GREENFIELD — Betty Nee, the Greenfield High School secretary and volunteer who dedicated her life to serving the school and its students, died Saturday in Naples, Fla. She was 82.
“She was a dynamo,” said Ken Fortin, who graduated from GHS in 1990 and then returned to the school more than a decade later as a substitute teacher on the strength of Nee’s suggestion and recommendation. “I walked in after 11 years and she said, ‘Hi, Ken!’ I couldn’t believe she remembered my name after 11 years. She remembered everybody. She was small in stature, but you went in the office and you knew who was in charge.”
He said that he had visited with Nee last around Thanksgiving, and she seemed well and in good spirits. She was visiting a relative at the time of her death, he added.
Fortin said “Whenever anybody needed something in the office — if you were late for school, or needed dismissal early, or if you were a staff member who needed pens or paper, or to speak with the principal — you pretty much went through Betty most of the time. She knew everything about that school, from head to toe. Outside of her husband and her son, it was her life. ”
Nee had worked in the high school office from the time — as Elizabeth Spencer — she was a junior. The school at the time was in the location of the current Greenfield Middle School. There she met her future husband, when he was a senior and she was a freshman. She even planned the 1952 graduation for her class.
Nee returned immediately after graduation as the principal’s secretary, organizing every graduation that followed and staffing the front office until her retirement in 1997. And then, after a brief hiatus, she returned following the death of her husband, John, a school custodian, to serve as a full-time volunteer for the 16 years that followed, keeping track of state reports, purchase orders, report cards, schedule changes, hiring and assigning substitute teachers, making arrangements for class nights, awards ceremonies, open houses, and even measuring students for caps and gowns.
Working under a dozen different principals, “She was the constant; you depended on her,” said GHS Principal Donna Woodcock. “She had a lot of knowledge and history of how things worked.”
Nee, who was born in Buckland and moved to town as a child in 1945, helped found the Greenfield Alumni Association, said Woodcock.
“To me, it’s not volunteering,” Nee told The Recorder in 2012, when she was honored as the schools’ volunteer of the year. “It’s my home away from home. I love it. I would not want to do anything else.”
Although she remained shy about the role she played, crediting the staff rather than taking credit for her works as a dedicated, detail-oriented staff member and later volunteer, Nee was awarded a plaque by the student council when she retired in 1997, as well as an engraved bench for the school’s entranceway when the renovated school was dedicated.
The plaque, which now hangs in the main office, sparked a controversy in 1997, when the student council sought to dedicate the office in her honor.
“I think that’s crazy because Betty pretty much WAS the main office,” said Fortin.
“Betty is Greenfield High School,” said Penny Ricketts, one of throngs of parents who sung the praises of Nee for helping the students for more than six decades. “She was there for the kids. That was her focus. She was all for uplifting them.”
“She was the hallmark of Greenfield High School,” said Franklin County Chamber of Commerce President Ann Hamilton. “The kids loved her. Parents loved her. Teachers loved her. She was all things to all people. She interacted. It was loyalty. It was devotion.”
Greenfield Mayor William Martin, a 1962 GHS graduate who was invited by Nee to bowl with her and her husband, said of her, “Betty stayed in touch with people for years. There was a genuineness about her. She had such staying power. And she became her own legend.”
Angela DeSanty Mass, who knew Nee as a class president before her 1995 graduation, which she worked with her to organize, and then worked with as a math teacher after college, called Nee “an institution of knowledge. She was the pulse of Greenfield High School.”
Mass said, “She was always welcoming, and she took time to listen to people.”
Nee was even known to pay for caps and gowns for students in need and to help them go to the prom.
“I don’t think people are aware of how many anonymous scholarships she gave to kids over the years, and they never knew they came from her,” said Marilyn Hanan, a retired math teacher who was friends with Nee. “They were kids she really got to like, work with in the office or know from different organizations, and to this day, they don’t know she provided those scholarships. She was a pretty amazing lady.”