VERSHIRE — Once Ethel Pike became your friend, she stayed your friend.
Norwich resident Linda Mulley, a friend from high school in Peabody, Ma., had no idea that Pike had moved to the Upper Valley until she reconnected with her when they both found themselves at a meeting of the feminist Amelia Earhart’s Flying Club in the 1970s. A friend was showing footage of Mulley working with children who had disabilities when Pike recognized her. Some people may have politely nodded after the screening, but not Ethel.
In true “Ethel style,” she stood up in the back of the dark room, exclaiming, “Oh my God, that’s Linda Mulley. Where are you?”
They never lost touch again.
“She was ebullient. That’s the word,” Mulley said. “A very outgoing, a very ‘slap you on the back when she saw you’ kind of person.”
Pike, who died in her home on Oct. 28, 2021, at age 77 after a period of declining health, loved her work as a nurse and the many close friends she made as she pursued every interest with passion and committed herself to her adopted hometown of Vershire.
Born in Presque Isle, Maine, Pike also grew up in Massachusetts and New York. At Peabody High School north of Boston, Pike had never fit in with the “popular crowd” — she was too busy “doing her thing around the edges,” Mulley said. And while many of their classmates stayed in Peabody, “she struck out on her own.”
She graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1966. She served as a nurse in the United States Air Force Reserves during the Vietnam War until she was honorably discharged in 1971. From there, she worked as a critical care nurse in Hartford, Conn., and San Francisco, before her work took her to the Upper Valley in the late 1970s.
In 1983, Pike started at Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover. She joined the pediatric intensive care unit in its early days, although she had never worked with children. What Didi Sheets, who helped start the PICU, “admired most” about Pike was that she understood how much she needed to learn even though she was a “highly skilled” critical care nurse.
“She was ok with that,” Sheets said. “She knew that she had to learn from these pediatric nurses who understood growth and development and how to approach children.”
When Sheets left the PICU in 1991, she recommended Pike for her position as nurse manager. Pike went on to led the PICU until she retired, and it was her “crowning glory” and her “legacy,” Sheets said.
After the hospital moved to Lebanon, Pike was one of the people who made sure that the PICU at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center had large rooms with beds for parents to stay.
“It was a huge change for healthcare, to have families right there,” said Bridget Mudge, a nurse who worked with Pike.
Pike stayed at DHMC as the nurse manager at the PICU until she retired in 2005.
“She would always support the staff and take care of them,” Mudge said. “Abuse, cancer — it’s not always a happy scene. She was very balanced with it and knew how to handle it. She was always able to handle it.”
For Mudge, having her as a manager was “just very settling.”
Pike consulted on establishing PICU units across the country and traveled to Zagreb, Croatia, as part of DHMC’s exchange program.
She retired from DHMC in 2005. The hardest thing she had ever had do to was give up her nursing license, she told Sheets.
But she never stopped nursing. She wrote to Mudge in March and described a life busy with friends, hobbies and local politics. And every Friday afternoon, she sat with a neighbor housebound with Parkinson’s disease where she said she was responsible for “town ‘news’ and chit chat,” she told Mudge.
Pike had enough hobbies that could have kept a less enterprising person sufficiently busy in retirement.
“She never stopped learning, and never stopped teaching, and never stopped helping people,” said Naomi LaBarr, a former town clerk in Vershire and close friend. While Pike was working at DHMC, she had gotten a degree in women’s studies from Dartmouth College. She always had the energy to learn something new and turn an interest into a hobby. Friends remembered how she learned piano and guitar, cheered on Dartmouth’s women’s basketball, played Stat-O-Matic (a game for the most committed baseball fans), grew an abundant vegetable garden, made cider, canned food for the winter and studied French — which she practiced on trips to Montreal with her language group.
Pike didn’t take retirement as an invitation to rest, especially after she found herself talking back to the radio, as she told her friend Betty Jo Black. She applied to two jobs: to be Vershire’s town lister, and to be a veterinary technician at the Chelsea Animal Hospital.
And she got both positions in the same day, and she took on two jobs.
She met Black at the animal clinic.
“She was a lot of fun, and had a lot of medical knowledge,” Black said. “But mainly she was such a brilliant mind, that she was a delight to be around.”
Labarr remembered how she was “all smiles when she was around animals.” Dobermans had a special place in her heart; she adopted them, and trained them so well that the sizable dogs obeyed her soft-spoken commands.
And in Vershire, she was not only a lister, but the manager of the Snowshoe-a-thon, a fundraiser for the Children’s Activity Fund and summer camp and, briefly, an interim Selectboard member.
“She was the head honcho for several years and she did a great job of it,” Black said, remembering the Snowshoe-a-thon. “She was good at getting a lot of people together and getting them to take care of the job.”
And she did that again and again. She served on the board of VerShare, a grassroots mutual aid group, where she helped organize a food shelf.
As her niece Erin Pike cleared out her house in Vershire this fall, she kept finding new recognitions and accolades. They showed just how much her aunt did for her community without most people in her life ever knowing the scope of her work.
Erin and her family live in Florida, but they saw Ethel at a cottage they shared in Maine. Ethel’s father, an airline mechanic, built it on the edge of Lermond Pond, west of Camden, in the 1950s. There, Pike cherished the isolation as she kayaked and admired the bald eagles and loons.
The cottage is “an ongoing project no matter what,” Erin said. And her aunt, ever capable, was always willing to put it in “elbow grease” to keep it beautiful. She had experience. She had transformed her hunting cabin in Vershire into a year-round home with insulation, drywall and joint beams on the ceiling.
Erin and Ethel would talk while they worked on the house, ate hotdogs at their favorite spot or packed a picnic to eat at Mt. Battie.
She was “insightful, wise — definitely wise,” Erin said. “And not judgmental.”
Again and again, Pike’s friends remembered her conversation. “It was like a spiritual meal,” said Janet van Bobo, a friend from high school who moved to the Netherlands in 1969 but made sure to visit Pike in Vermont. And there were laughs too, said LaBarr, one of the women Pike met every week for a “Girls’ Night Out.”
“We’d share what’s going on in each other’s lives and laugh and cry and do what friends do,” LaBarr said. And they kept doing that for 10 years, although with time it became a Girls’ Night In.
“She probably had an effect on more people than anyone I know,” LaBarr said. “She was always there. Whatever I needed help with, she was always the first one in line.”
Claire Potter is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at cpotter@vnews.com or 603-727- 3242.