Betty Mayther

"Betty is saintly. Her room is an amazing beehive of humanity: the arts and craft area. Guitar or zither music fills the air, while in the far right-hand corner two potter's wheels spin, an old foot machine operated by a ten-year-old, and another electric one with a totally involved seven-year-old. As you stand at the door, along the right wall there are low tables where some children work on stitchery and another is drawing cartoons. In the middle there are higher tables where some teenagers are working with silk-screening.

"Betty taught kindergarten in the Portland Public Schools and was one of the first teachers to give sex information to kindergartners. Her teenage daughter Robin said, 'Her room was always a fun one to go into—so many things going on—it was an artistic room.'

"As the many voices in her room looked for her attention and assistance, I asked Betty how she was able to handle so many competing voices at once; she said, 'Just take your time and ignore one for a while'."

– Manny Bernstein, Handbook for Living & Teaching with Freedom

ONE DAY, someone will write a proper biographical sketch of the MLC teacher with, undoubtedly, the most enduring legacy, Betty Mayther. No such sketch will do her justice—but we will honor her with the effort.

Betty was one of five founding teachers in 1968. A devotee of creativity and freedom in the classroom, her voice must often have carried the day in the democratic discussions that led up to the school's opening day. Her focus was always the arts, and the arts grew into a key focus for MLC! There's consensus that her classrooms—particularly B-1 beneath the southwest stairs where she settled—were "the beating heart of MLC."

Betty taught at MLC for 25 years and stayed in close touch with her legions of students, from her retirement in 1993 to her passing in 2016. Born Elizabeth McQueen in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, in 1927, Betty married her husband Bill Mayther in 1947 and together they raised their four children, beloved to the MLC community: one-time teacher Robin and alumni Craig, Mary (Slac), and Chris.

For now, we offer the brief sketch below, written in 1969 by co-founding scholar Manny Bernstein, which appeared in the 2018 50th Anniversary publication; a great reminiscence by Nick Chase, also published there; Betty's appearance in Paty Baum's fine 2004 MLC documentary; and also below, a short memorial by Betty's granddaughter Amanda, and a 2017 reminiscence by your interim webmaster. Long live Betty !!!

March 10, 2016—Today would be Betty Mayther's 89th birthday, a birthday she shared with her beloved grandson Will, who passed away far too young. Today our family is missing them both.

A founding teacher of the Metropolitan Learning Center, Betty's light, love, passion, and creativity are woven into the history and philosophy that guide the school and greater MLC community to be what they are today.

Betty's passing on January 19th has thrown the whole Mayther family for a loop. We are all grieving and it is taking time to process the fact that she is actually gone.

Many friends and MLC community members have been asking if there will be a memorial for Betty. Rest assured there will be one. Our family wants it to be one worthy of her ....

Thank you all for your love and friendship to Betty and our family over the years; she and we are so blessed to be a part of the MLC community.

– Amanda Mayther, on Facebook

Thoughts about Betty Mayther, February 2017

Betty was the only person I ever knew who wore Jungle Gardenia perfume, every day and proudly. A powerfully sweet floral scent for a primary-and-secondary-school art teacher! When I think about this now, 48 years after encountering the fragrance, and Betty, in the Metropolitan Learning Center’s very first days, I realize it fits the scale of what she’d taken on, and the seductive enfolding nature of what she managed to create, starting in that year of 1968.

My closest friends and I were mostly protegés of Emil Abramovic and Ehrick Wheeler, and later Dorothy Zarelli, the more traditional science-literature-math teachers, as opposed to the iconoclasts—Betty, Abe Bialostosky; Sally Svitavsky I suppose, although I don't remember her so well; and later, John Angell. Nevertheless, most of us got around, in the completely insane way MLC afforded in those earliest days when we’d simply follow our whims through the days.

Betty’s best-known classroom was in the basement down the stairs from the parking lot, but her first classroom was the last one on the right down the main hall from the office. That was where we played with color, and with clay, making little working whistles and convoluted sculptures with intertwining channels, down which to roll marbles, like early gravitrams. It was where the hippest older students would hang out doing art all day, always listening to music, from a stack of LPs that appeared and grew. To me the soundtrack of that room will always be Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs, and the Beatles’ Hey Jude.

And that room was Betty. I like to imagine her, once MLC as a concept had been signed off by the School Board, once the iconoclasts had outvoted the traditionalists to make MLC a purely gradeless rule-less educational experiment, rubbing her hands together, setting up her classroom over the summer of 1968, saying okay, now we’ll finally get to see how unbridled self-expression can shape children’s character.

In years to come, I drifted away from friends compelled toward lives in the arts, so many of whom have succeeded passionately. But Betty always went out of her way to welcome anybody who kept coming around, finding ways for them to co-create, do a project for her, work on the annual literature-and-arts magazine, smear their hands with paint and listen to music. I’d always love seeing Betty, right up until the last times, usually at big parties. I admired her presence at the memorial for our first principal, Amasa Gilman, and on-screen in the documentary Alien Boy, about James Chasse, “Jim Jim,” who was her student, and whose days in her classroom seem to have been among his few happy ones.

One of my own most powerful and romantic memories from that first year was a Betty memory. When the enormous snow came, two feet or more that covered the city for weeks, on the first evening when time stopped and everything went immobile, some group of us somehow found ourselves at what had to have been Betty’s house, with her son Craig and some other older and some other younger kids. It was society! It was the promise of love! It was freedom suspended in time. We listened all the way through the Beatles’ entire newly released White Album. We walked in the deep cold snow.

We all think and talk and dream about and still often argue and debate about our experiences at MLC, that one-of-a-kind, never-to-be-repeated life phenomenon. But only in writing about it now do I reach one conclusion: I think Betty may have been the most successful MLC teacher, in dedication, joy, perseverance, consistency—and in lives changed. – Sam Lowry (MLC alumnus, 1968-74)

Fabulous photo courtesy of Amanda Mayther