Bob Thatcher’s first two pitches to his eldest son, Michael, were fastballs for strikes. The Rivendell Academy baseball team was scrimmaging on a spring day in 2001 and the assistant coach was feeling feisty and demonstrating why he’d once been a respected, right-handed hurler for Boston University.
The next pitch, however, was a hanging curveball and roughly belt-high to the senior, who put every bit of his 6-foot-2, 160-pound frame into his swing.
“Dad was smirking and having a good time and then I tattooed the ball over the left-field fence,” said Michael Thatcher, who along with his younger brother, Adam, also played soccer for his father. “I took about two minutes to go around the bases and I remember one of my teammates telling me to pick up the pace.”
Michael Thatcher usually caught a ride with his father after practice. On this day, however, the maroon Volkswagen Passat belonging to the school’s athletic director was nowhere to be found. The son hoofed it home and enjoyed every step.
“Best two-mile walk I’ve ever had,” Michael Thatcher said. “I came in and dad was sitting in his chair and my mom just started laughing. He probably smiled all the way home, but he wasn’t going to show me.”
Bob Thatcher served 43 years as a teacher and 47 as boys soccer coach at Rivendell and its predecessor, Orford High. Also at one point the institution’s vice principal, he died of complications from Alzheimer’s Disease on Jan. 20, 2022.
The home run story encapsulates much of Thatcher’s impact: the participatory dedication to his students and athletes. The pride in seeing his son succeed, accompanied by the desire to impart a lesson on showboating. And above all, the chance to create family memories.
“He parented his own kids as well as he inspired the rest of us,” said Vanessa Alonso DeSimone, a student of Thatcher and his wife, Nancy, who also taught at Orford High. “They brought a lot of fun into our lives.”
Said former soccer player Eddie Gray: “He was stern, but he had a huge heart and a sly smile.”
Thatcher was born in Fort Wayne, Ind., but grew up in Acton, Mass., the only child of Cedric Thatcher and Barbara Birch, who divorced when he was 7. Cedric Thatcher, a veteran of World War II’s Pacific Theater, for many years ran the Colonial Kitchen restaurant in West Acton. The eatery served as the pregame breakfast site for his son and his Acton-Boxborough High football teammates on Saturday mornings.
Thatcher went to to pitch for Boston University’s baseball team, which occupied the remnants of Braves Field, the eponymous home of the Major League franchise that departed for Milwaukee in 1953. Boston University also played games at Fenway Park. Thatcher graduated in 1972 and on the recommendation of an aunt, Doris Barry, who was Orford High’s secretary, successfully applied for a physical education teaching job at the small, rural school.
Thatcher reported for duty in September to find boys soccer coaching duties also on his plate. He’d never played or coached the sport before, but with the team’s first game scheduled in less than a week, it was incumbent he learn quickly and some of the lessons were hard-earned. A Valley News photo dated Oct. 18, 1972, shows Thatcher, sporting long sideburns, addressing his huddled troops, whom the caption describes as finishing 0-5-5 that season.
Victories weren’t vital for Thatcher, however. Despite being deeply competitive, he possessed the perspective of so many great youth and high school coaches – that athletics are an extension of the classroom and the lessons taught provide the activities’ true value. This was also evident in Thatcher’s physical education classes, where his playful side emerged but his standards remained high.
DeSimone and her twin sister, Patricia, were in fifth grade when Thatcher started at Orford. It was the first school year under the federal gender equality amendment known as Title IX, which required boys and girls to have equal access to classes in any coed school. Previously at Orford, DiSimone said, girls had their own gym class, so leaving what she viewed as a “safe space” to mix with boys was cause for anxiety.
“I’ll never forget how he brought energy and confidence,” recallign how Thatcher added an extensive gymnastics program to the curriculum. “He made the girls feel very much a part of that class. To roll into a very conservative and rural school district and to bring change was influential and courageous.”
Helping Thatcher with those activities was another new teacher in town, Nancy Henry. She arrived in 1975, and soon lost her husband to a sudden illness 14 months after their wedding. Thatcher, who had already been married and divorced, returned to Acton every other weekend to spend time with his daughter, Tori, who was born in 1971.
“It started out with us being friends who supported each other,” said Nancy Thatcher, who taught home economics at Orford for 27 years. “And then, suddenly, there we were, the scandal of Orford. Small towns have to have something to talk about and at that time it was us.”
DeSimone said gossip had no bearing on the joy many of the young couple’s students felt about their obvious attraction. She and her sister were among a small group of students who attended the 1978 wedding.
“It was very gradual but when it happened, we were euphoric,” DeSimone said. “We felt that ‘Oh, my God, they saved each other.’ It was so romantic.”
The Thatchers went on to help many young people. Students having trouble at home regularly made pit stops of varying lengths at their house, sometimes sharing a bedroom with one of their own children.
Bob once came across a Danish exchange student crying on the school steps during an autumn day and learned that things weren’t working out with her host family. He and Nancy took the girl in for her remaining months on U.S. soil.
Bob Thatcher also went to bat for Mike Hillmann, a 1979 Orford High graduate who was one of 11 children. Despite being an athletic 6-foot-2 and interested in basketball, Hillmann wasn’t permitted to play sports by his father. Twice Thatcher visited the Hillmann home to plead the case of Mike and his younger brother, Roland, who was 6-4. Twice the request was denied.
“He wasn’t successful but he made an attempt,” said Mike Hillmann, who served as Thatcher’s student assistant his senior year. “I would have done anything for that man. He gave me a little extra attention and showed me I could be something special when I needed it.”
Chad Tatham, a 2001 Rivendell graduate, remembers the open door to Thatcher’s office, which was adjacent to the boys locker room. Every new passer-by was acknowledged and many were waved in to talk about school, girls or life in general.
“He had this wink and side smile he’d give you and that was all you needed to feel good,” Tatham said. “It was contagious.”
Thatcher was also a prankster, dating back at least to one Halloween when he was around age 12 and his mother asked him to pass out candy at the front door. Hearing screams soon after, she discovered her son on the roof, dropping water balloons on smaller children as they came up the walk and eating the candy himself.
Anyone walking in front of Thatcher’s vehicle while he was inside risked the horn going off and watching the culprit roar with laughter. Rivendell baseball coach Eric Reichert, a Notre Dame fan, once caught Thatcher completing some Boston College chalk graffiti on the road in front of his apartment on a day the schools clashed in football.
Of course, such hijinks go both ways. Kate Thatcher, her father’s youngest child, recalls “For Sale” signs occasionally sprouting from the family’s lawn. A group of students once picked up her father’s pickup truck and walked it inside the school building before placing it in front of his office door.
Another incident that had the school talking, but that only became humorous once some time had passed, occurred in the 1980s after Thatcher decided to replace a burned-out light bulb in the gym. He made what he thought were proper precautions and climbed a ladder, only to be electrocuted and topple from the top rung. Ben Gray, now a Fairlee electrician, broke his teacher’s fall and neither were seriously injured.
Nancy Thatcher was in a meeting when a student brought the news.
“I had heels on but still beat everyone to the gym,” she said, recalling that for a short time after the incident, her husband’s balding pate began to again sprout hair. “Bob always did the things no one else would.”
A man who rarely shouted or swore held his players to the same standard and built a reputation as a fair and unflappable arbiter during several decades as a high school basketball referee in New Hampshire and Vermont.
That didn’t stop some hoops fans from heckling him, of course. A young Michael Thatcher often accompanied his father to his soccer team’s games and officiating assignments and remembers a night at Lin-Wood High in Lincoln, N.H., when he was an elementary school student and sat next to a leather-lunged patron.
“He was being really rough on my dad but then he started talking to me and found out who I was,” Michael Thatcher said. “After halftime, he came back with a bag of popcorn and a soda for me.”
Thatcher, who served stints as his school’s boys and girls basketball coach, also refereed youth games as needed. He was once overseeing a fourth-grade game in which Kate, and her teammates were dominating play. An opponent attempted a layup but the whistle suddenly blew and Kate was slapped with a foul.
“I complained that I was across the lane and couldn’t have possibly touched her,” Kate said. “He said if I made one more comment, I would be grounded.”
Micheal Thatcher began attending Orford High soccer practices around the age of 3. The son and father rode thousands of miles in their trademark, red Nissan pickup truck, a cassette tape of Genesis Greatest Hits or the Top Gun movie soundtrack sometimes playing in the cab.
One day Michael asked his father what he whispered to himself in the quiet seconds before a soccer game’s opening kickoff.
“He said he was praying for the safety of his players,” said Michael Thatcher, who also recalls seeing his father in tears while in a school hallway one morning during the late 1980s. It was Bob’s birthday, Oct. 2, but news that one of his former soccer players, Tim Wilkins, was dead of a heart attack had just arrived.
“You’re not supposed to cry on your birthday,” Micheal told his father in an attempt at solace.
“You’re not supposed to lose someone who was like a son to you on your birthday,” Bob replied.
Thatcher’s own children were lavished with attention and regular trips to the Fairlee Diner, often for one-on-one time. Tori Thatcher Taylor recalls driving with her father in the mid-1970s and having her own on-air handle, “Rosebud”, while talking on the vehicle’s CB radio.
Kate and Bob annually went Christmas shopping together on Dec. 23, a tradition that lasted from her early childhood until Bob Thatcher became housebound last year.
Holidays and family bonds were important to the Thatcher patriarch, who loved to devise difficult Easter egg hunts and spent hour upon hour playing in the Moody Beach surf during the family’s week of vacation in coastal Maine. A babysitter came along on those trips, because Nancy Thatcher knew she’d get little help while her husband was having fun.
That enthusiasm was infectious and made the Thatcher house the most popular in its Fairlee neighborhood. The garage refrigerator was stocked with drinks, the basement play room available and on summer nights the children would play flashlight tag or chase lightning bugs with their friends. The parents once came home to find 13 kids playing basketball in their driveway – none of them a family member.
“I had the best dad in the world,” said Kate Thatcher. “If he wasn’t joking around with you, there was a problem.”
Thatcher retired from teaching in 2014. He had thoughts about stepping away from coaching and refereeing at the same time, but Nancy, seeing that her husband still loved those activities, urged him not to give them up until he was fully ready.
The Raptors captured the 2017 Vermont Division IV boys soccer title and advanced to the 2018 semifinals. Athletic director Ross Convertino, who’d recently taken over for Thatcher in that role, and the school board then replaced him with first-year assistant Kevin Brooker, whom he’d inserted onto Thatcher’s staff.
“My dad was replaced without so much as a conversation,” Michael Thatcher said. “He was really, really hurt by it. He was not ready to be done coaching.”
Convertino declined comment.
Complicating the situation was that Thatcher had begun showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s months before his Rivendell tenure ended. Kate Thatcher said her father, always a fast driver, made her nervous when she rode with him and her mother began to notice that Bob’s left foot sometimes caught when he walked.
Nancy Thatcher asked Kate to call Rivendell girls basketball coach Russ Wilcox to see if her husband’s longtime friend had noticed anything, and he reported that, yes, observations were being made around town and on the basketball refereeing circuit.
After a visit to a local physician didn’t result in definitive answers, Tori Thatcher Taylor, whose professional life often brings her into contact with memory-impaired patients, pushed for her father to receive a second opinion at a Massachusetts hospital. He was diagnosed with the fatal disease in the summer of 2018 and soon after began participating in an experimental study.
Bob Thatcher didn’t want word of his illness to get out and undertook what would be his final soccer campaign. However, reporters noticed that he struggled for words during interviews and would sometimes lapse into silence and gaze into the distance in mid-sentence. Six months later, on a trip to London with Michael to watch a Premier League soccer game, the son’s radar went off when his father asked a question about a rule that he’d known for decades.
Bob Thatcher’s world shrank as he declined. After he lost the ability to drive, Nancy would take him for rides in their 1999 Mazda Miata convertible sports car and sometimes pilot him to Rivendell soccer games, parking under the trees and up against the fence at the east end line. When he became housebound, dozens of friends, relatives and former students visited.
Among them was Tatham, who said he viewed Thatcher as a second father. The Georgia resident, now working as an airline flight attendant, wanted his former coach to know how much he valued the lessons he’d been taught.
“In a lot of ways, during those visits, you would feel like you were with a vacant body,” Tatham said. “But then he would grab your hand and there was suddenly a connection that you could see in his eyes. Nancy would tell me how much it meant to him, even though he couldn’t show it.”
Wilcox, who had watched so many televised sports games in the Thatcher house, said his bond with Bob had reached the point where the pair could sit together in comfortable silence, which helped during visits late in his friend’s life.
Wilcox emotionally recalled the care that Nancy and her children provided during Thatcher’s 3½-year battle with his disease. It was teamwork that, with the aid of visiting nurses, helped him remain in the family home until he died.
“Nancy is so strong that it brings tears to my eyes,” said Wilcox, part of a group that gathered in the Rivendell gym last December to honor Bob Thatcher’s career and unveil a banner doing the same. “I watched Bob decline and I watched Nancy meet that with nothing but love and strength.”
While describing her husband’s impact outside his family, Nancy Thatcher said that her father, perhaps concerned about teachers’ relatively low salaries, once told his son-in-law he would make a good salesman.
“Bob said, ‘I am a salesman, because every day I have to sell education to kids,’” Nancy Thatcher said. “And that was what he lived.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com.