Colin Nollet

10-8-10

Shannon Nollet

Shannon Nollet was born on May 23, 1993 in Beverly Massachusetts. The hospital where she was born could be seen across Beverly Harbor from Salem Willows. She explained that Salem Willows was an arcade area and park that her family would bring her to when she lived in Lynn, MA. Shannon lived in Lynn for six years; she went through both pre-school and kindergarten while there. Her family ended up moving to Epping, New Hampshire, cutting short her first grade career in Lynn.

Once in New Hampshire, Shannon started her first day of first grade at Epping Elementary School. She had gone there with her mom, but she was soon pulled away by three of her new classmates: Cacia King, Taylor Fiore, and Taylor Dahme. Telling Shannon's mom that they had it handled, the three friends told Shannon all she needed to know about Epping. They told her who to be friends with, who to avoid, all about the teacher, how the school was run, and what boys were cute (at the time, the cutest boy was a Michael Seamen). From the teacher, Shannon found out that they were learning the alphabet and were at the letter E; she was not impressed. Her first grade teacher in Lynn had already started reading Harry Potter to her. When Shannon left Lynn, her teacher gave Shannon a copy of Harry Potter and Shannon ended up taking turns reading it with her mom after she moved to Epping. This didn’t help her opinion of Epping kids because she started to think that all Epping students really had no brains, because they couldn’t even read yet.

She admitted that she turned out to be wrong as she grew up with the same group of people for the entirety of elementary school. She still goes to Epping and has many friends that live in Epping with her. Her best friends are Becky Weaver, Kim Lemieux, Sam Leclerc, and Cacia King. She has been in the same grade with all of them since fourth grade and has been friends with them just as long. Just recently she has earned a brand new hoard of friends.

Over the recent summer Shannon went to St. Paul’s which is a private high school that opens its doors to smart kids all around New Hampshire for the summer. It is known as the Advanced Studies Program and the people who attend have a specific class which they take for the five week program. Shannon took Shakespeare for performance where she performed in two plays: All’s Well that Ends Well and Twelfth Night. They had 17 days to rehearse for Twelfth Night and only thirteen days to rehearse for All’s Well that Ends Well. She got to play Maria in Twelfth Night where she brought a new light to the word saucy!

She definitely loved the experience and got to take a lot away from it. She got tons of new friends, from her Shakespeare class, her dorm, the boy’s dorm, and even from the lunch room. Her room mate, the amazing Katherine Kessler, became one of her greatest friends during St. Paul’s and they will probably be best friends for a while. The long future ahead will tell us what comes next for the biography of Shannon Nollet.

Jerry Boris Dorbin Interview

Jerry Boris Dorbin

By Emma Baker

Jerry was born in Slilana, Kansas with his older sister Rosanne and two younger brothers, Sanford and Gale. Jerry then moved to Lincoln, Nebraska where his parents grew up. His father owned a small store, but was forced to shut it down in The Great Depression. Jerry found out that his mother had cancer and that she died when he was seven. His father couldn’t handle her death so he sent his children away; Jerry was sent to a boarding school is Kansas City.

Jerry had replaced his family with the boarding school since he lived there and it was his home. Even though on long vacations he lived with his wealthy aunts and uncles his home truly was the boarding school that he forced to go to. Once a week for two years one very Monday, there was a morning assembly where the school would gather and sing college football fight songs.

Later Jerry went off to a private school on the edge of Los Angelous. At this school he had the chance to meet Jack Benny’s daughter, George Burns’ kids, and Hoagie Carmichael’s kids. After his high school, he went into the navy and he took quite a few photography classes, where he was trained to take pictures of the Korean War. In the navy he also wrote and took pictures for the navy newspaper. While writing for this newspaper, he realized his knack and love for writing.

Once he got out of the navy he went to be a football writer for a local newspaper. He worked on this newspaper for ten years. This was a very small town newspaper and one day when he was getting his story about a fire he accidentally mentioned the name of a store without their consent in the article and he was fired.

Jerry then moved to Santa Fe New Mexico where he lives and now and became a health inspector publicist. He would go on to be a stockbroker for twenty-one years, which was strange since he had been a writer up to that point. Now Jerry writes articles more magazines and some light verse; he also has completed a novel but cant seem to get it published.

An example of one of his light verses goes something like this:

A whimsical huckster named Pringle

Wrote ads that could make clients tingle

In endless staccato

He chanted his motto

“ For slogans just give me a jingle!”

Rob Marggraf

By: Colin Nollet and Mae Rines

Most people see death but once in their life; some see it every day of their lives. Rob Marggraf is one of those people who see death on a 9:00 to 5:00 basis. Rob is one of the lead workers at Tasker’s Funeral Home in Dover. He has been in the business since a very young age, following in the footsteps of his father. When he was young, Rob lived in Massachusetts where his father practiced as a funeral director. His father never owned a funeral home, but Rob frequently heard about his dad’s work at the dinner table.

His father never brought his “real” work home, so Rob didn’t see a dead body until he was around ten or eleven. While running errands, Rob’s dad took Rob to the funeral so that he could finish a few things. Rob waited for his dad in the embalming room while his dad picked up a few things. He described the room as having tables with bodies on them and that all he could help but do was just stand and look around. The bodies weren’t of people he knew so he didn’t feel sad; he was only impressed. When he saw his first embalming, Rob said that he wasn’t disgusted by it; instead, the process fascinated him.

His father’s field of work intrigued him, but he didn’t pursue that field at first; Rob went to college for European history in hopes of becoming a teacher. After college, Rob worked in the marketing business but was not happy with what he was accomplishing. Sometime in the ‘90s Rob started working on and off with his dad, helping out with all the different jobs. In 1994 he finally decided to go back to school at UNH to get his degree in mortuary science. He has been a licensed Funeral Director since ’96.

Rob didn’t start out at the Tasker Funeral Home. He first started working for a larger funeral company. He lived in Dover with his wife and three kids, during this time, and commuted to Manchester for work. He ended up becoming part of a Dover “Gravestone committee.” Rob met Grover Tasker through this board, for Grover was one of its head members. When Grover’s son, Lee, quit the family business, Grover asked Rob to take Lee’s place at the Tasker Funeral Home.

Rob has been a supervisor at the Tasker Funeral Home for five years now and does many things there. Rob acts as a head for parts of the business and does anything from taking phone calls to embalming the bodies. He is part of the process for every body and funeral and his part varies so that he always has something to do. He is grateful to the Taskers for the job but he is also very close to them. He described the Tasker family as very good people in their business and their community. He really loves his job and his family and he would love to meet you, but you might have to die first.

Jen Palmatier Interview

Jen Palmatier

By Emma Baker 

Jen Palmatier moved to Milton Mills, NH in January of ’95. Jen, her husband and their three children moved to Milton Mills because it was inexpensive and not like other model “boxes” that people tried to sell off as homes. They loved the feel of the town. They said it felt a lot like Mayberry, and how it seemed like a great place to raise kids. Over the years, Milton Mills has changed and evolved but its still a decade behind the rest of the world. It is such a small town that you cannot find on accident and you have to want to be there.


Jen works at the Milton Free Public Library and she started to work for the library 9 years ago when a large problem arose. A patron with the library was supposedly censoring a book, but she just wanted to go to a librarian trustees’ meeting and talk about why it was bad. Then someone spoke against her and it had a snowball effect. Jen went to the meeting and realized that everything that was going on was ridiculous so she became a board member so she could do her part to help the town.


The towns of Milton and Milton Mills were conservative republic towns at first but they are slowly changing. Most of the community were people that have been in Milton Mills for a long time and not very welcome to newcomers. They were not very welcome to Jen and her family when they arrived. The town of Milton Mills is very old fashion and they have a lot of community spirit.


The New Hampshire Farm Museum was founded in the early 1900s to help support the community. It was an inexpensive and safe place for people of all ages and way to pass along history. Jen volunteers with the New Hampshire Farm Museum and does a lot of work in the gardens but she is slowly burning out with it. She also helps with a children’s day camp. It’s a junior’s volunteer camp, to be exact. They sell locally grown food, but in a place where they don’t have to compete with other farmers.


But the New Hampshire Farm Museum isn’t the only safe, local place for the residents of Milton and Milton Mills. The Milton Town Beach or Milton Three Ponds has always been a very special place for Milton. It is an inexpensive and safe place for kids. Awhile back, they offered free swimming lessons. After each year of swimming lessons completed there was a big party with prizes for the kids. Unfortunately, they had to shut down the swimming lessons because they couldn’t get a Red Cross certified volunteer teacher. One of the yearly things that takes place at the beach is the Beach Day, which is when the students from Nute high school spend a day at the beach.


Nute high school in Milton used to be a private but in the ‘50s it became a public school. The graduating class size is slowly lowering but rumored to be on the rise starting with next year’s class. Unlike many other schools they still honor the old fashion holidays like Veteran’s day by having the Veterans of Milton come in and talk to the kids.

Interview Hunter Williams by Mae Rines

Hunter Williams is a young man who was born at Wentworth Douglas Hospital in Dover, New Hampshire on September the 3^rd, 1995. As a child he contracted lead poisoning at the hospital, which is the reason for his speech impediment.  Later in life Hunter, his older sister Jassa, and his younger brother Parker went out into their enormous backyard on a snow day. The snow was slick and shallow. They went out on the one-inch of ice, thinking it was safe, but of course it wasn't. He fell through. It was ice cold and he couldn’t touch the bottom. There, in the freezing water he soon went numb. He waited for two minutes while his brother, Parker, went to go get their mother. Eventually she went in and saved them.

When his youngest brother, Kai, was born he asked his mother where babies came from (Hunter didn’t wish to elaborate on the explanation). When asked about Jassa, he said that his relationship with his sister is “A good one. We treat each other like crap but we help and love each other, and that’s what counts.” His favorite childhood memory is receiving his dog, Rex.

Hunter has lived his entire life on the border of Rollinsford and Dover in a fairly large estate near a horse barn called ‘Wishmaker Stables’. There, his family teaches riding lessons and raises several different horses. Hunter spends time taking care of the horses there; some of his jobs include feeding, watering, shaving, removing hay from the stalls, and bringing in the horses from outside.

Hunter seeks to be a writer and actor in the future after going to college. He wants go to either Prince Brown or UNH for university. When he is older he wants to stay in New England, live in a large estate, and have a family of his own and a dog. While Hunter Williams is still at a fairly young age, he sees a bright future ahead of himself and aspires to do his best.

An Interview Of Linda Langley. by Mary Langley

          Linda Mary Langley was born on November 26^th, 1954 in Evanston Illinois. She is the daughter of Mary B. Langley and Robert S. Langley (who passed away in 2008). Ms. Langley’s life revolves around her family and her pets. In addition to her mother, she has her younger brother R. Brock Langley, her two nieces Rachel Rose Langley and Laura Elizabeth Langley, and her daughter, Mary M. Langley.  When asked about her opinions on her family life, Ms. Langley responded that all the members of her family are very similar in their love of travel and music so they all mesh very well together.

        
         Ms. Langley has traveled all around the world and started traveling at a very young age. When she was 10 years old her father, who was a diplomat at the time, moved the family to Germany so he could work at the American embassy. Ms. Langley was just at the right age to enter the German school (whereas her brother, who is two years younger was not.) She studied German for four months before transferring into the German school. When she first started there, she was one of four Americans. By the time she left two and a half years later, she was the only one.

         
        Ms. Langley’s visits to Germany are a key part in her history. The first time she moved there, it was roughly 20 years after World War II has happened. She remembers distinctly that some of her teachers at the German school were very against Americans; where as some of them were the exact opposite. The principle of her school, for example, once got very angry at her for wearing an American girl scouts uniform and literally tore the beret off of her head and threw it to the ground.

         
        Herr Becker, on the other hand, was quite the opposite. Herr Becker was Ms. Langley’s German Teacher (the equivalent of an English Teacher in America) and she describes him as “a strikingly good looking man who was probably in his early thirties.”  One time when she was in seventh grade Herr Becker assigned the class some short story readings about the Nazi regime told from the point of view of Jewish or Gypsy protagonists. She said that Herr Becker “spent a week talking about the detailed descriptions of the concentration camps, and it was a very awkward week for the German kids and me because they were all related to someone who had fought on the German side and my father had fought on the America side. “

         
       Being an American in the German school gave Ms. Langley some unwanted popularity. Linda was kind, and an American, which meant that the most popular girl in class, Carola Schewe thought she was competition. Carola was athletic and smart, but she wasn’t very nice. Another distinct tale that Ms. Langley remembers is that one day in Physical Education they were playing team game. Of course, Carola was one of the captains, and in the last round of picking players for their teams, Carola was forced to pick Claudia Crupp, who was one of Ms. Langley’s good friends. Claudia Crupp was knock-kneed, so she was horrible at sports, and when Carola had to pick her she exclaimed “Ach, die bloed Flasche!” (which literally translates into ‘ah the stupid bottle,’ basically calling Claudia a useless object.) Ms. Langley was enraged and before she managed to get a grasp of common sense she slapped Carola. No one had EVER hit Carola Schewe. Carola then jumped her and started pummeling her into the ground. But Carola Schewe never messed with Ms. Langley or Claudia again.

         
        Ms. Langley has been all over Europe, with the exception of Spain, Portugal, Albania, Hungary, Monaco, Cyprus and Norway. She’s only been to Africa once, but when asked about her time in Africa the first thing she said was that it changed her life. She visited Mali and Botswana. It was Mali in particular that had a huge influence on her life. She went to Mali to visit her then boyfriend, David Richardson, who was working in the peace core there.  When she went to Mali she didn’t know anything about the country. And when she left she felt even if she spent another 25 years there, she would still have more to learn. Her time in Mali really taught her how families and communities work together and support each other in that part of the world.

         
        One of her most memorable traveling experiences was when she was selected by the Rotary to go on a trip to India in 1994. In India, each of the rotary selectees stayed with an Indian host. When she was in Jodhpur, a few of the hosts had special connections and managed to get the Americans a visit to the Palace to have tea with the Maharaja. She remembers specifically that Jodhpur was a beautiful city, and is her favorite city in India. When asked about what she remembers of the Maharaja’s palace she said “It had a lot of fancy weapons and it’s own movie theatre. We went to the receiving room and the Maharaja walked it.  He was young and handsome, and he had his teenage daughter with him. We had tea and snacks and we got our pictures taken with him.” On that trip to the palace, Linda talked with the Maharaja’s daughter for hours about parakeets, because the daughter had a parakeet and Ms. Langley had one back home.

        
        When she went to Mali however, her trip showed her that her relationship with David wouldn’t work. The two had met when they were studying at Indiana University and he was the only man she ever really thought about marrying. She never felt the need to marry, and is currently a single mother taking care of her fifteen year-old daughter. She thinks of her daughter as the “miracle child.” Only a few weeks before Ms. Langley found out she was pregnant, a doctor had told her she would never have children. Her pregnancy was ridden by miscarriage scares and her daughter was born by Caesarian section seven weeks before her estimated birth date. She was only 4 pounds and six ounces at the time but to Ms. Langley she was a little slice of heaven. She says that she already had a rather strong belief in God at the time, but the birth of her daughter made her feel like God had reached out, touched her and said “Everything is going to be ok.” She calls this miracle a “divine answer to a human misdiagnoses.”

         
       Ms. Langley is quite the family woman. Her father Robert. S Langley passed away in 2008 at age 92. She was always daddy’s girl, and regrets that she has been so busy with her ailing mother lately that she hasn’t had true time to mourn him. She said that she “fell off the Langley side of the tree” as opposed to her mother’s family, the Brock family (which is ironically the side her brother, Brock, fell off of.) Her brother has been a great help in her whole ordeal of taking care of their aging parents and she smiles as she reflects on how she used to take care of him, instead of the other way around. She mentioned that when he was younger he used to sleep in a crib until he was a few years of age, but he wouldn’t be able to sleep right unless he was sleeping with a hammer, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Ms. Langley used to wait until their parents were asleep to sneak in and hand him his tools so he would be able to sleep better.

        
         Ms. Langley has always loved school. If she could, she would spend all her life learning and would never work a day in her life. She has studied at five colleges in her life. First, she attended Wellesley College in Massachusetts. She attended a few colleges and universities after Wellesley. She went to Indiana University, the University of Connecticut, Iowa State University and the University of Maine. She has degrees in Cartography, Land Surveying and teaching German. For 18 years she worked as a land surveyor at Civil Consultants in South Berwick, Maine before her mother grew very ill and she had to take a leave of absence.. She has her surveying license in both Maine and New Hampshire and hopes that she’ll be able to go back to work in that profession once her mother’s health situation is resolved.