He and Amy, his wife of 51 years, bought a home in Marysville and they will officially leave the center at the end of the month.
“I’m going to miss it,” he said. “But I don’t have the energy I used to. It takes me a lot longer to do things than it used to.”
Sunderland, a 25-year teaching veteran, said it’s no surprise that Thorleifson became a fixture at the center and a favorite of students who have visited over the years.
“He just keeps on teaching,” she said, “and he knows how to get the students to listen.”
Since 1985, Thorleifson and his wife have lived in a small home on the property. The environmental center is available to the Everett School District through a willed agreement with the Lively family. The will calls for the school district to keep a full-time caretaker on the site.
Groups of students from schools throughout the district visit the site to learn about the environment, from maintaining gardens to raising pheasants and releasing salmon from the hatchery.
“My main philosophy is that I’ll never do anything that the kids can do,” Thorleifson said, reinforcing his belief that students can learn best when they’re directly involved in the process.
Thorleifson expected to keep the job for a year or two, said Kayleen Pritchard, a retired teacher and administrator who oversaw the center’s science program for several years.
Pritchard noted that Thorleifson was offered a salary of about $1,500 a month but turned it down on the condition that it be given to the district’s science programs.
Thorleifson and his wife “were committed to this site not because it was a place they could take care of, but a place where they could educate kids about the outdoors,” Pritchard said. “He gave the gift of time, and it’s a beautiful example of volunteerism.”
The on-site home — no offense to the Cascade High School carpentry students who built it in the late 1970s — is no palace, Pritchard said.
“They live in a home that’s a portion of the size of what they would have lived in,” she said. “They left their luxuries to give to the community.”
Victor Balta is a reporter for The Herald in Everett.
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