June Wooliver (Hourcle) Wortman

SACO – June – budding teenage opera singer, lawyer, pilot, solar company pioneer, international business traveler, and supporter of many causes, including her beloved Monastery of Christ in the Desert monks and the Salvation Army – died at home on Feb. 25, 2025. She was tended to by Beacon Hospice, caring helpers Melissa and Pam from Amada Healthcare, and her loving husband of almost 25 years, Larry Hourcle.

June was born into depression era poverty to Henrietta and Philip Wooliver in Pittsfield, premature and so sick with asthma, she had to skip the first six years of schooling. Henrietta, an indomitable force, taught her to read, and by the time she finally started school in seventh grade, she had read her way through the library.

June was finally able to start school after Henrietta had the idea that singing lessons would help her breathing, June began to lessons with a teacher trained in opera and became her protege, She went on to earn money in teenage as a soloist at local churches, and by senior year was a soloist at Tanglewood, and also won a scholarship to music school at University of Michigan.

Part way through June’s freshman year June’s father was severely crippled on a construction site, she returned home took a speed writing course and became a legal secretary working for a lawyer who she hoped would take her father’s case, but he became “abusive” toward her. Rather than risk telling her family, knowing they would get in trouble seeking retribution, she packed up, headed west, finished college at University of California Berkeley in two years , and went on to UC’s famed Boalt Hall law school.

Jobs for women lawyers were difficult to come by in those days, but there was an opening for a county Assistant District Attorney and June became California’s first female DA. Over the next 10 years, June became the office’s Chief Trial Attorney, well known for her success in even the most serious cases. During that time, both parties also sought her to run for Congress, but instead, she moved to head the Western Division of the new Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in San Francisco.

After numerous successes in actions against companies like Westinghouse, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo, she became increasingly “uncomfortable” with her EEOC boss – Clarence Thomas, and left to start her own firm which eventually grew to five offices in California and New Mexico that she flew between in her two-engine Beechcraft Baron.

While in New Mexico, she met and married Tom Wortman, VP of General Telephone and Electronics, a client who managed a fiber optics plant. They married and eventually moved to California, where, in addition to law, she opened a hot water solar energy company employing only ex-convicts, until Mobile bought one of her units, copied it and started building their own, driving her out of business.

Always looking for new adventures, June and Tom were recruited by Kurz Instruments a California tech company to travel the world selling their products while developing a support and repair capability for them in Europe, the Mideast, Asia, and Australia – from Atlantic to Pacific.

Then, Tom started growing sick likely from his time at the GT&E New Mexico fiber optics factory he headed. It grew to the point that June carried on alone traveling around the world while Tom remained in California tended to by June‘s mother Henrietta.

Ultimately, June and Tom decided to retire, moved to North Carolina but Tom died shortly thereafter. June’s professional life was all in California and as soon as she could, moved back to Monterey, California, where she had previously lived.

June took a job with the Salvation Army there as their fundraiser for Northern California. She was also on their board and met fellow board member and Academy Award-winning actress Joan Fontaine, who offered June to stay at her house.

Living with a movie star and her job with the Salvation Army led to a period where June associated with many of Hollywood’s most famous personalities: Clint Eastwood, Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, and many others.

But the legal bug wasn’t dead in June. She yearned to go back, but this time in the newer field of environmental law and decided to go back East closer to her aging mother. She interviewed at George Washington University Law School, one of the largest environmental law graduate programs. There she met with the program’s acting director, Laurent (Larry) Hourcle, who had retired shortly before as the Air Force’s first and then DOD’s chief environmental lawyer to join the GW law faculty.

After she had finished her coursework and was set for graduation, she invited Larry to lunch just before Christmas in 1999. They shortly became inseparable and married. Within the following year, problems with Larry’s cancer treatment forced him to leave teaching. They retired to a summer place they built in West Virginia, but in 2006, moved to Maine’s Atlantic Heights retirement community, where they both enjoyed the most extended continuous residency in one place they each had ever had.

Services will be private. She will lay to rest in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Saco, Maine.

Arrangements are by Cote Funeral Home, Saco.