WATERVILLE – Viola “Vi” Quirion, a longtime employee of C.F. Hathaway Co. and an activist for senior citizens’ and labor issues, died Sunday at a nursing home in Waterville. She was 77.

Quirion was employed at the Hathaway shirt plant for 44 years before it closed in 2002. She was a member of the Maine Council of Senior Citizens and the Maine AFL-CIO.

Gov. John Baldacci said Quirion was involved in efforts to keep Hathaway operating and its workers employed, but he also remembered her activism in labor issues and in efforts to make cheaper prescription drugs available to seniors.

“She’s going to be tremendously missed,” Baldacci said. “I think it’s important to recognize her as an individual who set a standard, a kind of a role model for us to follow.”

Quirion was featured in the late 1990s on the CBS program “60 Minutes” while on a bus trip to Canada to purchase prescription drugs with other senior citizens.

“She was an institution,” said state Rep. Marilyn Canavan, D-Waterville. “She was someone who was unstoppable when it came to advocating for working people and advancing causes she believed in, like the living wage.”

In 1999, Quirion was recognized by U.S. Rep. Tom Allen, D-Maine, for her work on prescription drugs.

“She never was on welfare, she never collected an unemployment check. She spends nearly a quarter of her $900 monthly income from Social Security on prescription drugs,” Allen said at a briefing in Washington on drug-coverage bills then before Congress.

Quirion was born in Winslow and was a resident of the Mount St. Joseph Nursing Home when she died. Funeral arrangements are pending, the Gallant Funeral Home in Waterville said.