Viola Leone Cottrell Adkins

Viola Leone Cottrell Adkins was born May 29, 1921 in Sacramento, California to Sutton F. and Viola Myrick Cottrell. Her parents were true 1898 Alaska Gold Rush “sourdoughs “, having met and married in Skagway, Alaska. Leone was the youngest of their four children. Leone’s mother was a fine singer and voice teacher and Leone could read music before she could read words.

Leone grew up in Sacramento, Piedmont, Stockton and finally San Francisco before her parents moved to Washington in the depths of the Great Depression to a ranch near Olalla that her mother inherited. It had no power and no running water. Leone had to haul water from the well, but her father, Sutton, a mechanical engineer, soon remedied the situation.

Leone entered South Kitsap High School where she soon became involved in everything musical. Leone was South Kitsap High School Band’s drum major, and she started and directed the football pep band. Leone graduated in 1939 and was working in 1941 as a special messenger bonded to the Admiral in the Bremerton Navy Yard. She played string bass in the first concert of the Bremerton Symphony. On December 7, 1941, Leone was the organist at the Bremerton Navy Yard Chapel. She was among the first civilians to know of the bombing of Pearl Harbor because the Admiral had been called out of the service and was hanging up the phone in the chaplain’s office when Leone came in to get her coat at the end of the service and Admiral looked at her and said, “We are at war”. Leone answered her nation’s call and joined the Woman’s Army Corps.

After the Army rolled the WAACs into the regular Army, Leone took the honorable discharged that was offered and played string bass in an all-girl swing and jazz band in Chicago and throughout the Midwest for several years during World War II.

Returning to Washington she studied music at Cornish School of the Arts and the University of Washington. Leone was a professional string bass player with both Portland and Seattle Symphonies as well in dance bands. Leone had an unusual coloratura soprano voice and trained as an opera singer at a repertory company called the Little Opera House in Seattle, which pre-dated the founding of Seattle Opera. She was invited to take master classes under Metropolitan Opera Conductor Wilfred Pelletier and studied voice with his wife, Met star Rose Bampton in New York City.

She sang under Glynn Ross, the later founder of Seattle Opera, in performances in Los Angeles. While pursing music professionally, Leone was employed at various times at G. Schirmer, Johnson West and other large sheet music houses in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Hollywood.

After a short-lived first marriage, Leone and her baby daughter moved into a multi-generational Cottrell household in Arcata, Humboldt County, California headed her widowed brother Jim. At Humboldt State she was on staff in the music department while completing her bachelor and masters degrees and starting the university’s Summer Opera Workshop.

There was more to life than music with Leone and one of her favorite things to do was to camp near Richardson’s Grove on the Eel River in the heart of the Redwoods. Leone also loved the open road, a fast car … and ice cream. She was often beautifully and suitably dressed. She was alternately understated in many things and very much the center of attention and leadership in others. Leone was kind-hearted, hospitable, and had a sense of humor. She knew how to get the most effect out of the resources she had to work with. Quietly charming, Leone was in many ways a “southern belle” without the accent.

Leone often summered in Port Orchard and in late 1976 she married an old friend, Forrest J. Adkins and moved back to Port Orchard. Frosty was General Manager for many years of Peninsula Feed and Grain in Port Orchard. Returning to Port Orchard, Leone immediately became involved in the musical scene, rejoining the Bremerton Symphony as a string bass player, founding the Bay Street Playhouse and starting the symphony’s annual gala, “Vienna Night". In 1992 Leone founded, along daughter Elizabeth, step-daughter Lorraine Adkins Harmon, and jazz pianist Dick Coolen, the still on -going Kitsap Opera and was the General Manager /Artistic Director until 2023. Kitsap Opera produces fully staged opera in the original language with orchestra, giving young singers opportunities. She conducted the Kitsap Opera orchestra for her last time in the 2015 production of Carmen. Leone Cottrell Adkins was a Kitsap YWCA Woman of Achievement recipient and Port Orchard Chamber of Commerce 2002 Woman of the Year.

One of her last undertakings was several road trips between 2016 and 2018 with her daughter to California, documenting the impressive motorcycle racing career of her older brother, Jack W. Cottrell.

Clear thinking and attending to her affairs to her last day on this earth, Leone passed on September 5, 2024. Leone was a devoted and life-long Christian Scientist, serving as organist and soloist in many branch churches including First Church of Christ, Scientist, Bremerton. She was confident her Heavenly Father was the source of all life, talent, goodness and love.

Leone Cottrell Adkins was proceeded in passing by her parents and husband Forrest J. Adkins, her brothers James Sutton Cottrell and Jack Winfrey Cottrell, sister Elizabeth Myrick Cottrell Van Patten Martin, nephew Norman L. Van Patten, nieces Margaret C. Cottrell Hall and Rosemary Myrick Cottrell Hawkins, her step-son Dr. Ronald J. Adkins, and step- daughter Lorraine Adkins Harmon and Rosemary Moen (Frosty’s step-daughter from a previous marriage).

Leone Cottrell Adkins is survived by her only daughter, D. Elizabeth Cottrell of Port Orchard, WA, her nephews David C. Martin (Concord, CA,) Stephen F. Cottrell (St. Augustine, FL), Harry S. Cottrell (Duluth, MN), niece Mary Martin Patton (Concord, CA) as well as great and great -great nieces and nephews in California, Oregon, Minnesota and Wisconsin and numerous step-relations in Washington state, including step-son Gary D. Adkins and Linda Brisky Kaminski (Frosty’s step- daughter from a previous marriage).

Private burial
Memorial services pending