I met Mary Ishkanian for the first time well after her teaching days were over. The Item had just become the sponsor of the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee, I was one of the judges, and Mary was the pronouncer.
I’ve sat through my share of these things in the ensuing years, and of all the pronouncers we’ve had since then, nobody — in my estimation — did it better than Mary. Every word, every syllable, rolled off her tongue as if Professor Henry Higgins himself had decided to inhabit her body.
These were the days before the City Hall auditorium was fixed up and fitted with better equipment for things like acoustics. If you think it can be a bit rough now, you should have seen it back in the nineties, when she was at the mic.
It didn’t matter.
“She knew acoustics,” said Jaye Warry, the retired deputy superintendent of Lynn schools. “She knew sound production. She knew how the sound was at City Hall, at Classical, and at English.”
If she did, it was because she made it her point to know. Warry tells perhaps the quintessential story about Mary (she may be Ishkanian stylistically, but she was always simply Mary to me), who died Sunday at the age of 92.
Early in Warry’s teaching career, she was given the task of putting on a “little music show” where she taught. She didn’t have much experience and she was very nervous about it.
“All of a sudden, Mary appeared at the door, and she asked if I needed help,” Warry said. “It ended up being a delightful little junior high production, and it was because of her.
“She breathed life into it,” Warry said. “What would I have done had she not showed up? She even got a piano player for me. She was extremely talented. When she walked into a room, she was so effervescent. She would help anyone out.”
Her effervescence, and her style, set her apart as much as anything did.
“She was a classy lady,” said former Lynn superintendent Dr. Catherine Latham. “Every time I ever saw her, she was always elegant. And beautifully coiffed. She was just wonderful.”
But she was far from being showy, despite the obvious care she put into her appearance. There was real depth that went along with that, said Nicholas Kostan, another former superintendent who worked with Mary during his career.
“She was a great teacher,” he said. “She taught at English when I was there, and she always, always loved English High.
“She went a step above, in terms of taking a special interest in every student she dealt with,” Kostan said. “The kids had that feeling she cared about them. She made a lot of effort to learn about their backgrounds, what they liked, what they were interested in. You don’t see that anymore. She was special.”
“I never found anyone who had a bad word to say about her,” said James Leonard, still another superintendent who worked with her. “She was soft spoken, polite, courteous, and she loved teaching.
“Many times, even before I was the superintendent, she would be out there, volunteering for things in the school system. Those are difficult people to find. She loved those children.”
Leonard said that while Mary could be very enthused about what she did, and the arts program in the schools, she was not excitable in demeanor.
“She was slow-paced,” he said. “She worked hard and focused on serving the kids she was working with. She was a very, very sweet lady.”
Warry was 22 when she first met Mary. She said Mary worked tirelessly with Larry Lowe at English to build up the drama department.
“She was part of an elite group of folks in the city who focused on drama, musical productions, and dramatic productions through her whole life.
“She was also a speech teacher in the district, and she not only focused on corrective speech, but of diction too.”
Which is probably why, year after year, she always nailed those difficult-to-pronounce words at the spelling bee, almost without effort.
