Mary F. Fitzpatrick, a legendary public high school teacher who introduced thousands of Massachusetts students to the fundamentals of mathematics, died on May 23, 2020 at her home in Amherst. She was 98 years old.
“Mrs. Fitzpatrick,” as she was always known to her students, traveled an unlikely road to her career as a mathematics educator. She was born on February 12, 1922, in New Bedford, to Martin Callahan, an Irish immigrant who came to the United States as a boy of 10, and Mary (Bowen) Callahan. Although her parents had very limited educations, her father, who worked in the textile mills of Fall River, displayed a remarkable aptitude for numbers. As their only child, Mary demonstrated similar talent, and her parents encouraged her to pursue higher education. She was one of only four female Mathematics majors in Massachusetts State College’s (now the University of Massachusetts) Class of 1943. She always remembered where she came from and would wear a pale green carnation pinned to her lapel on St. Patrick’s Day, in tribute to her Irish origins, and the close-knit, working-class immigrant community in which she was raised.
She met her future husband, Robert Alan Fitzpatrick, in college. Although they hoped to marry upon graduation, World War II intervened. Fitzpatrick was deployed to Europe in 1944 shortly before D-Day. Mary returned to New Bedford and taught Mathematics at Fairhaven High School. She had grown up next to the ocean, and ever after loved being near the sea. On Friday October 13, 1944, she married then Lieutenant JG Fitzpatrick in a small ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, when Fitzpatrick was briefly home on liberty. Because her father had died that fall, custom dictated, as she would later explain to her children, that she wear a black dress to her wedding. They raised six children in a marriage that lasted over thirty years, ending only with her husband’s sudden death in 1975.
The Fitzpatricks settled in Amherst in 1949 after Robert accepted an appointment as professor at the University of Massachusetts. Mary returned to work shortly after the birth of their third child in 1952, as research assistant to a chemistry professor at Amherst College. In 1958, she began teaching Mathematics at Hopkins Academy in Hadley. Every spring she often brought home freshly cut asparagus from her students who worked their parents’ farms. She loved teaching in Hadley, where she earned a reputation as a rigorous but fair-minded instructor, who was remembered, and stopped in the grocery store decades later, by her former students in whom she took a great interest. Her Hopkins’ colleagues, drawn to her dry sense of humor, became lasting friends. She joined the faculty at Amherst Regional High School in 1970, teaching Algebra, Geometry and Calculus. She had her youngest daughter as a student, and tutored her children and their friends at her dining room table. In an academic town, full of professorial parents wanting the best instruction for their children, she was a sought-after teacher, and honored with the Robert Frost Chair for her outstanding teaching skills. Known for her impeccable taste, one former student, now a science writer for the New York Times, recently described her “enduring memory” of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, who always looked “as if she just stepped out of the beauty salon.” But, most of all, it was her clarity and forthrightness that impressed this Geometry student. “She made us love math. It’s not that she made it fun. But she made math interesting, even eye opening.” By the time Mary retired in 1987, she had taught math to the children of some of her first students.
Unlike many married women of her generation in Amherst, Mary Fitzpatrick was ahead of her time in combining work and family. Despite her many teaching responsibilities, she was a devoted mother, who understood and appreciated the differences among her six children, meeting them where they were throughout their lives. She adored, and is adored by, her three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren, as she never lost her delight in young people or her instinctive, yet kind desire to help them improve themselves. Mary’s razor-sharp intellect endured to the end of her life. She tutored her grandchildren in Calculus when she was in her late 80s and completed the New York Times crossword puzzle, daily, in ballpoint pen, until the last weeks of her life. Her longevity inspired not only her children but also their many friends, comforting them as the years went on with her vivid, warm, enduring presence, and reminding them of their own parents already gone. Her continuously growing family meant the world to her, and she not just welcomed but expected them to migrate to the family home to spend the holidays together in Amherst. Attendance was usually perfect as all were drawn by their wish to spend time, share apple pie with coffee ice cream, and play a fiercely competitive round of dominoes with “Mom,” “Nana,” or “Big Nana.”
She leaves five children, Maureen of Amherst, Robert of Holyoke and his wife Evie, Ellen of Newtonville, Mary of South Boston, Frances of Amherst, three grandchildren, Ryan Taft of Billerica, Brigid and Robert Wright, both of Boston, and four great-grandchildren, John, Gianna, Giselle, and Casey, as well her son in law, Jeffrey J. Wright of Needham. Her youngest daughter, Jean, predeceased her in 2018.
Mary’s family wishes to express their deep gratitude to Kathy Wiater, Regina Rumplik and Karen Hill of the Cooley Dickinson Hospital VNA and to Drs. Marianna Marguglio and Victoria Noble.
A service will be scheduled in the late summer, with the date to be announced. In lieu of flowers, her family suggests donations to the Lown Cardiovascular Group, where Mary long received exemplary care from Dr. Shmuel Ravid, Helene Glaser, R.N. and their colleagues, at 830 Boylston Street, Suite 205, Chestnut Hill, MA. 02467 (www.lowngroup.org)
Obituary and memorial register at www.douglassfuneral.com