Celebrating Frances Martindale

Update: the photos below, and dozens more from the evening, are now on Gordon's Flickr page. 

Tonight, over five hundred students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni, family and friends gathered to celebrate the legacy of Frances Martindale, Director of Gordon’s Joukowsky Library. Frances is retiring in June after thirty-one years at Gordon, years in which she cared for every one of the hundreds of students who came through Gordon’s doors.
 

The evening included two major announcements: a picture book, Magic Will Happen, that has been created with a central character based on Frances, and a major campaign that has begun to endow the position of Director of the Joukowsky Family Library in perpetuity.
 

Magic Will Happen was written by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie and illustrated by Laurel Aylesworth, with alumni parent Cindy Elder helping navigate the publishing process. Tallie got to know Gordon as part of the robust visiting author program Frances has curated at Gordon over the decades, and she based the main character on Frances. The story includes several nods to Gordon, including the wooden book outside Gordon’s library that carries an invitation to “Touch This Page and Magic Will Happen,” and is aimed at allowing future students, at Gordon and beyond, to experience some of Frances’s magic.
 

The endowment effort has a goal of $2 million dollars to establish the Frances Martindale Fund, which would make the Director of the Joukowsky Family Library Gordon’s first-ever endowed position. Frances’s work over the past three decades has made the library the heart of the school, pedagogically and emotionally, and this endowment will ensure that the library continues to play that vital role.
 

And those were just two moments in an evening which was bursting with tributes to Frances and her work. A group of Frances’s longtime colleagues unveiled an outdoor story grove that will serve as a counterpart to the one in the library, along with a little free library and nature education center, all built around the Maryanne Pieri pollinator garden that Frances has used as an outdoor classroom over the years. These spaces were designed and implemented by Ground Flora of Providence and Early Childhood parent Nick Vanesse, with inspiration from Randall Imai’s design of the Joukowsky Family Library - the little free library even includes a wooden book crafted by Imai that matches the one outside Gordon’s library.
 

The program also included remarks from longtime friend of Gordon Jane Joukowsky, former Head of School Ralph Wales, and Frances’s daughter Tavie Abell ’08. Frances’ former colleagues Susan Hodgin and Bridget Baird led a performance of The Children Will Listen from Into the Woods, one of the first musicals Frances staged as she brought Gordon’s after school theater program to life in the early 2000s.
 

With the picture book, the endowment and the living outdoor spaces being introduced tonight, the event became as much of a beginning as a farewell. As Head of School Meredith deChabert explained as she announced the endowment at the end of the evening:

Tonight is both a celebration and an invitation: an invitation to help carry Frances’s legacy forward into Gordon’s future.

The evening ended with the video linked at the top of this email, a tribute spanning across generations that served to bring Frances’s voice into the proceedings.
 

Magic Will Happen
Magic Will Happen is available now for preorder at www.gordonschool.org/magicwillhappen. The cover artwork can also be previewed at that link.

The Frances Martindale Fund
Gifts are being accepted at www.gordonschool.org/francesmartindalefund. If you are interested in making a multi-year pledge, a planned gift, or would like to discuss your gift further, please reach out directly to Alexandra O’Connor at aoconnor@gordonschool.org