HANOVER, NH — Mary Ann Hayward died on July 14, at her family’s lakehouse in Elkins, NH. She was a Hanover native, born on March 9, 1936. She graduated from Hanover High School, Wellesley College, and returned to the Upper Valley in 1958 to teach English at both Orford High School and Hanover High. As a neophyte teacher, she called those years among the most difficult and challenging of her life. Yet, she loved getting to know the students and trying innovative approaches to teaching grammar, poetry, literature and composition. Some of those students became lifelong friends.
She and her husband, Edward (Ted) Harris, returned to Hanover in 1970 after spending eight years in the Boston area while he completed his medical training. From 1978-1984, she served on the Hanover and Dresden School boards, elected as chairman of both as well as, in 1979, chairman of Supervisory Union 22. She received an MALS degree from Dartmouth in 1982. In 1989 she and her husband moved to Palo Alto, CA. Their marriage ended in divorce.
According to her family and friends, Mary Ann was always on the move. She never tried a sport she didn’t like. At six years old, she learned to ski on the J-Bar at Oak Hill and played tennis at the Dartmouth Varsity Courts Club. She learned to handle a rifle and shot rats at the dump with her father, Sidney Hayward. She practiced fly casting for trout in the back yard, using a line with a weighted fly. That translated to fishing in area lakes and streams and, later, to wading the rivers in California, Idaho and Montana. The only A she got at Wellesley was in crew, a required gym class.
She loved music. She knew the words, all the verses, to dozens of campfire songs and naughty ditties and could accompany herself on the piano to ballads from the ‘50s. In high school she was a cancan girl in a Dartmouth Players production of “No Mother to Guide Her” and in later years amused her family with a high-stepping performance of “Won’t You Come Back, Bill Bailey.” She never mastered the ukulele, a lifelong disappointment.
Mary Ann was a preserver of family and friends, of staying in close connection to people she cared about. She regularly wrote letters to those she knew and loved in communities from the East Coast to the West. The correspondence from letters received fills shoeboxes and cartons. She viewed these personal connections as an important undergirding of her life, a testament to the power of friendship and support. A lifelong advocate for women’s rights, Mary Ann sought out companionship and nurtured relationships with like-minded women, young and old.
Her greatest value and love was family and homeland: her three sons who graduated from Hanover High and went off to different points of the compass. The family’s cottage on Pleasant Lake in Elkins, NH, built by her father in 1949, became the focal point for annual time together.
For the past four years, she battled Stage IV ovarian cancer, diagnosed in 2016 in Palo Alto, CA, where she had been living for 30 years. With energy and optimism, and buoyed by the devotion of her family, she moved back to her Hanover roots, for, she said, “I never planned to live out my days in California.”
She leaves behind her sons and their wives, Ned Harris and Edie Meacham of Baltimore, MD, Tom Harris and Kate Reavey of Sequim, WA, and Chandler Harris and Sarah Stearns of Thetford, VT, along with grandchildren Andrew, Eliza, Maeve and Liam Harris. Her longtime partner, Lindley H. Miller, Jr. of Palo Alto predeceased her.
A private burial will be at Pine Knolls Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to St. Thomas Church Endowment, West Wheelock St, Hanover or a charity of your choice.