PARIS – Some of Pearl Starbird’s paintings are hanging on the wall of her nursing home room. One is of a frog gazing up at a high vase filled with flowers, looking as if it would like to jump into the bouquet despite the move’s distance and impracticality.
Starbird, who is 96 and an artist and cellist, seems to understand dreams and ambition and the obstacles that can get in their way. She has just given $715,000 for a scholarship fund to support local students who want to study music or visual arts, but who might be put off by university bills and parents who say learning law or accounting would net more wealth.
Any graduate of an Oxford County high school or of Lake Region High School in Naples is eligible to apply.
“I want my money to be used for something worthwhile,” Starbird said Friday in her room at Market Square Health Care Center. As a former art teacher, she said she appreciated seeing her students grow emotionally as well as artistically in her classes.
According to the Maine Community Foundation’s Web site, this new scholarship “is meant to make the difference between a student choosing to major in art or music as opposed to a more practical’ course of study.” The foundation will oversee the Pearl Starbird Scholarship Fund.
Summers in Maine
Starbird began playing the cello at age 6, and taught art in Boston public schools her whole career. She summered in Maine with her family at a camp on Keoka Lake in the village of Waterford Flat, and she retired to Waterford in the mid-1990s, according to Keith Willoughby, who has known Starbird for more than 30 years and will be executor of her estate.
“She planned on leaving money to fund scholarships in Boston,” Willoughby, of Waterford, explained by phone last week. “As we discussed the whole thing in the 1990s, she decided it made more sense to leave it to kids in Oxford County” because the need was greater here.
In July, Starbird sold her family’s Keoka Lake camp at a discount to a good friend, Willoughby said. “She never had anything large to give away until she sold the house in Waterford. I have worked on her financial affairs for many many years – she has enough to get by, but what she has given away is a huge portion of her estate.”
The scholarship is not an endowment, a type of fund that uses only the interest for grants. Rather, it will be invested, but money will be drawn from the account as needed.
Tanya Swain, regional coordinator for the Maine Community Foundation, said the scholarship “will have a significant and immediate impact. It could support someone’s entire education; the benefit to individual students could be tremendous.”
Deadline will be soon
The first deadline for applicants is Jan. 1.
Starbird never married, although in her large jewelry collection are several engagement rings, Willoughby said.
Starbird said, “I decided it wasn’t worth wasting my life on men,” adding a small sideways glance and small grin. Her closest living relative is a niece in Australia, who frequently sends letters. An older sister died a few years ago.
Starbird recalled preparing for summertime trips to the Waterford family camp – which was designed by her aunt – when her family would pile suitcases on the roof of the car and inside it. Starbird’s family lived in Dorchester, Mass., where her father worked as a doctor. Her aunt, Grace Starbird, was an art teacher, and instructed Pearl and her sister on the cello.
“My aunt was very talented, with everything she did – mathematics, high degrees in college. She was very smart,” Starbird said.
Starbird, who took after her aunt in many ways, painted, played the cello and made jewelry. She also loved to bowl and hike. She claims to have climbed at least half of the mountains around here.”Well, I’m that old!” she said.
Willoughby said that a few decades ago, Starbird was part of an active social group in Waterford Flat.
He said, “My wife and I got involved in the ’60s. Ladies would wear long gowns to the parties, and men always wore jackets and ties. … Pearl threw a great party, she was always a gracious presence and never wanted to be the center of things.”
To this day, Starbird remains elegantly turned out.
As she talked about her scholarship, she was wearing a bit of lipstick, and rings circled her fingers, one of a willowy goddess Isis holding up the sun. She bought the ring 50 years ago on a rainy day, she said.
A sign at the nursing home instructs nurses to put Pearl’s jewelry away every night in a box, which spills over with bracelets and earrings, beads and stones.
Henry Schmelzer, president of the Maine Community Foundation, said of Starbird’s scholarship, “This is a contribution to the whole future of the area and shows what philanthropy can do.”
And Starbird, when describing her goal as an art teacher, could also have been predicting what her scholarship might accomplish. “I tried to get the kids to know what art is, to find it through themselves – beauty, color, design.”
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