WHITNEYVILLE – Every holiday, Frances Grover’s daughter traveled from New Hampshire to be with her mother.

For the last Fourth of July parade through Machias, Martha Gay and her husband watched Frances ride in a convertible on the 50th anniversary of the Rose M. Gaffney School, which was celebrating its former teachers.

This Memorial Day weekend would be no different – the Gays started out early Saturday morning on their trip. But then the news came midroute on the cell phone, that Frances, 86, had died that morning.

All of Grover’s family gathered over the weekend in Machias, where she had been living for the last year in Marshall Care Center.

They were joined by dozens of community members Tuesday morning for the service, a Mass at the Holy Name of Jesus Catholic Church. Grover worshipped there every Sunday.

She was remembered for her 36 years of teaching in Whitneyville and Machias – where she taught hundreds of students who still live in the area. Her own memories from her teaching days remained her favorite conversation topic.

“No one would cross her, that’s for sure,” said Mitchell Look, the current principal at Gaffney, who had Grover as a teacher when he was a young boy in Whitneyville.

“Everybody listened to her. Even the oldest and toughest kids respected her. And the young kids just felt safe with her.”

She graduated from Washington State Normal School – now the University of Maine at Machias.

She had the upstairs classroom at Whitneyville School, the red building on the hill that, in 1966, closed as a school and became the Whitneyville Library. When students in Whitneyville started going to school in Machias, Grover went with them – to teach another 15 or so years at the Gaffney School.

She retired from teaching in 1983.

Grover’s nephew is Edward Hennessey, president of Machias Savings Bank and, like her, a Whitneyville native.

“I went to see her once after she retired,” Hennessey said. “She said she was going crazy, so I asked her to come work for me at the bank. She stayed 20 years.”

Grover was a trustee for the Whitneyville Library Association for about 40 years. She had said at times that others should take her place on the board, but the association wouldn’t let her go.

“She may have felt she was too old, but we had voted her a lifetime member,” said Nate Pennell, another Whitneyville native who is also a library board member.

Three weeks ago Grover attended a fundraising supper for the library in Whitneyville.

“She sat there and talked for hours about the old times, all reminiscing,” Pennell said.

Grover lived her whole life in Whitneyville until moving to the nursing home in 2005.

She loved reading the Bangor Daily News and waited by the door for its delivery each morning at 5:30 a.m.

She also loved to walk, and had taken a walk just the day before she died.