Randolph
Lincoln, the Randolph hospital’s director of development and public relations, said she notified Mascola early in order to ensure that there would be space for each of her sons, now 12 and 14, in the child care program.
“It is top of the line,” Lincoln said.
The 44-child center carries four out of five stars in the state’s Step Ahead Recognition System, which the Department for Children and Families describes as a system that highlights programs that are “going above and beyond state regulations to provide professional services that meet the needs of children and families,” on the department’s website.
Lincoln credits Mascola, who led Robin’s Nest for about 26 years, for easing her transition back to work after having her sons. Mascola was clear in her expectations of staff and families, Lincoln said.
“We knew that there was consistency across the board,” Lincoln said. “That worked really well for us.”
Many Randolph-area families have Mascola, who died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last December at the age of 60, to thank for helping them feel safe leaving their children at the center during their working days, no small task for families who may be leaving their infants and young children in someone else’s hands for the first time. In addition to providing comfort and security to parents, many children have Mascola to thank for helping to kickstart their education through the center’s play-based curriculum.
The center was once available to the broader community, but due to demand in recent years has come to accept children of Gifford employees only. It’s a valuable benefit, said Lou DiNicola, Gifford’s medical director for primary care and a long-time Gifford pediatrician. Though some families still find it feasible for one parent to stay-at-home, many need a child-care provider they can rely on in order for them to go work and pay their bills, he said.
“Economically, it’s very, very rare you can provide what you need nowadays with one parent working,” said DiNicola, who now has a grandchild at Robin’s Nest.
Educationally, the social skills and other abilities children gain at Robin’s Nest help prepare them for later life, said DiNicola, who noted that Mascola’s understanding of child development — skills children should have at each age — was at “a near pediatrician level.”
During Mascola’s directorship, Gifford also took over Randolph Elementary School’s afterschool program, which cares for elementary-age children in kindergarten through sixth grade, from the end of the school day until 5:30 p.m. This addition further supported families and children in Randolph, Lincoln’s family included.
Mascola’s commitment to the work, which included hiring and training staff, as well as offering support to children and families stemmed from “her simple love of children,” said DiNicola, who as a pediatrician worked with Mascola to educate the center’s staff on subjects such as nutrition, managing peanut allergies, immunizations, and determining which children were sick enough to be sent home and which could stay.
Her sister and self-described best friend Debby Dinagan said that Mascola had a special way with children.
“I never in whole my life met somebody like her,” said Dinagan, a Swanzey, N.H. resident who was four years older than Mascola. “When she spoke to a child they listened to her.”
Mascola used her “very sweet voice” to speak to kids in a way they could understand, said Dinagan.
Born on March 18, 1957, in Barre, Vt., Mascola was the second of four children of William and Delores Allen. In addition to Dinagan, Mascola had two younger brothers, Bill and Jeff.
The siblings spent much of their youth playing outside, Dinagan said. Favorite activities included kickball, building forts and tree houses, and picking and eating raspberries.
That love of play is something Mascola seems to have applied to the curriculum at Robin’s Nest.
“That’s how they learn,” said current director Carrie Wright, who served as assistant director under Mascola.
As director, Mascola’s favorite activities included reading stories and singing, Wright said.
Mascola graduated from Spaulding High School in Barre in 1975. She first worked at a Barre hospital writing diet plans for patients, which were then reviewed by a dietitian. Then, she attended Norwich University in Northfield, Vt.
There, she studied English and education, and fell in love with Jerry Mascola. Originally from New Jersey, Jerry had come to Norwich to study criminal justice. The couple married in June of 1981, after they graduated from Norwich.
“She helped me get through Norwich, I’m not going to deny it,” Jerry said.
Jerry served in the Army for eight years, which brought them to Fort Sill in Oklahoma and then to Crailsheim, Germany. Those years brought them their two children, Jessie and J.D., as well as Mascola’s first directorship. She helmed the childhood development center on the Army base in Germany.
Following the end of Jerry’s eight years of service, the family returned to Vermont, living in Barre at first. Mascola cast about for open positions and found one at Robin’s Nest, a post she held from the early 1990s until 2016, when her illness forced her to go on leave.
After an icy drive home from Randolph to Barre one night in the early 1990s, Mascola told Jerry they either had to move to Randolph or she was going to have to quit. The family moved to Prospect Avenue, just blocks away from the hospital and Robin’s Nest, in 1993.
“We grew up,” Jerry said. “We did what we needed to do.”
It was during her time as director, in 1999, that Mascola was first diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After several years of treatment, including a stem-cell transplant in 2001, Mascola’s cancer went into remission for several years.
Through it all, “the center was her passion and it always kept her going,” Jerry said.
She continued her education, earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from the University of Phoenix and taking a variety of professional development courses.
Mascola particularly enjoyed learning more about how to care for children with special needs, said Wright, Robin’s Nest’s current director. She also liked sharing this knowledge with the staff, Wright said.
During her career, Mascola applied lessons their father, a sales manager at Granite City Tool in Barre, taught all his children, Dinagan said.
“Father instilled in us the fact that you have to work and you have to pay your bills,” Dinagan said. “There isn’t one of us that’s not good at it.”
Despite those lessons, Dinagan said she was occasionally frustrated when her sister got hung up at work.
“Sometimes I’d get kind of mad because she was supposed to be down here,” Dinagan said.
Still, Dinagan said she enjoyed Mascola’s regular visits to Swanzey, which would include shopping, cookouts and late-night chats. The sisters’ tastes were so similar that sometimes they would buy the same clothes separately and appear at the other’s home wearing it.
“We were so close that it was uncanny,” Dinagan said.
As children, the siblings also learned to “put our best foot forward,” Dinagan said.
Even as Mascola’s health worsened, she continued to put herself together before she left the house.
Her hair was fixed, make-up was on and she was dressed appropriately, Dinagan said.
Though Mascola’s daughter, Jessie (Mascola) Huynh said she knows the chemotherapy and radiation treatments wore on her mother, Mascola always put on a brave front and took on her illness as a challenge.
“She never wanted to give up,” Huynh said.
In the final year of her illness, Mascola helped Huynh with preparations for her May wedding.
“We did a lot of things before she got really too sick,” said Huynh, a 33-year-old Randolph Center resident who works at Vermont Technical College.
Mascola helped Huynh select a venue, dress and cake. A quilter, seamstress and crafter, Mascola also helped her daughter put together centerpieces for the wedding, which, as it turned out, she was not able to attend in person.
Though Mascola died before the event, Huynh sewed a heart-shaped piece of one of her mother’s scarves into the inside of her dress.
“I knew she was there,” Huynh said.
Since Mascola’s passing, Huynh said it’s been difficult to drive by Robin’s Nest and to pick out new clothes, something for which she previously would have sought out her mother’s assistance.
There’s another step on life’s journey that Huynh wishes her mother could be here for: Grandchildren. Though not in Huynh’s immediate future, she said her mother wanted to be around to meet her grandkids, buy them cute outfits, and witness their first steps and first words, as she had for so many other children before.
“That’s something she really wanted to see,” Huynh said.
Jerry — who stayed by his wife and soulmate’s side throughout her illness, through hospital stays, and special date nights and pedicures scheduled around doctors’ visits — draws some comfort from the belief that given the mass killings of children in recent years, God needed his wife’s help in heaven.
“He needed somebody to take care of all those lost souls,” Jerry said.
Valley News Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
