GREENFIELD — Betty Miles’ teenage children didn’t want to come home. Miles was running a daycare out of their home and her own kids were starting to feel too grown up.
When her oldest of her three children came home from middle school one day, she told her mom about a survey of what TV shows everyone watches at home: she said Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street.
It was true Miles explained, more than 30 years later — but she loved to teach children and didn’t want to necessarily give up the daycare.
Around the same time, in the fall of 1974, she started with her youngest daughter at one of the YMCA’s first parent-child swim class.
It was going well and the instructor at the time, Mary Ellen Moore told her she was good with kids and asked if she wanted to teach.
Miles was surprised, but thought that this could give her the opportunity to teach children, while moving away from her daycare business. She had always loved the water, growing up in New Hampshire and spending summers at Lake Winnipesaukee, learning how to swim from her grandfather, who instilled not only a love for the activity but a respect for the water.
She had already spent years heavily involved with the local swim team, eventually seeing her oldest daughter, Kristin, swim collegiately for University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Soon enough, Miles became certified to be an instructor and a lifeguard and the rest was 28 years of history. This week, Miles formally taught her final class at the Greenfield YMCA and will retire at the age of 73.
“I’ve really loved my job and loved teaching” Miles said. “It was a hard decision to come to the fact to come to the time to retire. I guess I’m just a kid at heart.”
With her husband, Walker, they plan to spend retirement with their three children, all of whom have children of their own. Her youngest, Julie-Ann, is down in Alexandria, Va., with Miles’ newest grandchild, a 9-month-year-old.
“When we go down to Virginia, it doesn’t just have to be a weekend,” Miles said about her retirement. “We can take a week … we can take the scenic route.”
She describes it as bittersweet though, leaving something that has left her knowing generations in Greenfield, who know her as “Miss Betty” and who she almost still remembers their name.
Her former students, some of whom have become lifeguards and others parents of children who then would also learn from Miles, remember her sweet, sing-song voice and the smiley faces she would sign her name with on assignments and notes.
Victoria Maleno, assistant aquatic director at the YMCA, remembers the nursery rhyme tunes, and activities like sipping tea while sitting in the shallow end of the pool. She also would go onto recognize the care Miles had in helping children who were too scared to swim or even get in the pool, feel comfortable and often times, learn to swim.
“One of the biggest things is the way you present the class to the kids and the environment you make with them because I don’t think there was ever a kid that didn’t feel safe or engaged,” said Maleno, who first started to teach her how to swim at six months old in the parent-child swim class.
One of Miles’ closest friends at work was Nora Roche, who retired a few years ago. Miles would typically teach the children with the least experience, while Roche would get those with more experience. When someone passed the lower level with Miles, they would move onto Roche.
“I could not tell you how many times I’ve heard ‘I want Betty! I want Betty!’” fellow close friend, Aquatics Director Pam Mickiewicz remembered. “It’s not that they didn’t like Nora, but they just wanted Betty.”
Miles led programs like “Splash Week” from 1991 to 2005 and the Aquatic Safety Awareness Program (ASAP) from 2000 to 2012. She was honored as the National “Make A Splash” Water Safety Hero of Massachusetts Award one year.
“It was a tremendous honor,” Miles reflected, being selected over the usual winners in the bigger cities. “I just didn’t think I was doing anything that unusual.”
Miles added: “Standing in front of a room of adults kind of scared me. I didn’t know what to say. It really was a quite special award. I looked out at all of those people and I said oh my lord why did they pick me?”
When Jane Kane, business manager, first started going to the YMCA about 30 years ago, Miles was her aquatics exercise teacher. Eventually Kane’s children and grandchildren would learn to swim from Miles.
And how do you replace her?
“Exactly. How do you? Whoever takes her place has big shoes to fill. That for sure,” Kane said. “There won’t be another Betty, but we can all aspire to be.”
Thursday night at Friendly’s, Miles spent dinner with her some of her kids and grandkids. It was a day of celebration, not only for her, but also with graduation season in the air and with the two twins turning 12 years old. It was the kind of time that she hopes to spend in her retirement life — with the family.
She told the grandchildren that she has an important job for them. They looked up at her with an expression of ‘oh boy,’ she said. The job: get her up to speed on technology.
“‘Well you can text, right grandma?’” one of her grandchildren said. “I said, ‘No, but I got a phone that I can make calls with.’ The oldest one looked at me and said ‘Oh grandma, don’t even try to catch up because by the time you do, they’ll be onto something else.’ ”
The joke though is one of the cycle of life: Miles has spent nearly the past 50 years teaching kids and now she was looking at a new challenge ahead of her.
In a way, learning how to use technology is just like teaching a preschooler to swim.
“It’s all deep. No matter where you’re at,” Miles humored. “It’s like ‘Ok, this is where we blow bubbles.”
One person though Miles joked that she was on the same level with for technology was her nine-month-old granddaughter down in Alexandria, Va.
The granddaughter though, her newest, is already starting to learn how to swim, baby steps at a time.
Recently she received a picture from her daughter of the granddaughter in the pool. The parents wanted her to look at the camera. But Miles said that the infant was looking “past it, flirting with the lifeguard.” She laughed and said how she’s excited to see her grandchildren grow up, now that she has the time to finally do so.