Helen Joyce Locke

Helen Joyce Locke was a heroine with a small h; she embraced life fully and rose to its varied challenges with confidence, humility, and a spiritual reverence. Her world primarily was her family including her birth family and the one she shared with her husband and five children.

Her early childhood was not easy. Her father lost two wives, one from childbirth and the other in the influenza epidemic. Helen, as the middle of three children, knew only stepmothers and her father became her rock upon which she built a life. He divided his time and his passion between his career as an administrator in the Dedham, Massachusetts public schools and a family camp on an island on Great Pond, the largest of the Belgrade Lakes in Maine. Self-sufficiency, simplicity, and community were its dominant themes as it grew and developed under two generations of the Joyce family.

Helen was introduced to Richard Locke by her older brother, Harold, who was visiting Joyce’s Island with his Dartmouth College friend. After Helen finished Wellesley in 1911, she went to teach at the Northfield Seminary in Massachusetts for two years after which she and Richard were married. Their first child, Jane, was born in 1913. World War I intruded and Richard saw duty in France as a 2nd Lieutenant and then a 1st lieutenant in the army. After his discharge, Helen bore four more children. As a mother she was sensitive to the emerging differences of her children and sought a blend of public and independent schools.

The thirteen acres of Joyce’s Island had originally been used as summer grazing for Helen’s grandfather’s sheep. When it became a family summer retreat, tents surrounded the edge of the island, but gradually thirty cabins were built and eventually expanded into a guest camp from 1880 to 1965. Helen, Harold, and their younger sister, Tucker, all acquired a love for the character, setting, and responsibilities of the Joyce camp. It now included a central complex for the kitchen, dining and rec room where evenings of charades, music hall songs, or hymn sings were instigated. At the height of the summer there were fifty-five to seventy-five guests. Helen took over the kitchen responsibilities, hiring the two cooks, the wait staff of six girls, four boys for outside work and she planned the food supplies.

Mary Baker Eddy and Henry Emerson Fosdick were among Boston’s religious leaders at that time. Although the Locke family was members of a local Unitarian church, Helen’s spiritual curiosity led her beliefs well beyond. In her view, each person was a sacred being. Out of this conviction she offered to share our home with a German refugee family in l940.

One of the Locke family adventures involved a trip from their Belmont, Massachusetts home to Vergennes, Vermont on five family horses. Jane, the eldest daughter, had contracted to teach riding at a camp but the camp’s arrangement for horses had somehow fallen through and her position cancelled, but reinstated when Jane said she could provide the horses! Over the next few days, the route and logistics were roughed out because trucking the horses over two hundred miles was out of the question.

Once school ended five Locke children, the youngest being ten, mounted the horses. The support vehicle was a twenty-year-old box-shaped sedan with a child’s playpen on top. The parents would scout ahead to find some farmer who would offer pasture for the horses and an empty barn for the family for the night. The five day trip was an amazing and unique experience for each of us kids. So much so that Jane was able to offer the return trip to campers who had learned well under her tutelage.

One of my strongest recollections as the youngest son of my mother’s indomitable spirit came when my father died unexpectedly of a hospital staph infection. Several months later she announced at age sixty that she wanted to learn to drive. My father had recently purchased a new car with the hope of a summer on the road exploring the country. As I was then living at home it was my lot to teach her. Fortunately, the McLane Hospital with its extensive and private roadways was only a couple of miles from our home. After tentative and halting beginnings she became an apt student and soon progressed onto public roads. For her graduation present, she gave herself the transcontinental trip that she and my father had planned. And, in her telling, he was right there with her all the time!

Written by Frederic Winslow Locke, Sr.