My mother, Linda Howard Watkins, died on Friday, April 29, 2022. She was 78 years old.
With the sun on her face, the sound of seagulls in the distance, and me by her side, Linda
enjoyed one last beach day, in view of the sparkling water of the Cambridge Reservoir. Linda
died on the anniversary of the death of her beloved father, Joseph Ray Watkins, to whom she
was devoted. She exited the way she had lived, with fierce love and impeccable design.
Born weeks premature on July 13, 1943, Linda started life in an incubator. Lucky to be alive and
sighted, she lived her first few years in an apartment building her grandparents’ owned on
Chauncy Street in Harvard Square. As a toddler in Cambridge, she once darted into the street
to chase an open truck filled with bananas. Her love for bananas persisted her whole life, as did
her love of cats, which also started in Cambridge with a cat named Timmy Mouse. Her family
rescued (took) Timmy Mouse from a girl who had thrown him down the stairs of their apartment
building.
When Linda was four, she moved to Hingham with her one-year-old sister, Nancy, their parents, Joe and Betty Watkins (nee Betty Guptill Lewis), and Timmy Mouse. In Hingham, where she spent the rest of her childhood, she loved going to the beach, playing tennis, knitting, listening to music, playing guitar, ice skating, riding her bike, earning Girl Scout badges, roller skating around her friends' wrap around porch, swimming, sailing and square dancing at the Yacht Club, and going to the movies at Loring Hall (aka “boring hall”) with her friends.
On sunny days, Linda could always be seen with her face lifted towards the sun. She went to
great lengths to achieve the perfect tan, even constructing a tanning booth from a refrigerator
box lined with aluminum foil. In the winter, Linda loved ice skating on a pond in Hingham where she earned the nickname “Speedy”. Her best trick was a “shoot the duck” maneuver where she skated fast then squatted to glide with her right leg extended parallel to the ice.
After college, Linda worked as an au pair in Nice, France. She had majored in French and
became fluent. She wrote poetry in French and loved French music. She loved the colorful
French fabric, Souleiado, and enjoyed the fact that her birthday was the day before Bastille Day.
While in France she enjoyed barefoot adventures without a helmet on the back of a Vespa on
the cliff roads of Les Grande Corniches. In 1964, she and a friend traveled to Innsbrook, Austria
for the Winter Olympics. Instead of watching any of the competition they went shopping, leaving
the games with beautiful Loden jackets.
With her work earnings, Linda saved enough to either buy a Marc Chagall painting (whose studio was nearby) or move to Italy and study Italian. Lucky for me, she chose Italy, thinking she would pursue a career connected to her gift with languages. Linda came home to
Massachusetts from Italy in 1967, fluent in Italian and accompanied by an Italian citizen whom
she would marry (mistake) and have a daughter, me (worked out). In short order Linda said, “Arrivederci signore,'' and kicked il padre terribile back to Italy.
She took on the role of hard-working single mother with gusto. We moved to Back Bay, Boston, where she created an idyllic life and community for us. Our apartments, first on Commonwealth Ave, then on Marlborough Street, were perfect gems of modern design. On one wall of our first apartment, Linda mounted lines of a Gertude Stein poem (“Pigeons on the grass alas”) in vinyl. Against my bright blue bedroom wall, she hung a large Marimekko wall-hanging with strawberries bursting from the tapestry. Linda loved games and filled our shelves with everything from Chinese Checkers (which she always won) to Go To The Head of the Class (another one of her favorites). She read to me every night from the collection of great children’s books she assembled, and filled the apartment with music. She mounted a swing in the doorway of my room (so much fun, and a perfect way to dry hair while listening to Bee Gees records).
Linda was active in helping support a then start-up school called The Learning Project which I attended and loved. She painted a lot of blue stools for the school and helped to improve our local playground by taking care of the landscaping. Linda also volunteered in libraries and
assisted a friend in managing a children’s art gallery (I always thought this was very cool) at the
Back Bay train station. Every weekend she and I went to Hingham where we enjoyed visits with her parents, spending time at the Cohasset Golf Club, searching for bargains at Building 19 and the Bargain Center, going to the beach, playing games, seeing neighborhood friends, and making go-carts. Linda even made, by hand, on her own, a large fort for me and my friends to play on, complete with its own colorful flag.
In 1972, when I was four years old, Linda began a career in libraries serving with the “Library Volunteers for Boston'', a program which established libraries and library service in Boston Public Schools when there had been none. Under this program, while single handedly raising me and walking me to countless ballet, swim, gymnastics and art classes, she established and managed two elementary school libraries, one at the Charles Perkins School in the South End and another at the Martin Milmore School in the Fenway. She chose school libraries so she
could have the summer off to be with me when I was young. Libraries, especially reference
work, had called to her ever since she traveled on the QE2 with her grandmother as a teenager.
Every morning during the cruise, a scavenger hunt was placed under her cabin door. She loved
the quest to find the answers, and she was the first to complete it every day. Linda never lost the
thrill of the hunt, whether finding an answer for a library patron or finding the perfect bargain.
While volunteering in libraries and taking care of me, Linda earned a Master of Education
degree at Boston University and certification as both a media specialist and elementary and
secondary school teacher. In 1978, she became the library media specialist at North Quincy
High School. I truly don’t know how she did this while balancing her master’s program and work, but Linda never missed any Learning Project school potlucks (to which she always brought rum cream pie, a family favorite), or any of my endless swim practices and swim meets, ever. In 1981, she started a second masters (yup, you read that correctly, second) program at the
Simmons University School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), while working full time as assistant SLIS librarian. Graduating in 1984, she assumed the role of SLIS librarian. In 1985,
Linda received the Kenneth R. Shaffer Outstanding Student Award and was inducted into the
Beta Phi Mu international honorary society for librarianship, in which she was very active for
three decades.
Linda’s professional calling was her role as the SLIS librarian at Simmons University, a position she held for 33 years. There she devoted herself to being a librarian’s librarian bar none. She mentored thousands of library science students, developed a premiere research library, fostered community, and supported LIS professors and staff. In a tribute article written about her when she retired, her colleagues described her contribution. “Linda’s dedication and commitment to the profession of librarianship was unparalleled and is part of her lasting legacy. She showed what a true professional in the field of library and information science could and should be. No one better understood collections, faculty, and staff than Linda. No one worked more selflessly and tirelessly on behalf of her thousands of constituents. No one went further into depths and breadth of service beyond all expectations. And no one did all of these things without ego, but rather with pride of place.” In 2014, for her exemplary service, Linda was inducted to the Massachusetts Library Association Hall of Fame. She received the Simmons Alumni
Achievement Award that same year. Linda loved her work and was always grateful to Simmons
for the many lifelong friends she made there.
Linda was a collector, not just of books, but of icons of modern design. She felt design should be beautiful even in things that were meant to be utilitarian. She believed in form over function for the sake of design. Her Gaggenau stove was collected as an art object, not a functional appliance since Linda’s cuisine of choice was take-out, Dove Bars and bananas. Her Vola faucets and Asco washer and dryer needed specialty plumbers to install. None of these things worked particularly well but they looked great. While in her 20’s, Linda’s father took her to see a doctor to show her what smoking does to the lungs. This did not have the desired effect of convincing Linda to stop smoking. However when her father resorted to bribing her with $500, Linda stopped cold turkey so she could buy a Massimo Vagnetti dinner set. Linda was always delighted when she saw modern design pieces that she owned, displayed under plexiglass in the Museum of Modern Art.
For the last 15 years of Linda’s life, her greatest joy was her granddaughter. Katie, who called Linda “Dado”, was her heart. Linda took on the role of “Dado” with the supremest of love and with unbridled enthusiasm and pride. It was her ultimate role. She was a playmate, personal
shopper, private librarian, musical theater and live performance escort, art facilitator, and
provider of unconditional love. Their love was, in their words, “to the moon and back and back
and back a million times.” Linda created a room dedicated to play in her Newton home for Katie
and decorated her backyard with pinwheels and colorful large plastic balls. After her
granddaughter was born, Linda took Fridays off to go to music class with me and baby Katie.
Once retired, Linda traveled three hours by train, foot, and two buses to meet Katie at her
elementary school to create “Wednesday Funday” for Katie and a friend featuring different arts
and crafts projects each week. Linda created for Katie, like she did for me, a wonderful world full of vibrant color, music, books, laughter, joy, play, and infinite, boundless, and timeless love.
In her last days, when my mum was staying at the Care Dimensions Hospice House, she
wanted to go home to Hingham. She loved the beach and wanted to be near the water with the
sun on her face. Every day in hospice, I described a day at the beach. I would tell her, “The
water is perfect. The sand is beautiful.” We would apply suntan lotion to her face so the smell
would transport her to the beach. On her last day of life, I rolled her bed outside to a spot
overlooking the reservoir in Lincoln, MA. Keeping warm under her handmade Marimekko quilt,
her face covered in Bain de Soleil, and listening to “Here Comes the Sun”, “La Vie en Rose,”
and “Let it Be” sung by a kind and talented musician, Linda enjoyed one last beach day. Birds
sang and darted overhead, the water sparkled, and pink and yellow sweet-smelling spring buds
burst from their branches. When she heard me laugh with a good friend who visited, she was
ready to go. I called Katie to come in from the car – “Now!” – and Katie sprinted, got caught in a
garden maze outside the care facility, and jumped a fence to get to her grandmother. With
Linda’s blue and white pinwheel spinning at maximum velocity at the end of her bed, her
daughter and granddaughter by her side, she took her last breath. After a year of suffering, her
last moments were a gift.
Linda leaves behind her daughter (me), Sarah Howard Watkins, granddaughter, Katie Watkins DiCesare, and son-in-law Tom DiCesare of Wayland, MA; her sister, Nancy Watkins Denig, and niece, Julia Watkins Denig, of Northampton, MA; and many cousins and friends whom she remembered and loved with her whole being until the very end.
Linda will go back home to Hingham and be interred next to her parents at St. John’s Memorial Garden. There will be a celebration of her life at 11 AM on June 18, 2022 at Hingham Bathing Beach Gazebo.
If anyone is interested in making a donation in her honor, please consider The School of Library & Information Science at Simmons University or The Learning Project Elementary School in Boston.