When an ambulance call came in, Pauline “Polly” Laughlin didn’t reach for her car keys. She didn’t have any.
Laughlin, who never got a driver’s license, would head for the Enfield Fast Squad station on foot, often in the middle of the night and sometimes in snow or rain.
“She would walk down there or run down there as fast as she could,” said her daughter Sue Butman, who served on the squad with her. “I lived across town, and I would try and pick her up, but sometimes she would even get there before me.”
Laughlin, a founding member of the squad and a fourth-grade teacher in Enfield for more than 30 years, died April 24 in Sunapee. She was 90.
She was born in Gilford, New Hampshire, in 1935 and grew up in Glover, Vermont, the only girl in a family with three brothers. Her father died when she was 18, according to Butman.
She later attended Lyndon State Teachers College in Vermont. Her daughter, Ellen Passage, said Laughlin “always made a point to tell people” it was a teachers college when she went, before it became a regular college.
Butman said her mother was “quite the hot little ticket” in college.
“They would put bras at the flagpoles,” Butman said. “After college, she never, ever drank again. She never told me why. She just said when she started teaching, she wanted to be respected.”
Laughlin met her husband, Irving “Squirrel” Laughlin, at the Mittersill ski resort in Franconia, where she was waitressing, according to Butman. The couple married in 1958 and moved to the Upper Valley in the early 1960s, first to Lebanon and then to Enfield. They separated in 1981 but never divorced. Irving Laughlin died in 2015 at 87 and was the subject of his own Valley News A Life in February 2016.
‘Strict, but all the kids liked her’
After about a year teaching in Lebanon, Laughlin was hired at Enfield’s elementary school, where she spent most of her career. She tried other grades, including second grade and a stint in middle school, but kept coming back to fourth.
Fourth graders in New Hampshire study the state’s history, and Laughlin’s classes took a yearly trip to the State House in Concord.
“That was one of their favorite things,” Butman said.
Passage said her mother and co-teacher Sharon Phinney also took students to the Seacoast to explore tide pools.
“I always heard that she was strict, but all the kids liked her,” Passage said. “She would always try to make things fun as far as learning goes.”
Laughlin was a stickler for grammar at home, too. Passage said her mother would correct her children when they said “you and me” instead of “you and I.”
Passage said she didn’t want her own children in her classroom because she worried people would think they got special treatment.
By the time she left the classroom, Laughlin was teaching the children of her former students. Butman said that was something her mother loved.
She tried retiring once, but “after six months, she couldn’t handle it,” Butman said. When Laughlin retired for good, it was because the job had changed.
“She did love teaching so much,” Butman said. “But when the times changed and teaching wasn’t quite as pleasant as when she started, she’s like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.'”
‘I don’t know how she did it’
Laughlin helped start the Enfield Fast Squad while she was still teaching. At the time, Butman said, the town’s volunteer firefighters were handling ambulance calls, with Lebanon providing mutual aid.
“It became obvious that the men did not really want anything to do with the ambulance part of it,” Butman said. “They did it, but they didn’t enjoy it.”
Laughlin and others got certified as EMTs so the town could handle its own calls. She stayed with the squad for more than three decades.
For a stretch, Butman said, she and her mother and a pair of brothers handled most of the town’s calls.
“We got into such a rhythm,” Butman said.
Not driving had its frustrations. Passage said her mother would sometimes reach the station first and then have to wait for someone who could drive the ambulance.
“She would go on calls in the middle of the night, two or more calls sometimes, and then she would still get up and go to school in the morning and not be tired,” Passage said. “I don’t know how she did it.”
Passage credited “tons of black coffee from the time she woke up to the time she went to bed.”
‘It was just her’
“She took the class, and the first time they got her on the highway, she was scared to death, and that was it,” Butman said. “She says, ‘I’m never, ever going to drive.'”
Laughlin walked to school every day. She walked to the library once or twice a week and came home with four or five novels, Passage said. She never owned a cellphone or a computer. In retirement, she walked a couple of miles most mornings.
“I can’t ever remember her ever complaining about it,” Passage said. “It was just her.”
Laughlin learned to speed-read in college, Butman said, and later wished she hadn’t.
“She said, ‘I wish I hadn’t learned how to speed-read, because I know I missed so many details,'” Butman said. “But she couldn’t do it any other way.”
Laughlin also loved to garden, and her lawn shrank a little more each year, making way for flowers, not vegetables, Passage said, including roses and hostas Butman described as 8 to 10 feet across.
“It seemed like every year the grass in her yard would get less and the gardens would get more,” Passage said.
When the snowplow kept chewing up the edge of her lawn, Laughlin had two boulders from a road project placed at the corner of her property, Butman said. The plows had to stay on the road after that.
She was also a prankster, especially with her grandchildren. Butman said a birthday gift might be wrapped in box after box, or hidden at the end of a trail of clues.
Her granddaughter Daniele Gonzalez remembered riding bikes at her grandmother’s house when Laughlin “stole” one and took off.
Gonzalez said the two watched “The Price Is Right” together and looked up birds in a field guide from her grandmother’s deck.
“Whether she was in grandma mode or mom mode or teacher mode, she was the same individual through and through,” Gonzalez said.
Growing up in Enfield, Gonzalez said, strangers would stop her to say, “Oh, you’re Pauline’s granddaughter. I know her.”
‘Fly by the seat of her pants’
In retirement, Laughlin delivered Meals on Wheels and served community meals with the Enfield Lioness Club.
She also started traveling with a group of friends — bus trips to Boston and New York for shows and botanical gardens. Sometimes they would order dessert first, Passage said, and take their dinner home.
In her 70s, Laughlin went ziplining and got her first tattoo, a dragonfly on her ankle.
“She would just fly by the seat of her pants sometimes,” Passage said.
Laughlin lived with dementia for about the last 10 years of her life, Butman said. When it worsened, her travel group could no longer take her along. But the Lionesses kept picking her up for their Wednesday meals.
“They wanted her to have the ability to interact,” Butman said.
She spent her final years at an assisted living community in Sunapee.
Every so often her memory would come back, Butman said, and “that’s the mom I know.”
Butman said she learned from her mother how to be herself.
“My mother was who she was,” she said. “This is who I am, and I’m sorry if you don’t like me, but that’s not my problem.”
Laughlin is survived by her three children, Mark Laughlin, Sue Butman and Ellen Passage; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. She was predeceased by a granddaughter, Mia Follensbee.