Leonard Hooper has something to say to the thousands of Maine teachers who are expected to leave the profession over the next five years. “You might think retirement is attractive, but once you get into it, it’s pretty boring,” Hooper said during a recent interview in his English classroom at Machias Memorial High School.

Hooper, who is 75, has taught for close to half a century. He tried retiring in 1992. He wasn’t any more successful than he’d been in 1976 when he left teaching to pursue another of his passions.

That was the year he returned to Machias after 25 years of teaching in suburban and inner-city New Jersey schools and opened a florist shop with his sister.

“You can watch flowers grow and they don’t talk back to you,” he said of his decision.

Within a year, Ozias Bridgham, the superintendent of the Machias schools, called him about a teaching position at the high school.

At 53, Hooper returned to the classroom.

When Hooper retired in 1992, he turned his talents to overseeing the publication of a history of Machias Savings Bank and writing the life story of Grace Donworth, a Machias author who wrote about life in Down East, Maine, in the early part of the 20th century.

Donworth wrote “The Letters of Jennie Allen to Her Friend Miss Musgrove” and “Down Home with Jennie Allen” and was quite famous, according to Hooper.

“Mark Twain helped her to get published,” he said. “I remember Grace. She lives in the house Dr. Peterson lives in on Bruce Street. Her father came from Ireland without a penny in his pocket.”

Hooper’s days with the Donworth project ended in 1999 when he received another clarion call from the Machias school system. Superintendent Betty Jordan asked him to return.

“I got back into teaching,” Hooper said. “It’s in my blood. I can’t stay away from it.”

His Machias classroom reflects his passion and the work of his students.

On one section of wall, under the heading “Powerful Women,” are sketches of Virginia Woolf, Harper Lee, Edith Wharton, Mary Ann Evans, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austin and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Shakespeare’s Flowers – student drawings of the blooms the bard refers to throughout his works -occupy most of a back corner.

A world map hangs at the back of the classroom because Hooper likes students to locate places that are mentioned in their reading.

The bulletin board displays clippings from newspapers and magazines that students have chosen to illustrate a recent unit on self-image.

“I think the kids are so much smarter now,” Hooper said. “I teach every freshman that comes into this school, and even those kids that are supposed to have a learning problem are very capable students.”

Hooper grew up in Machias, graduating from Machias Memorial High School in 1944. He served in the U.S. Navy during the last year of World War II and then attended what is now the University of Maine at Machias before taking teaching jobs in Augusta and Castine.

His Reserve unit was called up during the Korean War. When he came back to Maine, he completed his degree in English at the University of Southern Maine.

Returning to Washington County in 1952, Hooper taught in a one-room schoolhouse in North Perry for what he describes as “just a great year.”

“I had 20 students in every grade, and all these older kids were teaching the younger ones,” he recalled.

Hooper’s teaching memories span half a century. He remembers making his first copies by cutting a stencil, pressing it into a tray of geletin, and using the inked impression to create a limited number of similar pages.

This semester, he and his students made an iMovie of Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

Hooper believes that youth need older, experienced teachers and is always disappointed when he hears of people who can’t wait to retire.

“I don’t think there is an age when you retire as long as you’re able to give something to the community,” he said.

Working with young people keeps him young, he said, but he notes that he goes to bed earlier than he once did because he needs more time to regenerate.

“I get up at 4:30, walk from 5:30 to 6:30, and get here at 7.” he said. “There are usually kids waiting.”