October 29, 2016
Mary McIntire Harrington of Dedham died suddenly and unexpectedly on
October 29th. Always known as Mimi, she had been a resident of Dedham for 21
years and a fifth-grade teacher at Dedham Country Day School since 1986.
Born in Montclair, New Jersey, Mimi was the daughter of Lawrence and Zella
Harrington, both teachers themselves. She graduated from James Caldwell High
School in Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1974 and from Smith College in 1978. Mimi
worked as a newspaper reporter in Lake Placid, New York, in the lead-up to the
1980 Winter Olympics and then in publishing in New York City for several years.
Following the inevitable call of the classroom, she moved to Boston, completed a master’s degree at Lesley
University, and found her place at Dedham Country Day—although she never lost her enthusiasm for watching
the Olympics.
While classroom teaching was her vocation and a source of enormous satisfaction, Mimi’s heart always lay
with the Girl Scout Camp Eagle Island on Upper Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondacks that she had attended
as a girl. She spent many summers as a counselor and as sailing director, and in 1991 she achieved her dream
of becoming director. She spent four summers in this position in the 1990s while also starting a family, and she
remained active as a camp alumna. When the Girl Scouts closed Eagle Island and moved to sell it, Mimi helped
found the Friends of Eagle Island, who were able to purchase the camp property in 2015. As a director of the
Friends, Mimi was deeply engaged in fund-raising as the group worked to restore the historic property and the
camp and sailing programs that had meant so much to her.
Sharing the joy of sailing was one of Mimi’s great passions, but she also loved to compete. A member of her
college sailing team, Mimi had rediscovered racing as a member of a summer community on Lake Champlain
since 2004, and she was a past commodore of the Split Rock Yacht Club in Essex, New York, where her family
recently purchased a seasonal camp and where she had instituted a youth sailing program.
Mimi lived for reading and book-collecting, and like sailing, these were joys to be shared. She was an early
eBay user, and she spent many happy Saturday’s browsing library sales. Her great interest was not in making
money but in assembling collections of children’s and young adult books that would ignite an interest reading
in the children and students of her buyers; her DCD students also experienced her passion for reading not as a
solitary exercise but as a contagious pleasure. She was also the treasurer of the Friends of the Dedham Public
Library and helped run their book sales for many years.
Mimi married Peter Gow—also a teacher, then at Beaver Country Day School—in 1990, and they had two sons,
Nathaniel Gow Harrington and William Gow Harrington, both graduates of Beaver. Nat, a graduate of Yale
University, is currently a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, and Will is a senior at Harvard. Mimi
and Peter also became foster parents of John Bul Kuol, a Sudanese refugee, in 2002; John graduated from
Beaver and Wheaton College and currently works for the Marriott Corporation in Boston. Mimi was
predeceased by her parents and by her sister, Zella Harrington of Amherst, Massachusetts, for whom Mimi
was a longtime caregiver after Zella was struck by Alzheimer’s disease.
A memorial Celebration of the Life of Mimi Harrington will be held at Dedham Country Day School, 90 Sandy
Valley Rd., Dedham, on Wednesday evening, November 2, at 7:00pm. In lieu of flowers, her family asks that
donations be made to the Friends of Eagle Island online at paypal.me/MimiFOEIMemorial or at P. O. Box 245,
Livingston, NJ 07039.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailynewstranscript/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=182263440