by Evan Spring
In the 1970s and 80s, Worthington native Helen Bartlett Magargal (1920–2008) was a beloved teacher at the town’s R. H. Conwell Elementary School. But for her own high school education, options were limited. She chose to board in Northampton, doing chores to pay for her room. Sometimes she was lucky enough to get a ride home on weekends.
“But in spite of that,” as her daughter Christine Mulcahy explained, “my mother graduated in the top ten of her class. Great college material, right? There was no money. But years later, when Bernie Yvonne became principal here in town, and was a neighbor of my parents, he convinced her that she could go to college. She was a grandmother, she was in her forties, she didn’t have a driver’s license. So she tackled all those obstacles and became a teacher that everybody remembers.”
For the historical society’s annual meeting on September 29, 2024, townspeople gathered to pay tribute to Helen Magargal, who also authored the WHS monograph Early Schools in Worthington in 1999-2000.
In attendance were three of Helen and Ray Magargal’s four children: Christine, the second child, now residing in Northampton; Wells Wrisley “Mack” Magargal, the third child, visiting from Virginia; and the youngest, Steven Bartlett Magargal, who recently moved from Worthington to South Carolina. The oldest sibling, Judith Ann Berube, lives in Florida and could not be there. Also in attendance were Christine’s son, Lawrence (Larry); Mack’s wife, Terry; and Steve’s wife, Diane.
When Helen was a child, her family lived on Old North Road and then Buffington Hill Road. She attended the Lyceum School on Buffington Hill Road near the Corners, and at one point had a mortifying experience in the neighborhood. She and a friend were trailing behind one of the two elderly Rice sisters, who lived opposite the library. One of the Rice sisters was deaf, and Helen and her friend debated which sister was in front of them. As Christine explained, “I think it was my mother who yelled something not nice, and it was the sister who could hear very well. My mother ran home, climbed up a tree, and her mother was down there with a shoe. ‘Get down here, Helen.’”
After graduating high school Helen worked for a Springfield family as a nanny and housekeeper, while being courted by her future husband, Ray Magargal. “He would drive down with Harold Brown and they would look for the cheapest gas they would quote down the streets,” Christine explained. “But he was too shy to knock on the door and ask Mom to come out. So, you’ve seen that movie, he tossed pebbles. But he also sang the song ‘Tangerine,’ according to my father.”
For their wedding, said Christine, “My mother had to choose between a wedding dress or a wedding cake, and she chose to have a wedding cake.”
Ray and Helen settled into “The Spruces” on Williamsburg Road at Worthington Corners. The house had belonged to Helen’s grandfather, and Helen’s aunts Marion and Elsie Bartlett lived there as well.
As several gatherers noted, Helen’s talent for teaching was rooted in her awareness of each child’s individual needs. Mack observed this in his childhood, when The Spruces had a dilapidated shed with an attic. “We were not allowed to go up on the attic stairs. And I went up there, you know, investigating, because there was a lot of interesting stuff there. She saw me coming down the stairs, but never said anything. She knew I was embarrassed, and she just let it ride. I think that was her gift of being able to tell what people need, what they don’t need, not making them feel embarrassed.”
“Plus she used to read to me,” said Mack. “I was bad at reading, probably dyslexic. And so she would sit at the dining room table and read to me.”
Helen was in her early forties when she enrolled at Westfield State College to study education. She was following in the footsteps of her mother Alice Catherine Bartlett, who also worked as a teacher, and her aunt Marion Bartlett, a principal at the Memorial School in Springfield.
But first she needed a driver’s license. “She went back to Westfield State when I started first grade,” said Steve. “Going back to get her license I think was harder than going back to college. She was scared to death of driving. I remember being in a car with her one time, and she went to the left side of the island instead of the right and got pulled over. The cop was really cool, but Mom, she was crying up a storm. ‘Oh my god, I could have killed us.’”
“It was also thanks to my father,” said Christine, “because he took on a lot of the work that she had done. You know, he was cooking, child care. He supported her. And then he liked hosting dinners for all the teachers.”
“I still remember the car my dad bought her,” said Mack. “It was an old Dodge with big fins on the back, and it had push-button transmission.”
“She never spoke much about how hard school was,” said Steve. “But once she started teaching, she definitely knew she was in the right spot.”
Helen’s first teaching job was in Hinsdale around 1971 or 1972. By this time her oldest child, Judy, had children of her own, and Christine had graduated from college. Soon Helen would be teaching at the Conwell School until her retirement, usually first or second grade, but sometimes third or fourth, or two classes combined.
“My son was lucky enough to be in her last first-grade class, and it was just great to have her as a teacher,” said Janet Dimock. “I think they all felt supported, even when they didn’t behave.”
Phyllis Smith recounted how Helen perceptively diagnosed a problem with her son. “He was very shy, and he was always in the back of the room and didn’t say much. Come to find out, he couldn’t understand her wording because of blockage in his ears. She’s the one that found that he wasn’t saying letters correctly because he didn’t hear them.”
When Helen taught Linda Arnold’s children, Linda — who had previously worked as a middle-school teacher — volunteered in the classroom. Later she did some substitute teaching as well. “She made it look so easy,” said Linda, “and when I was in there alone, it wasn’t that easy. She could multitask like nobody I ever saw, and this was when she had the combination class. She’d have a group of children she was teaching reading, and they were all at so many different levels. She’d perform miracles providing seat work for all the other children, so they could be busy and engaged with something while she worked the children in her reading group. That was amazing to me.”
Before the gathering Kate Ewald heard from Lindsey and Matt Molyneux, who had Helen as a teacher. “Helen used to watch Lindsey do all these little drawings,” said Kate, “and she invited Lindsey to come over to the house, and they did artwork together. And now Lindsey is a professional artist.”
As for Matt Molyneux, “She made him feel so welcome and loved, like a grandmother might. He made a reference to a comment that Maya Angelou wrote: ‘People will forget what you say and do, but they will well remember how you made them feel.’ He shared that because that was his experience with Helen. Now he’s a fabulous teacher.”
Phyllis Smith recalled Helen reading to the children from Miss Nelson Is Missing, a book by Harry Allard and James Marshall that features a witch-like subsitute teacher. “The kids were totally involved with her story, and they went out to recess,” said Phyllis. “And during recess, she came back all dressed up as this character. She’s sitting at her desk, made up and everything, and freaked the kids right out.”
One time Steve convinced his mother to give him a key to the Conwell School so that he and his friends could play basketball in the gym after hours. “The very first night, Keith Modestow went through a wall,” said Steve. “So now I gotta call up my mother and tell her. She goes, ‘Ohhhh, no.’ My father came down with Bobby Bartlett and they had it fixed that night, and nobody knew any difference.”
Inevitably discussion turned to Helen’s husband, Ray, and his various pranks, including a notorious four-hole privy hung up at The Spruces in the garage. “When we tore the barn down,” said Steve, “we rebuilt the barn with some of the old wood. They were having a family reunion, so my father, being the prankster that he was, got the pictures of my mother’s whole family — and it still hangs in the garage to this day, the four-holer — the pictures were glued to that, and that’s how the people arrived to the family reunion. That might be the maddest I’ve ever seen my mother.”
For a few summers Ray and Helen ran the kitchen at the golf course, and they encouraged their children in the sport. “She just let us go, if we were going to the golf course,” said Mack. “It’s such a small town, there aren’t many kids your own age to do things with, so you could always play golf by yourself, go out there and hit the ball around.”
Many gatherers remembered the wholesome family environment at the golf club in those days. “Most kids in Worthington,” said Ben Brown, “especially if they knew the Magargals, were fairly proficient at golf, as junior members as well as finding golf balls.”
Steve, an outstanding golfer who went on to compete in tournaments, had brought along a cherished photograph of his mother in mid-swing.
As Steve explained, Helen was self-taught but had excellent technique. “She was five-ten or five-nine, and you can see that in the picture, the follow-through. That’s athletic right there. All her weight’s on her left side. You want to show somebody a picture about how to finish a golf swing, that’s how you do it.”
Christine and her son Larry lived with Helen and Ray at The Spruces for several years. Larry, who spent a year at Conwell and graduated from Gateway, said of his grandmother, “In the memories that stick with me, she was very persuasive, but in the sweetest, nicest way. I could never say no to her to anything that I didn’t really want to do, and none of my friends could either, because they’d all had her as a teacher.”
“The biggest thing was playing within a hand-bell choir in the town. She pulled bells from some church somewhere in the Hilltowns. All of a sudden there’s bells in the house, and she’s like, ‘Oh Larry, here, you do this, and then we’ll get your friends.’ Next thing you know, we’re playing bells every single week. And nobody complained. If I talked to my friends today, they still love that memory. I never thought I would play bells, but you just couldn’t say no to her. You didn’t even realize she was asking.”
“I remember her playing Moonlight Sonata on the piano, just by ear,” said Mack.
“She just loved music,” said Janet Dimock, who moved to Worthington in 1976 and sang with Helen in the Hilltown Choral Society. “We’d all meet at the Corners, and stuff ourselves in a car and drive up over to Clark Hill to go to rehearsal in Cummington. They were the most funny group of people that I’d ever want to know. We were always laughing, because they were always telling stories on each other, pranks they used to play on people. The time that Bevo Bartlett and I think Ray hid out in back of the Osgoods’ house and waited for Harriet to take a shower. This is as adults, not kids. They started throwing rocks at the bathroom window.”
“I remember the drama club would put on a play at the school,” Janet continued. “Helen would get all the kids involved. The kids would have little parts, or they’d be the sound effects. Helen made little signs for the kids to hold, whether they were supposed to be the wind or some other background noise. And she got them all enthused about it.”
“The only thing you should never ask Helen to do was support a raffle,” said Janet. “It didn’t really matter whether it was for the school, or the town, or anything else. She would be very stern. ‘Raffle? That’s gambling.’”
Over the years The Spruces hosted many family members and guests, including Lyndon Brown, who rented a study room. Helen’s Bartlett forebears once ran a hotel at Worthington Corners, and her father, Guy Bartlett, worked at the Weldon Hotel in Greenfield. Around the late 1980s, Helen and Ray ran a bed-and-breakfast. They also hosted teachers from England on an exchange program, including a couple named Trevor and Grace.
“My father was so, ‘Oh, these English people, I’m going to have to hold my finger like this,’” recalled Christine, holding an imaginary tea cup and projecting her pinky finger. “Well, they became fast friends, and they came back year after year. One of my biggest regrets was that I could never afford to take Mom and Dad over there, so they could be with Grace and Trevor. People became family. They were friends, but they became family.”
“There was a time when everybody in Worthington not just knew each other, but socialized and were very connected, by necessity as well as proximity,” said Ben Brown.
When asked how Helen spent her retirement, Christine replied, “Her garden, her children and grandchildren, volunteering, church, bell choir.”
Mack added, “She spent hours and hours transcribing music for the bell choir. And making applesauce.” She also continued to visit the Conwell school and read stories to the children.
Of course she also spent time at Worthington’s illustrious roadhouse, Liston’s, where her son Steve was proprietor. “Of course everybody paid attention to her,” said Steve. “She liked the atmosphere, she liked the fact that people would come talk to her, and the conversations. It’s like she was almost holding court sometimes.”
After Helen Magargal’s funeral in 2008, there was a well-attended reception at Town Hall. “I remember at my mother’s funeral,” said Mack, “someone coming up to me and saying, ‘Your mother always told me what was what. I didn’t like it then, but I appreciate it now.’”
When Helen retired, her students gave her a gift of a tablecloth inscribed with all their signatures. “When I would see that,” said her grandson Larry, “I was like, ‘Oh, wow, everybody loves my grandmother in this town.’”
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
Evan Spring, a jazz historian and freelance editor, moved to Worthington in 1998 and serves on the WHS board of directors.
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