Meet Your Neighbor
Sandy Oliver
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

You read about islanders who are in the public eye all the time, but what do you know about your neighbors - those you see at the supermarket, the gas station, at school or just in passing on the street? Everybody has a story about how they came to be here, what they have done and how their experiences have shaped and perhaps changed their lives and added to the fabric of Nantucket's unique character. This week The Nantucket Independent continues a new feature highlighting island residents.

Sandy Oliver, familiar to many from her years teaching on the island and as a teller at Nantucket Bank, loves to travel and experience new adventures. Although she is about to retire - for the second time - she is full of enthusiasm for what the future may bring.

Born and raised in Tipp City, Ohio, Oliver attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio after high school where she earned her bachelor's degree in education. She began her career in Kettering, Ohio as a kindergarten teacher where she spent a year before moving to Colorado Springs, Colo. to rent an apartment with a close friend and fellow teacher and other friends.

"We were just adventuresome," said Oliver.

After staying in Colorado one year, Oliver became engaged to the late Nantucket native Donald Oliver, whom she met when participating in a friend's wedding. She returned to Ohio to teach in her hometown and Don Oliver moved there. In 1960, she came to Nantucket to meet Don's family, and the couple wed in January of 1961. They relocated on the island shortly after the ceremony, and Sandy began teaching first grade at the elementary school. She soon became pregnant with the first of their four daughters, Sherri Ann, who was born late that year, followed by another daughter, Melissa, in 1962 and two more - Tina in 1966 and Dawn in 1967.

Between babies and teaching at the elementary school, Oliver began the island's first public kindergarten in 1965 at Academy Hill School. "It was an exciting adventure to put that all together," she said. While teaching here in 1981, Oliver earned her master's degree in education from American International College in Springfield, Mass.

But Oliver had many more experiences ahead after she retired from the island's public school system in 1993. Because her children were grown and on their own by then, she felt free to explore the world. Oliver traveled to Ukraine with a missionary group called the Navigators based in Colorado Springs, and spent a year there as part of an invitation from Russia's Prime Minister to implement Christian morals and ethics into the country's public schools. The 17-member mission took a Christian curriculum to the Ukraine, meeting with teachers in the city of Rivna at the end of academic days to discuss the material. Oliver was invited back for an additional three months to assist the incoming mission group with their orientation.

In the winter of 1995, when Oliver returned to Nantucket, she worked at the Jewelers' Gallery on Centre Street for five years before deciding to join the team at Nantucket Bank where she has worked as a teller for seven years, always displaying a big smile for everyone she encounters.

"I get to see a lot of Nantucket people," she said of one reason she enjoys her job at the bank. "We all have our own little circle of life. It's just so wonderful to see so many people I wouldn't have the opportunity to see now that I'm not teaching."

Oliver is retiring from the bank this fall, but not retiring from new experiences. Besides wanting to spend more time with her two daughters living on the island who have six of her nine grandchildren and visiting her two daughters and their families on the mainland, as part of her dedication to the Summer Street Church, a non-denominational church where she coordinates the Sunday school program, Oliver hopes to attend shortterm mission trips. She would like to travel to Pignon, Haiti, where the church has established a relationship helping to build a Christian school and where she could teach for brief periods.

Beyond that, Oliver intends to maintain her annual catch-up meeting with her Ohio high school classmates and also hopes to participate in a women's Christian retreat in Washington State that she has been invited to attend.

"I find as you get older there is something enriching about being able to go back to your roots and past friendships and seeing relatives," she said. "But I look forward to my new adventures. I look forward to being able to be willing and anxious to serve the Lord in any way that I can. I am here mostly because of my two daughters who are here, and I

need to be near my family." I