Patricia Harvell Thurston, a long-time teacher at Bass Harbor and Ellsworth schools, died at age 93 on April 26, 2012.

She was the daughter of Ernest C. Brown and Leonora Balkam Harvell. By the time Patricia was born, in Calais on Aug. 24, 1918, her parents had already separated, so the little girl, was raised in the town of Robbinston, in a household of independent women that included her mother, grandmother and several aunts, all of whom were teachers.

When it was time for Pat to go to school, there was an epidemic of whooping cough among the children. While her mother had to go to work as a teacher every day, she left her daughter home with her grandmother to be homeschooled. Mrs. Thurston said she never forgot the first story she learned to read on her own, “The Hand That Carried the Bag of Flour.”

One day, as a teacher, she would give hundreds of children in her own classes that same thrill.

When she finally went to school, it was just a two-room schoolhouse, with her mother teaching first through fifth grades in the smaller room and another teacher instructing the older children in the larger room. Having her mother as her teacher through the fifth grade didn’t seem to bother young Pat. Her son, Bill Thurston, says his mother discovered a love of learning early in life and never lost it.

“She always had some sort of project going or some new subject she was studying,” Mr. Thurston says. “I am sure that’s what made her such a good teacher, too.”

Later as a student, Pat would go live with a grandmother, several aunts and cousins in Allston, Mass. There she attended the William Howard Taft Junior High School and later the Boston Girl’s High School from which she graduated in 1936.

The country was deep into the Great Depression when the newly minted teacher, Miss Brown, graduated from Gorham Normal School, in June of 1939, where seven of her aunts had preceded her.

In her memoirs she wrote that she did manage to get interviewed by a dozen superintendents, mostly from Aroostook County, who actually offered her teaching jobs in their towns. However, they informed her she would be paid with scrip and potatoes. She declined the offers.

Eventually she persuaded the principal at the McKinley Grammar School to hire her. That fall she moved to what is now Bass Harbor and spent the next 70 years of her life there, teaching for eight years in the two-room schoolhouse, and later for 24 years commuting to various grade schools in Ellsworth.

Bill says his mother in recent years enjoyed driving past the old schoolhouse building in Bass Harbor, which is now a condominium, and noting that the pretty little sunroom was once the school’s outhouse.

Her first year in Bass Harbor, the blue-eyed new school teacher, petite and pretty, caught the eye of a young man named Oscar Thurston who worked in his family’s grocery store. Apparently she liked the cut of his jib, as well, and the couple married on Pat’s birthday, in 1940, beginning a 60-year union that was marked by mutual respect and a good deal of laughter.

“It seemed my mom was always working,” Mr. Thurston says, “She was up at five in the morning, out of the house by six, and didn’t come home until five in the evening to cook dinner, then she stayed up late into the night to correct papers. But she loved it, loved the students and everybody loved her back.”

On the weekends when she wasn’t coming up with some special project for her students, he says, she tried to find time to tend her flower garden.

Pat retired in 1979, but it was not the end of her learning or teaching. She was an avid historian and genealogist who traced her family’s activities back to William the Conqueror, the Mayflower, the American Revolution and the Civil War. She also had grandchildren coming on, who learned to play some fun games at Nana’s and were served some important life lessons, along with fresh-baked cookies.

When Oscar became too crippled with arthritis to live at home and went to a nursing home, Pat got busy creating scrapbooks about sailboats, town histories and other topics that interested her husband. When he died in 2001, a little of the light went out of the blue eyes he had fallen in love with 60 years before.

After a bad fall about four years ago, Mrs. Thurston herself moved into a home, where she had already made many friends among the residents and staff.

Although she characteristically kept herself busy with a variety of projects, and enjoyed visits and drives with her son and grandchildren, as her hearing and sight failed and many of her old friends and cousins passed away, she confessed she was ready to go herself. Last week her heart stopped beating, and the bell rang for the last time on Mrs. Thurston’s 93-year class on living a productive, well-informed life.

In addition to her son, William, of Bar Harbor and four grandchildren, Mrs. Thurston is survived by her half sister, Barbara Barnes of Robbinston; and a half-brother, Phillip Brown of Hermon; and cousin Ellen Harvell of California.

Memorial services were May 2, at Jordan-Fernald in Mount Desert. Interment will be at Head of Harbor Cemetery in Bass Harbor. Condolences may be expressed at www.jordanfernald.com.

Friends who wish may contribute in her memory to the Bass Harbor Memorial Library, 89 Bernard Rd., Bernard ME.