Mel Urschel
I kind of leaned towards environmental science before it was a thing. There were no textbooks, then suddenly there was a landslide around ’73 or so."
With Judy and Heather Urschel
When TCC Biology Professor Mel Urschel was hired to teach at TCC straight out of college in 1969, his mom found out about it before he did. She read about it in the Vashon Island newspaper and called to congratulate him.
Urschel completed his undergraduate degree at Colorado State University, then earned his Master’s from the University of Washington. His daughter Heather Urschel would later follow that same path so closely that she, too would end up working at TCC, where she currently serves as Director of the Writing and Tutoring Center. She started working at the college in 1998, and her father’s last year of teaching full time was 1999.
“We never left TCC without an Urschel,” Mel said.
Starting TCC’s Human Cadaver Program
Throughout his three decades at TCC, Urschel was a pioneering instructor who left multiple legacies. One is the human cadaver program – an opportunity that not all four-year colleges and few community colleges can offer. To this day TCC’s healthcare and biology students get to work with human cadavers because Urschel brought the program with him from UW; in recognition of this legacy, the college named the cadaver room after him.
“We didn’t get the human cadavers right off, but I worked with the monkey lab, so I was able to get some real nice rhesus monkeys,” Urschel recalled. “We had one in the back of my truck, parked in downtown Seattle. We came back to the truck and this monkey arm was sticking up – it looked like a human dead person in the back of our truck.”
These days the dead (including monkeys) are treated with more dignity; Urschel reports that cadavers are currently transported from UW to TCC via ambulance.
Pioneering Environmental Science Education
Urschel taught biology and anatomy & physiology, and he was one of the first professors in the state to teach environmental science.
“I kind of leaned towards environmental science before it was a thing. There were no textbooks, then suddenly there was a landslide around ’73 or so,” Urschel said.
“Probably because of Rachel Carson’s book,” offered Heather.
Urschel recalls that the Vietnam veterans who ended up in his classes after returning to Washington in the early ‘70s were concerned about the environment and wanted to investigate what was happening to the land and waters of our state. He took a group of student veterans down to Olympia, where they discovered that the State had hired one half-time employee to keep of track of who puts what in our rivers.
“I think they’d seen the Earth as it was, and what people were doing to it,” Urschel said.
Years later, Urschel would snag an environmental science education rock star for the college – Professor Sue Habeck.
“We interviewed her, but we twiddled around for so long she took a job with forestry, out at a town – it had a movie – Forks! She was supposed to be there, so I drove out there, 100 miles per hour, and got her before she started working. We did get her, and it was a really great addition to our department.”
Teaching Healthcare Prerequisites
Through his biology and anatomy & physiology (A&P) classes, Urschel also taught generations of students going into science and medicine. At the time, A&P was three quarters long, and it was prerequisite for the TCC Nursing program.
“I came down from a high-level class at UW, where we had a lot of tools to work with, and I got to order some equipment,” Urschel recalled. “That was actually neat, that we could do some big-money things. We worked with human chromosomes, made our own chromosome tree. Raised leucocytes, killed them, separated them, put them in order. We don’t have time to do that anymore.”
Heather remembers that time as “the era when you can have big parties at your house with all your students.” Mel Urschel recalls inviting the A&P students to an annual spring softball game at Titlow Park, just down the hill from the college.
“We had our early session to warm up, and then we had our main game. Then we had a picnic. We ate, some drank.”
The Urschels would encounter nurses who took their program prerequires from Mel for decades afterwards.
“Every time I went in for medical treatment, I’d run into someone who knew my dad and get special treatment,” Heather said.
Having Fun with Faculty
When Urschel taught at TCC, sciences classes were held in the original Building 19, which was torn down during the construction of the new Harned Center for Health Careers. Urschel said that Ivonna McCabe was the original A&P instructor; he took over those classes when she became the science division chair.
“Having my boss’s office right next to mine was fun. We always got along well.”
Faculty offices were not grouped by department as much during that era. To this day Urschel meets regularly with retired faculty from other departments, including Art Professor Frank Dippolito and Librarian Janet Grimes, because they got to know each other when they shared a building.
The faculty made time for fun, Urschel recalls. One time when he was teaching a night class on his birthday, Heather burst into the classroom wearing a gorilla suit, and brought along Urschel’s best friend, Chemistry Professor Dale Potter, to witness the hilarity. Potter had visited Urschel’s classroom dressed as a gorilla 30 years before. Urschel tried to retaliate, but the fully kilted bagpiper he hired to attend Potter’s 40th birthday class broke down on the Nisqually Flats and never made it to campus.
“He was my teacher,” Heather recalled. “It’s really intimidating to have your dad’s best friend grading your final exam, especially when you didn’t study enough.”
Paving the Way for a Smoke-Free Campus
Another Urschel legacy is TCC’s status as a smoke-free campus. That became official college policy in June 15, 2015, but it was built on work that Urschel and his students began in the ‘70s and ‘80s. They started a campus smoking ban petition which got several thousand signatures.
“Roughly 17 percent of people on campus smoked, and of that 17 percent, 3-4 percent didn’t want smoking on campus either,” Urschel said.
The Student Senate eventually voted to ban smoking on campus, and the motion passed.
“At first it was no smoking, and then they decided they had to have a couple spots for the real nervous people,” Urschel said.
“This is the guy who made me take cross sections of diseased lungs to school with me. I don’t smoke now,” Heather added.
Teaching Through Changes
The science department started expanding its environmental science offerings in the 1970s.
“Not full scale, but something we offered at least once a year,” Urschel said. “Not as much as I thought we should have.”
Urschel said there weren’t a lot of changes to the Biology department over the years – that is, until computers entered the scene.
“Computers made retirement look better,” Urschel said. “I didn’t want to leave my students, but the computer stuff – it just made things that were easy, harder. Someone who was three doors down from me would send me messages on the computer, they wouldn’t come and talk to me – and I didn’t want to spend an hour every day going through messages.”
“Only an hour!” Heather exclaimed.
However, Urschel admits that the advent of the computer era didn’t change his department as much as it changed some of the others.
“Bones are still bones, and rocks are still rocks,” Heather noted.
Heather remembers that Urschel hand-wrote his lab tests, complete with drawings.
“He’d go to the Antique Sandwich shop, really early in the morning, and write the tests. And sometimes I’d get to help grade,” Urschel’s wife Judy recalled.
Teaching How to Learn
Urschel said that the racial and ethnic composition of his classrooms changed as different waves of immigrants arrived in Tacoma. In the 1980s, Iranian parents sent their children to study at TCC.
“They were good students, but it was kind of a mess because the young women were basically being watched over by their big brothers, and no adults. I personally just had to do a bit of counseling here and there, and I’m sure the Counseling department was busy all the time,” Urschel said.
Later, there was a time when 90 percent of the students in his night classes were composed of Ukrainian and Russian students. Faculty member Paul Jacobsen helped their families start a garden on campus, and Urschel eventually took over the garden’s management.
“My dad’s ‘very favorite class ever’ was in 2007, when the new building opened: it was a night A&P class and was almost all Russian and Ukrainian students, and they all signed a Slavic bible for him at the end of the quarter,” said Heather.
Urschel taught in Tacoma sister city Pskov, Russia through the Fulbright program. Later Annette Weyerhaeuser would sponsor Russian students to study at TCC, and four of those students stayed with the Urschels.
“The first girl was just agog at some of the things that we had. The next three weren’t quite as agog,” Judy recalled.
Heather said her dad was a fun teacher, and very personable. She and her mom, who taught preschool through third grade science, tried to incorporate that attitude into their own teaching practice.
“He always gave them our phone number,” Heather recalled of her dad’s approach to teaching.
“I liked them to know that my name was Mel,” Urschel said. “I just try to be personal with my students. I teach them how to study, and how to learn.”
After he retired from full-time teaching in 1998, Urschel continued to teach as an adjunct professor. He even taught one Tuesday-Thursday night A&P class so he could teach in the new Science building, which opened in September of 2007. He fully retired in 2011 but remains active with the Retirees group, which is organized by retired English Professor Georgia McDade.
At the end of the interview, which took place in Urschel’s Fircrest home, a group of retired faculty – and long-time friends -- came over to visit.
“We thought it was really nifty that they placed us in a building, mixed us up with art, science, etc.,” Urschel said. “That was a good idea over the years.”
For six decades, Tacoma Community College has advanced equity, cultivated learning, strengthened community partnerships, and enhanced institutional vitality. This story is one of 60, celebrating our 60th Anniversary. Discover more on our TCC 60th Anniversary web page.