Joanne Voorhis-- Born December 27, 1930
Joanne first came to Woods Hole in the summer of 1955. Her husband had been employed at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution earlier and he thought she might like to live in Woods Hole instead of Pittsburgh. She loved it at once despite it being the summer season. Her husband was offered a job and they visited in February to buy the house of Priscilla Montgomery, the long-time MBL librarian. Joanne liked Woods Hole even better in the winter. They rented a truck in Pittsburgh and came with their first child, Laura, in 1957. Andy was born in 1958 and Dan in 1962.
Through these years Joanne lived the life of an oceanographer's wife in the very congenial society of other wives and children whose husbands and fathers were often gone. The Woods Hole Child Center and its cooperative babysitting plan were important as was the League of Woman Voters (LWV)to take your mind off children. After she finished a term as president of LWV she ran for town meeting representative in 1965 and won. She adored and respected town meeting and usually felt after the tiring sessions ended that the will of the town had been done. When her youngest son, Dan, was eight she decided to attend Bridgewater State College so she could work in the public schools which she also felt was an important part of the community. Joanne earned her M.Ed. and was hired to teach first grade at Woods Hole School in the downstairs front room. That was the same year that the family was host to an AFS foreign exchange student from the Netherlands. It was a very full year. She started her second year in the Woods Hole School but the school committee voted to reduce a teacher in Woods Hole and add one at the North Falmouth School. She read her union contract between the Falmouth Educators Association and the school committee and realized that they needed to offer her all the positions for which she was qualified. One of those was school psychometrist who did testing of individual students primarily with intelligence tests. She took this position without realizing that it was now part of a new ever-expanding special education department under Chapter 766. She worked out of an office in the central administration building and tested students in all of the schools and the preschool screening. In 1980 she became president of the Falmouth Educators Association just as Bob Antonucci became the new superintendent of schools. In November so-call Proposition 2 1/2 passed which drastically cut school funds. There were many lay-offs of teachers, administrators and teacher assistants that needed to be negotiated between the union and the superintendent. It was a very difficult but challenging time. She was elected to a second two-year term as FEA president ending in 1984. For a year she was special education team chairperson at Mullen-Hall school and then became an elementary assistant principal serving at one time or another in each of the four elementary schools and sometimes in all at once. She retired in January 1993 and started an investment club with mostly teachers as members. She joined a second investment club and later a book club. She was a volunteer shelf reader at Falmouth Public Library which meant she got to keep the books in order. As a volunteer at Woods Hole Library she kept the bulletin board in order. In 2006 she became a founding member of Neighborhood Falmouth, Inc. whose purpose was to provide information and services to senior citizens to keep them in their own homes as long as they wanted to stay. She traveled a great deal with her husband but never really liked it as much as he did. Joanne has four granddaughters: Olivia, born 1994, and Amelia, born 1996, the children of son Dan who lives in Wichita Kansas; and Sophie, born 1985, and Zoe, born 1987 to daughter Laura of Charlestown, RI. |
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