Turning 100 is a very big cause for celebration, and Elaine Bart’s family threw her a joyous party on April 16 to honor her century of life. Elaine and her late husband, Roger, first started coming to the Vineyard as seasonal residents 80 years ago. The couple became year-rounders 30 years ago, and Elaine has been a treasured member of the Island community.
It is unclear if Elaine’s mother survived childbirth or gave Elaine up for adoption for other reasons, but during the Depression, she and her four siblings were placed in foster care. Elaine lived with several families before being adopted by a single woman who raised her in Greenfield.
This isn’t an incidental detail, but a testament to Elaine’s character and determination as a child. In the early ’30s the social stigma surrounding unmarried women and adoption outside marriage was significant. For example, “Elaine had the highest GPA in high school,” her daughter-in-law, Julie Bart, explains, but “she wasn’t allowed to give the valedictorian speech because she was an adopted child of a single woman, and they thought that was disgraceful. They gave her a medal, but [Elaine] still felt that was unfair. However, her thirst for knowledge has always kept her going.” She kept going with gusto.
Elaine won a scholarship to MIT, graduating in four years in 1947 with a master’s degree in chemistry. She was one of 12 women in the graduating class, and there were only 75 female students out of an entire student body of about 5,000.
Although there were real barriers — the women’s dorm at MIT opened only at the start of her second year — “she never mentioned anything about being treated differently in that male-dominated environment,” Tom Bart, Elaine’s second son, recalls. Julie adds, as a child “she was raised as one of the boys. Elaine played baseball and ice hockey with the boys. She didn’t feel like she was different. She accepted it and just went on.”
Elaine worked to supplement her scholarship as a teaching assistant in a chemistry lab, where she met Roger Bart, one of her students. With many young men off to war, MIT hired women as teaching assistants. Elaine and Roger married shortly after college, and Elaine taught chemistry to nurses at Simmons College (now Simmons University) while Roger pursued his doctorate in chemical engineering.
Extending her professional work, Elaine became an analytical chemist at Sloan Kettering Institute, analyzing the diets of cancer patients. She then became pregnant and a full-time mother, eventually to four children. However, after raising the children for 11 years, and when, in 1963, almost 50 percent of women were stay-at-home moms, Elaine returned to teaching as a middle school teacher. Her youngest was about a year old.
“She was unusual for her time in that she went to work when most women stayed home with their families. She needed to do something more with herself, so she started teaching. She’s a born teacher. She could teach every student at their level to ensure their progress,” Elaine’s daughter, Pam Bart Pasternak, says. Tom Bart noted that his mother “always credits her longevity to her teaching profession.” She indeed relished her long career teaching math, science, and social studies, until she retired in 1985.
Elaine’s Island story begins when she and Roger first came to the Island in 1945. Roger’s parents, Max and Clara Bart, were both teachers who began visiting around 1924. Elaine, Roger, and their children visited for a few weeks every summer. After Elaine and Roger both retired, they began spending the entire summer on the Island. She served as the longtime treasurer of the Vineyard Haven Friends of the Library. Recalling her tireless work as a treasurer, Vineyard Haven Library Director Amy Ryan says, “Elaine did a great job. She was very responsible, and we were very grateful to have her.” Elaine was also an avid member of a book club, and the Peter Luce Play Readers. Myra Stark, a longtime member of the Peter Luce Play Readers, shares how she and Elaine bonded: “We were good friends because we both loved the plays of Tom Stoppard. He’s not an easy playwright, but he’s wonderful. We both thought ‘Arcadia’ was a marvelous play. Because of her scientific background, she was able to explain a good deal about it.”
In “Arcadia,” set in 1809 England, Thomasina Coverly is a teenage “girl of the family” with a deep understanding of mathematics, nature, and physics.
During the off-season, the couple primarily lived aboard a 35-foot motorsailer, a yacht that combines the features of powerboat and sailboat. And from 1985 to 1995, while in their sixties, they sailed from the Vineyard to South Carolina and then across to Florida’s west coast.
The couple finally gave up sailing for shore activities when Elaine turned 70 in 1996, and they built a year-round house where she lives today.
Elaine continued her involvement with the library and the Peter Luce Play Readers. Since she was on the Island year-round, she also began volunteering at the Tisbury School, teaching science to kindergarteners and first graders. Elaine used hands-on demonstrations to engage the children with the scientific method, and the young students drew pictures of their experiments in their copious thank-you notes. Tom recalls, “The kids affectionately called her ‘Grandma Science.’ She stopped volunteering at 80. Even now, several parents and students still remember her volunteering efforts.”
Elaine felt it important to support young minds in other ways as well. She contributed to a scholarship at MIT to help students meet nonacademic expenses. And she donated money to the Vineyard Haven library about four or five years ago to acquire science books for young children, which was then called the Elaine Bart Science Collection. The collection has since been merged. “With her background as a teacher, she felt strongly about learning science topics in libraries,” Ryan says.
Elaine’s love of the sciences runs through the extended family. Tom and Julie are chemical engineers, and her grandson Dan is a mechanical engineer. Following his own passion, her youngest son, Roger, is a successful Tony awardwinning actor, working on Broadway, film, and television.
Today, Elaine’s children, eight grandchildren, and three great-grandkids all visit in summer, and share Elaine’s love of the Vineyard. Pam reflects, “I think that even though she never had a close-knit family [of her own,] she was able to build one.”
Reflecting on her mother’s life, Pam continues, “She’s always happy and upbeat. She never lets her negative circumstances bring her down. That’s what she taught us as kids. You can focus on the negative or you can focus on the positive. Choose to be happy, and make the most of where you are in your situation … She wasn’t afraid to be the only woman to work when everyone else was home. She gave me the courage to be one of the only women on my block who didn’t go back to work — to stay home with my kids. She inspired me. She did what was right for her, even if it wasn’t the trend. She’s always been very independent.” Julie adds, “It’s amazing how much Elaine accomplished from her humble beginnings.”
