She’s a mother. She’s a teacher. She’s an immigrant. She’s a newly minted centenarian. She is Newton’s own Elizabeth “Betty” O’Toole.
O’Toole celebrated her 100th birthday at Sunrise Assisted Living in Newton on Sept. 7 with a festive outdoor party filled with family, friends, and even former students. While people fussed with decorations and laid out treats for all to enjoy, O’Toole sat in the center of it all, a smile on her face and a tiara on her head.
O’Toole received commendations from Gov. Maura Healey, the Clintons, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former President Jimmy Carter – who will join the centenarian club on Oct. 1. Still, O’Toole was more concerned with sharing moments with friends and great-grandchildren.
Ask anyone about her, and it boils down to the same: Betty O’Toole has filled her 100 years with life fiercely lived.
A published author at 98
O’Toole grew up in County Clare, Ireland, on a farm near the Shannon estuary “where the river turns to meet the sea.” She wrote about this, and more in her 2022 memoir “A Poet in the House: Patrick Kavanaugh at Priory Grove.”
“We were seven, four boys and three girls,” she wrote. “We lived in a big house, Ballymorris House on top of Ballymorris Hill. During the Famine, my great-grandfather, Patrick Ryan, had hired the local people to build it. Many were being evicted from their homes and needed work.”
O’Toole describes an idyllic childhood running through farmland. The house itself, she said, was warm and friendly.
“The people plastered the outside by hand, and when I was growing up you could still see the imprints of their hands,” she wrote. “My mother, who knew a lot about art, thought it was the loveliest handwork she’d ever seen.”
The book focuses on a period in 1961 when Ireland’s leading poet Patrick Kavanaugh lived with the O’Toole’s, before the family began moving to the United States in the late 1960s.
An instinctive teacher
O’Toole had taught at tech colleges in Dublin before immigrating to the U.S., and when the family arrived in the Boston area she began teaching home economics at two public secondary schools in Brookline.
“She never slowed down for anybody. She used to teach in two schools and walk between the two schools every day,” Elly-May O’Toole, O’Toole’s daughter, told the Beacon. “It was about a mile and she’d walk it with her bags up into her 70s.”
O’Toole was arrested for protesting against Proposition 2 ½ (a law to limit property tax increases that exists today) when she was a teacher.
“She was always on the side of children and the disenfranchised,” Elly-May said. “The police officer in the Boston precinct when she was being booked actually said to her in Gaelic, ‘what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’”
A former student, Tang Sayabovorn, attended O’Toole’s birthday celebration with flowers and a card in hand. She was O’Toole’s student in the 1970s and had just come to the U.S. from Thailand.
“Mrs. O’Toole and the whole family have been so nice to me,” she said. “They were very kind. Being a new immigrant, I didn’t speak English that well at the time, but when one of her daughters got married I got a chance to go. I am lucky to know her family.”
A lifelong mother
O’Toole raised four children, and even helped care for a few grandchildren. O’Toole’s grandson Brendan Brodeur lived with her from kindergarten through third grade.
“She really is the matriarch,” he said. “After school she’d pick me up and we’d go play on this court where I’d play basketball, and she’d play basketball with me at 60 years old. I kept playing, I still play in rec leagues, and it all started when I was in second grade playing basketball with Betty.”
O’Toole’s children and grandchildren shared many lessons they’ve learned from her.
“My mother was always going to have my back and stick up for me,” said her oldest son, Larry O’Toole. “She showed us the value of empathy and caring for other people. We were always taught that everybody deserves our respect and we didn’t look down our noses at anybody.”
O’Toole, Elly-May said, always sees the good in everyone.
“My mother has lived her life always seeing the best in others,” Elly-May said. “She’s always taking the most optimistic view of everything, not seeing terrible rain – saying, ‘oh, it’s raining, how lovely.’”