NEWPORT — Among the many tales she shared with students as a volunteer at Newport’s Towle Elementary School, Marie Bugbee particularly enjoyed reading them Miss Rumphius.
And for at least one of those students, Kate Niboli Luppold, Barbara Cooney’s tale of a woman cultivating lupines on the Maine coast continues to resonate more than a quarter of a century after her grandmother recited it for her class — and five months after Bugbee died at age 97.
“It’s about planting seeds to make your home beautiful, about making your community beautiful,” Luppold said last week. “In her own way, that’s what Baba did for Newport all these years.”
Make that ways, plural, that Bugbee served her adopted town for 68 years.
In addition to volunteering at Towle School during her daughter Kathy Niboli’s tenure there as a teacher and a principal, Bugbee served as the first director of the town’s Library Arts Center in the late 1960s, as a founder of Newport’s end-of-summer Apple Pie Crafts Fair on the town common, as a charter member of the Soo Nipi Quilt Guild and as a longtime volunteer at the Newport Thrift Shop.
“Kathy used to say that Marie would never say ‘no’ to anything anyone asked her to do,” said Peggy McKenney, a retired educator and Niboli’s co-chairwoman at the craft fair. “She made me think that if there’s no good reason to say ‘no’ to something, why would you? So at the end of a long day if I’m particularly tired, I remember Marie and go, ‘Wait a minute: I’m not in my 90s.’ ”
In her 20s and 30s, the then-Marie Mosley devoted most of her time and energy to her and her first husband Robert Mosley’s three children, all the while pining for her native Maine coast, which the family had left in 1951.
“For a while, she really wanted to go back,” Niboli said. “But as the years went on, she lost that desire to go.”
Marie’s commitment to Newport deepened after Robert died and she married Orimer Bugbee in 1961. She became a trustee at the Richards Free Library, and in the mid-1960s, signed onto Marjorie Dorr’s vision of converting the carriage house behind the library into a community arts center. Today, the modern annex hosts concerts and exhibits of art work, much of it by Newport and Lake Sunapee-region artists.
“In those first few years my mother ran the day-to-day there,” Niboli said. “After she moved on from that, over the years she continued to volunteer and take classes and go to concerts and gallery openings. She was always busy with everything.”
She also kept her elder daughter occupied, recruiting Kathy to help run the Apple Pie Crafts Fair in the early 1970s. A few years later, the fair became a fundraiser benefiting the library arts center and has since evolved into a tradition that Niboli and McKenney now spend months organizing.
“She was kind of nurturing me, cultivating me, to eventually follow her,” McKenney recalled with a laugh. “Even after Kathy and I took over, she stayed very active. Just a couple of years ago, she was still making her pies to be sold and make more money for the center.
“She was in the tent, sharing recipes and greeting everybody like a reigning queen. People would come up to her, from a boy in his 20s she knew from church to people her own age. And she remembered everybody, by name. … She made everybody feel like they were the most important person.”
That included the students she encountered at the Towle School. Whether she was reading Miss Rumphius, talking about quilting, her travels to places like the Great Wall of China or about her own childhood during the Great Depression and living through World War II as a young adult she made the students feel special.
“The kids loved her,” McKenney said. “Whatever the topic was, they were fascinated by her.”
Chief among them was Luppold, who already was impressed watching her grandmother volunteer around town. Bugbee’s particular passion for the arts center helped inspire her to study fine arts at the University of New Hampshire.
And now, in her mid-30s and with a son of her own — Bugbee’s third great-grandchild — Luppold directs the center.
“After college, I was doing different temporary jobs in town, thinking I was getting ready to go to grad school for arts,” Luppold said. “At the time, it wasn’t a conscious thing at all, but in retrospect, I see how she helped me love this little town, a love she instilled in us without saying anything, just being a role model by example. Seeing it that way was a huge part of me wanting to come back.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.