Jean A. Mentor

Obituary for Jean Alice Mentor

Jean Alice Mentor was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on October 14, 1930, and passed away peacefully on July 31, 2021. Jean was born to Daniel C. Wright and Delphine (Pare) Wright, and grew up playing in the Forest Park neighborhood with her beloved older brother, Daniel C. Wright, Jr. Jean was most proud of being a good mother and wife, and of helping physically challenged children in the Longmeadow High School district. She passes on her love of art, her art of loving unconditionally, and her peerless dignity and grace in facing life’s challenges.

 Jean graduated from Commerce High School in 1948. After high school, Jean worked at the National Bronze Company, joining her aunt Mildred Barrett and uncle Neil Barrett. Before her sixth child was in grade school, Jean took a job showing The Plantation Condominiums in Agawam.   But her favorite job was still to come. From 1979-1986, she worked with a group of physically challenged children in Longmeadow, starting at Williams Middle school, and graduating with them to Longmeadow High School. Those kids knew her as a kind but firm advocate. Her stories about working with these kids were respectful and loving, but also realistic about the many invisible challenges they had. She respected each of them as full individuals, and would regale us with tales of the sometimes hilarious ways they leapt over able peoples' rules.

Jean met her future husband and the love of her life (in her words, her “dear boy”), Ramon B. Mentor Jr., through his sister Joan Bouchard Mentor (though she probably saw his handsome profile while he was playing pinball at Sam’s Drugstore). She married Ramon in 1953, and they made a handsome and vivacious couple throughout their lives. They were married for 65 years, and as Ramon would say to anyone who asked, Jean was a loving wife who kept him sane and was a constant source of support and affection, even when Ray was driving.

Jean would tell you that her greatest role was being a mother to her six children, and each of those children can testify to her warmth and her down to earth humor.  If the most important thing you can give anyone is your attention, she was our role model par excellence, and to other children as well. Her own kids would say good bye to their friends only to find them an hour later downstairs yakking with Jean while she peeled potatoes or folded clothes on the dining room table, often accompanied by a cigarette and a cup of Maxwell House coffee (with sugar and evaporated milk). She was unfailingly kind, and her children heard this from everyone: Jean’s older relatives, her coworkers and neighbors, and eventually the denizens of Loomis Lakeside retirement home.

Jean was also artistic, constantly drawing or doodling while doing something else. She would sketch impressive clothing designs and fashion plates, while her early watercolor impressions of Dondi, Jiminy Cricket, and Donald Duck graced her walls. Art and creativity run through her family and her veins, and one of the tragedies of her life was the blindness that kept her from making art in her later years. Like her husband, Jean had an uncanny memory right up to the end, and in some ways her story is her stories, the endless succession of tales about the old neighborhoods in Springfield, the people she grew up with, and the misadventures of her children and their friends. In retrospect, these stories were told with the precision and eye for detail of a novelist, told without malice or judgment, so that we received at her knee a wide ranging oral history of our area, of the Depression and the war, and of all the families that raised kids in our little corner of Longmeadow.  This might be the way to see Jean’s genius: she was a mother and an artist, shaping her masterpiece, this crazy Irish Catholic family, welcoming stray children (honorary Mentors) here and there, riding the incredible waves of history and cultural sea change she witnessed and helped her children navigate. (Imagine: she was born in an era when people cut ice from frozen ponds and had seen Civil War soldiers march off, and lived to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon).

We will miss her easy smile, her use of the words piffle, fudge and fiddlesticks, her chicken piccata. And we’ll miss her inner strength, her refusal to complain or feel sorry for herself, her faith in the golden rule and in the power of family.

Jean is survived by her six children Steven, William, Peter, Lisa, Ramon, and Patricia. She is also survived by her five grandchildren Madalyn Mentor, Bailey Mentor, Laurel Mentor, Alice Mentor, and Linden Mentor. She is predeceased by her husband of 65 years, Ramon B. Mentor, Jr.

Services to honor Jean’s life will begin with visiting hours on Monday, August 9th from 4:00-7:00pm at Forastiere Smith Funeral & Cremation on 220 North Main Street, East Longmeadow. Her funeral will be held on Tuesday, August 10th, beginning at 9:15am at the funeral home, 10:30am Liturgy of Christian Burial in St Michael’s Church on 128 Maple Street, East Longmeadow. Entombment will follow in St. Michael the Archangel Mausoleum in Springfield. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to Perkins School for the Blind or Valley Eye Radio. Please visit www.forastiere.com to share an online message for the family or for more information.