The young girl perched in her father’s fishing boat, toppled over the side and plunged to the lake bottom. She couldn’t swim.
As she floundered in the water, realizing she might drown, Doris Fae Walser prayed to God for help. She promised if he would save her, she would serve him for the rest of her life. She trudged along the mucky bottom and gradually arrived at the shore.
That young girl who grew up near Salem, Oregon, kept her promise, which is why so many people at the funeral of 90-year-old Doris (Walser) O’Neill Saturday spoke about her unending faith.
Her son, Robert O’Neill Jr., recounted his mother’s life-changing experience and read a letter he had written to her several years ago, recounting his childhood memories of her leading him in prayer, finding books to keep him interested in school, baking special desserts for his birthday. She put up with his collections of bugs, crustaceans, amphibians, reptiles, and more — “several of which escaped and were never found.”
“But the character quality of my mom that impacted me the most was her abiding faith in God and the power of prayer,” he said.
As a young mother in the mid-1950s, Doris, who lived on View Avenue in Centralia, each day walked with her son and pushed her infant daughter in a stroller past where the Mountain View Baptist Church was being built with lumber from the Hemphill-O’Neill Lumber Co., her husband and father-in-law’s company. As Doris stopped to watch, the workers — primarily church volunteers — invited her inside.
“As a result of that constant invitation, she started attending … and soon became a pillar of this congregation,” said Rev. Bill Knepper, senior pastor.
Mountain View began July 11, 1954, when 20 people yearning for a Bible-teaching church gathered in the basement of the Elks Lodge. The congregation later met in the Carpenters’ union hall and organized formally as a Conservative Baptist Church Feb. 12, 1955. Within a year, the members raised money to buy land at Belmont Avenue and Haviland Street in Centralia, where they built a 34- by 48-foot two-story church in a T design that cost about $12,500. The congregation first met for services in the unfinished building at Thanksgiving 1956 with 18 charter members. The formal dedication of the church, which seated 150, took place in December 1957. The pastor was Rev. H.W. Rydman.
The congregation formed a choir after settling into the new building and put it under the direction of Doris O’Neill.
“She was not only willing, she was very qualified in having already earned a degree in music education from Willamette University in 1950,” Knepper said. She also was an excellent seamstress who helped sew the choir robes.
Through the years, she taught Sunday school and served as a deaconess, choir director, soloist, organist, bell ringer and “just an all-around general hard worker,” Knepper said.
Even when she and her husband, Robert “Bob” O’Neill Sr. wintered in Palm Desert, she quickly formed a relationship with the Body of Christ there. They were married 68 years and had two children, seven grandchildren, and a dozen great-grandchildren.
“She made a commitment to her savior early in the journey and she kept it all the way to the end,” Knepper said.
“My mom was a woman of great faith,” said her daughter, Debra Jo Pine, who was inducted into the Daughters of the American Revolution by her mother, the family genealogist. “What I take with me is my mom’s love of God, her joy of music, her passion for gardening and her fully developed penchant for creativity.”
Her son remembered hearing Bible stories and memorizing Scripture verses at Mountain View, which he said “helped lay a foundation for the faith I hold to this day.”
“It is amazing to realize how God answered her prayers and used her servant’s heart to shape my life and the lives of many others,” he said.
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Julie McDonald, a personal historian from Toledo, was honored to work with the O’Neills to publish the Legacy of Two Lumbermen: The Hemphill-O’Neill Company History in 2006 and, four years later, Bucoda: The Little Town with a Million Memories and Chapters of Life in Bucoda. She may be reached at chaptersoflife1999@gmail.com.
