Louis Larsen
The owner of The Net Result in Vineyard Haven chooses Mildred Mayhew. “I had only two teachers at the Chilmark School. Mildred taught grades one to three. She’s my favorite simply because she guided me through a very formative time of my life. There were just three of us in my class when I finished sixth grade. For seventh and eighth grades, we went to the Tisbury School. I graduated from high school off-Island in 1972. Mildred’s still living, but I don’t see her that often any more. My life is mainly in Vineyard Haven now. Would she say good things about me as a student? I hope so. Though Mom sort of had to keep me on a leash back then.”

Alice Dias Coutinho
“It was Una Pinette,” says the Tisbury School graduate of 1932. “She taught commercial arts. She was French, and she married an Island man, Joe Andrews. She lived here the rest of her life. I really loved music and all my music teachers, but I also loved business subjects – especially shorthand.” After graduation – “there were eleven people in my class” – Alice parlayed her business skills into a career. “In my first job, I worked in the office of a lawyer who had just moved to the Island. He died of kidney stones just two years later. It was very sad. Then I was a bookkeeper at Paul Bangs’s market. That’s where I met my husband. Later, I worked for Ben David Motors. I’ve worked all my life.”

Eric Cottle
Fishing took priority over schooling until Eric met his favorite teacher Una Pinette. Wait a sec: that sounds familiar. . . . “I had two years of bookkeeping with her, and I learned more from her than from anyone else,” says the 1936 graduate of the Tisbury School. “She didn’t take any foolishness. She ruled with an iron fist, and that’s just what we needed. As part of our class work, she had us work for some company – I forget which one – and we had to make trial balances. That was probably Una’s first teaching job; she wasn’t much older than I was. I’m eighty-eight now, and I think she was ninety-two when she passed away about two months ago. She still lived near Tashmoo. I saw her in the hospital shortly before she died. I hadn’t seen her in maybe thirty-five years. The first thing she said was, ‘My God, there’s Eric Cottle!’”

Charity Randolph
“My favorite teacher was Bob Hughes,” says the 1945 valedictorian of the Oak Bluffs School. “He taught math and science, and because of him, I really excelled in those subjects. All he taught me stayed with me. He was also the school baseball coach. Bob later became the Oak Bluffs postmaster, and he always had articles about science posted in the post-office lobby. He graduated from the Oak Bluffs School himself in 1932. He still lives on New York Avenue. When he started teaching, he was making $1,200 a year. The school committee wanted to give him a $100 raise, but someone said he didn’t need it because he was still living at home.” In her thirties, Charity enrolled in Chicago Teachers College and ultimately led both her graduating and graduate-degree classes. She taught junior high school science in Chicago for twenty-eight years.

Shannon Rose McAuliffe
The 2005 graduate of Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School finds a reasonable excuse to name two favorite teachers: Dan Murphy and Jan Wightman. “They often taught jointly. I was in their music, choral theory, and voice classes throughout high school. I’ve known them since about sixth grade through activities like the All-Island Choral Festival. Singing has been my hobby since forever; but they made me realize I had opportunities. They give me an indescribable sense of family. They’re almost like surrogate parents.” Shannon was a member of the high school’s select Minnesingers choral group. At graduation exercises in June, she won the scholarship for Minnesinger Excellence as well as the Music Department Service Award. This September,
she enrolls at the College of Music at the University of Massachusetts.