Teacher college alums gather Elderly grads recall normal school

BELFAST – Good times in Castine and stories from teaching days during the Great Depression were on the agenda on Saturday at the annual reunion of Eastern State Normal School.

But the gathering of a dozen or so aging teachers – who caught up on news and laughed over memories before they dined at a local chowder house – might be the last one ever, they said, as the group gets smaller by the year.

Their school shut its doors to teachers in 1943 and became Maine Maritime Academy. Teaching students left Castine’s quiet streets for Orono and the larger campus of the University of Maine.

The youngest teachers who studied at the normal school are well into their 80s now, and the list of classmates who died last year was longer than the roll call of attendees.

The surviving alumni, however, remain teachers to the bone, with clear enunciation, name tags inscribed with copperplate handwriting and tack-sharp recollections of mischief-making students and low salaries.

Leah Graham Sample of Boothbay Harbor, who graduated from the normal school in 1943, remembered teaching in the Abbott School in Castine.

“One fifth grade boy … brought in from outside a large snake of some kind,” the well-dressed octogenarian said. “I was totally flummoxed.

“He said, ‘Don’t you want to hold him?’ I said, ‘I don’t think he’s very happy. It’s not the kind of atmosphere he likes. Why don’t you put him back in the tall grass where he belongs?’ And mercifully, he did.”

Sample, who is the mother of Maine humorist Tim Sample and still is working for adult education in her town, clearly can’t get teaching out of her system.

“I’m happy to say I’m still in the teaching business,” she reported to the crowd. “I love those kids.”

The “kids” she helps to attain their general equivalency diplomas are hardly the snake-toting youngsters of the past.

“They’ve had all kinds of experiences – marriages and divorces and split ups,” she said. “It’s all kinds, but you just love it so when you can drag them through.”

Another classmate, Grace Knox Littlefield of Searsport, said that she’s “89 going on 20.” Littlefield, with a beautiful face as wrinkled as a walnut, taught elementary school for 36 years. She graduated from the normal school in 1937 and remembered when the bridge to Verona Island was brand new and carried a 50-cent toll.

“It was right during the Depression and it was quite hard,” she recalled.

Littlefield said she comes to these reunions because she likes to remember Castine.

“It was such a lovely place. We really were happy down there,” she said. “We did all the things – dances, proms – we had a great time.”

Wayne Porter of Brewer, who graduated in 1943, had a long career working as a principal and superintendent of schools in Maine, Connecticut and Massachusetts.

“We had some great people,” he said of his normal school classmates. “They did a great deal for the state, and we don’t want that forgotten.”