Clara Rush Oesterle's legacy as a Miami-Dade County commissioner runs on 30 miles of electrified track: the Metrorail/Metromover system.

As commissioner from 1974 to 1988 and close ally of the late county Mayor Steve Clark, she championed light rail as essential to controlled county growth.

Former County Manager Merritt Stierheim called Oesterle ``a driving force'' behind the controversial project, which was ``a struggle from the get-go'' and came online in the 1980s.

A former registered nurse instantly recognizable by the white streak bisecting her dark bouffant, Oesterle died Nov. 1 at home in Inglis, Fla., five months after receiving a liver cancer diagnosis.

She was 84, a survivor of melanoma who was ``bionic on her right side'' with three artificial joints, said daughter Jacki Cooper.

The white streak's origins remain a mystery.

``She had it for as long as long as I can remember, and she admitted to dying her hair brown, but she swore [the streak] wouldn't dye,'' Jacki said. ``Through the years, though, it migrated from one side to another.''

Oesterle, the daughter of Kentucky tobacco farmers, came to Miami in 1947, having studied business administration and earned a nursing degree in Tennessee.

She got a job managing a busy Coral Way medical practice and met her future husband, Ralph, a well-known tax accountant whose professional help she sought.

Eventually the parents of five, they built a house in the South Miami-Dade neighborhood of Whispering Pines in 1957 -- which barely survived Hurricane Andrew.

The Oesterles moved to Inglis, a Gulf Coast town near Ocala, in 1999, a year after losing their second daughter, Robin. She succumbed to an inoperable brain aneurysm caused by the 1980 car wreck that killed her 20-year-old sister, Patricia.

Robin, 37 and divorced, left sons Tor and Chris, 13 and 12 at the time, whom their grandparents raised. Jacki, brothers Mike and Ed, also live in the Inglis-Crystal River area.

By the time that Ralph Oesterle persuaded his wife to seek a Dade County commission seat in 1973, on the strength of her experience as a PTA leader and civic activist, she had run unsuccessfully for the school board -- twice in the 1960s -- and for the legislature, as a Democrat, in 1970.

She won the commission seat in an October 1974 runoff with strong support from the South Dade Chamber of Commerce, of which she was an officer.

She favored a comprehensive land-use plan, reducing the property tax rate, and beefing up the police department.

`PEOPLE LIKED HER'

She voted against the master plan only once, in her first year, for a large-scale elder housing development in her district.

In those days, commissioners ran countywide, which fellow Commissioner Ruth Shack said made for ``a truly professional form of government -- not parochial.''

Shack said that Oesterle ``related very well to people. She was approachable, and people liked her.''

Oesterle fought for better schools and migrant-worker housing, and against county-funded outdoor art installations -- calling one ``weird bookends'' and another ``two boxes that look like old refrigerators'' -- and the county's 1977 gay rights ordinance.

``She came from a traditional family,'' daughter Jacki explained.

Once active at St. Timothy's Lutheran Church, her mother ``was very angry with God for taking her children,'' and left the church.