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Joan appeared at the beginning of our freshman year from the distant planet of Brocton, Massachusetts speaking that strange language wherein people ‘paaahked the caah’ when they went to a “paaahty.” And for boys with hormones boiling there she sat with her warm freckled smile, dark eyes, and flouncy skirts, innocent of the havoc she was wreaking on academic concentration by wearing a gauzy see-through blouse. Her father had just been transferred from New England to New York City to become a Howard Johnsons vice president in their food processing operations, and her mother, Joan says, “just happened onto Sea Cliff, what a lucky break.” They rented an unheated summer cottage near the beach from Mrs. Tilley before finding bigger rental offered by a former Miss Rheingold where they stayed while their home on Littleworth Lane was being built.
While at least the boys in the class thought she had come from some wonderful planet, Joan says, “I loved New York and Sea Cliff from the moment I stepped in it. I thought it was so much more sophisticated.” In her senior year Joan would recall her first Sea Cliff summer and swimming off the bulkhead at Tilley’s beach: “That summer at Tilley’s was one of the best of my life.”
After graduation Joan’s work at Helena Rubinstein would introduce her to the world of computing and a vision of the future. Rubinstein’s, she says, “had a computer that was the size of a very big room.”
In her spare time, like many in our class she often visited the Knotty Pine in Glen Head. “One night Barbara [Gilson] and I were at the Knotty Pine and there he was. He had just come out of the army. I went home and the next morning I told my mother, ‘I think I met someone I might marry.” He was Charlie Mouquin (’53), big brother of Chloe (’58). During their engagement Charlie started work with Howard Johnson’s food processing operations in Queens. They married in 1960, took an apartment in Sea Cliff for a year before buying a white brick house at the corner of Prospect and Carpenter just above Winding Way’s steep twist to Shore Road.
While the lived there Joan gave birth to their daughter Stephanie in ’66 before he was transferred to Hingham, MA where daughter Jennifer was born in ’69. Joan was more than pleased when he was transferred again, this time in the mid ‘70s to Miami. A former member of Science Club, she became an avid shell collector. In 1977, however, the company transferred Charlie back to Massachusetts where they spent the next 31 years in Medfield. Joan had stayed home to care for the girls until Jennifer was nine. Then she began working in the schools with special needs students. One summer “I took a temporary job with Raytheon [the big defense contractor] where they had one of the early office computers. It was a revelation. I could see that this would really change everything.” That included her career. She found a job with New England Library Network (NELINET) developing their on line interlibrary loan system. “I could see a computer would allow me to do things I could never do before.” She began to write and produce their newsletter, “and when Pagemaker [a publication design and layout program] came out I had even more fun.” She eventually became assistant to the executive director and began marketing their on-line reference service to New England university librarians. It was a job that kept her constantly in the car driving to every college, large and small, in the region demonstrating NELINET’s services. However, she was traveling from early morning till late at night and as the century turned she realized, “I have to stop this before I have an accident.”
She immediately suffered from “a little bit of retirement shock” and returned to working with special needs students in the schools. Two years later she and Charlie were ready for complete retirement. They are both avid golfers and Charlie had started visiting home shows to gather information. Someone said, “What you need is Tennessee.” In the northeast corner of the state’s Appalachian region they found their home in Loudan south of Knoxville and not far from Asheville, NC. Making friends, Joan says, was easy since “everyone is from some place else. We have a social life like we never had back home.. No matter what you like to do, there is a group here that does it.” Joan belongs to the Great Books Club, plays lots of golf, and does a lot of hiking. She’s also enthusiastically getting her new laptop up to speed.
