In West Bridgewater, Louise Ann Laughlin, age 75, passed away on October 2, 2020 following a prolonged illness. A 1966 graduate of Bridgewater State College, “Luanne” Laughlin began teaching at Weir Grammar School but spent decades at Edmund Hatch Bennett Elementary School, teaching third grade through most of her career. She received a Masters of Education from Bridgewater State in 1974.
After only a year as assistant principal at the Herbert E. Barney School in her early career, she realized she hated administration and happily returned to the classroom until her retirement in 2005.
Laughlin taught with a firm but loving touch. One winter, a disadvantaged student consistently came to school without a hat or gloves, recalled her lifelong friend, Joan Guertin. Laughlin organized a party and all the students got prizes. By the party’s end that student, Guertin remembered, had a new hat and gloves.
Rosemary Loura-Alves, an immigrant from the Azores, was in Laughlin’s class in 1970. She was 14, but was placed in the elementary school because she barely spoke English. That summer, Laughlin tutored Loura-Alves three days a week, helping her rapidly learn to read and write English, and refused any payment for the lessons. “She was a lot of help to me,” Loura-Alves said. “She tutored me that summer and I never forgot it.”
After almost four decades of teaching, Laughlin was nearly a celebrity in Taunton.
“When we’d go out, even last year,” Guertin said, “One of the guys who waited on us for lunch said, oh Miss Laughlin, I remember you!”
The daughter of the late Lawrence Laughlin and Louise Laughlin, nee Mulhern, Laughlin graduated from St. Mary’s High School in 1962. She had a knack for maintaining lifelong friendships, the people she dined out with in her later years were often the same ones she ate lunch with as a school girl.
“She cared about people,” said Guertin, who met Laughlin in kindergarten. “She just always kept us in her mind.”
Outside the classroom, Laughlin was irreverent, with a quick wit and an enthusiastic, if rarely in-tune singing voice. She loved Cape Cod and was happiest on a deck near the ocean with a glass of white wine.
She was close with her only brother, Larry, and was exceedingly generous to his three sons, her nephews, Jason, Matthew, and Travis. Laughlin and the young nephews grew closer while she cared for them full-time for many weeks over two summers while her sister-in-law, Cheryl, took education classes.
In early life, her nephews were likely to find the most in-demand toys under the Christmas tree with the label, “from Aunt Luanne.” As her nephews grew up and went to college, they often found a card, and sometimes chocolates, in their mailboxes, sent from their aunt on even the most obscure holidays.
She was the next person, besides Mom and Dad, that we all could go to for help,” Travis Laughlin said.
Twenty five years ago, Laughlin ran into Loura-Alves, the Portuguese girl she tutored, at the Filene’s in the Galleria. That began a friendship that thrived the rest of Laughlin’s life. The two would meet for dinners, and in recent years, as declining health forced Laughlin to live in an assisted living facility, Loura-Alves would help her travel to doctors’ appointments.
“I used to say, you took care of me,” Loura-Alves said. “Now it’s my time to take care of you.”
A devout catholic, Laughlin regularly attended Mass at St. Mary’s Church in Taunton.
A funeral Mass is not scheduled at this time due to Covid health considerations. A burial in St. Francis Cemetery will be private.
Visit our website www.okeefewade.com to sign the online guestbook, obituaries & directions