Mindy Starr-Pfahler sits in the Sheepscot River Pottery studio in Edgecomb on Monday, Nov. 11. Star-Pfahler, of Nobleboro, taught art to students K-8 for 26 years in New Jersey before moving to Maine in 2013 with her husband. She continues to teach art at the CLC YMCA and has been a member of the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest and Regatta committee since 2018. (Johnathan Riley photo)
Whether it’s decorating a seasonally themed mug at Sheepscot River Pottery in Edgecomb, painting a giant pumpkin on Main Street in Damariscotta, or teaching art to children, Mindy Starr-Pfahler brings creativity wherever she goes.
The retired art teacher of 26 years lives in Nobleboro, Starr-Pfahler is originally from Hackettstown, N.J., a place she said is known for its large Mars Inc. manufacturing facility that produces the popular candy M&M’s.
“You smelled chocolate in the air at certain times and it hung there and it was delicious or (the smell of) peanuts roasting,” she said. “It was a really tiny town, just like Damariscotta.”
In middle school and high school, Starr-Pfahler played the fife, a piccolo-like instrument, in her school’s colonial America fife and drum corps. Being a member of the group was a major time commitment, she said, with Friday night practices and performances during weekend parades year-round.
Starr-Pfahler said the group was in the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade every year and one year, she appeared on a broadcast of the event.
“That was probably the biggest thing we did, that was wicked cool, and (one year) my feet were on TV! Only my feet and then they cut to commercial,” she said, laughing.
After graduating from high school, Starr-Pfahler attended Centenary University in Hackettstown, where she earned undergraduate degrees in art and education and minored in psychology in hopes of becoming an art teacher.
“I knew that from the time I was in the second grade,” she said. “I really didn’t think I wanted to do anything else, well that, and a professional women’s baseball player, but they didn’t have a women’s team.”
Starr-Pfahler said she always knew she would be a teacher because family members were teachers. There were also early signs she was going to be an art teacher.
“I loved art, I had a bulletin board in my room and I did it every month just like regular teachers,” she said. “I kind of like knew, what I wanted to do, pretty much forever. I didn’t have any doubts.”
While in college, she married her boyfriend, John Pfahler, who she met in high school.
With her degrees in hand, Starr-Pfahler got a job as the K-8 art teacher in Newton, N.J. at Andover Regional School District, which she said was right next to Hackettstown. For the next 26 years, Starr-Pfahler worked at the school and “loved every minute of it” until she retired.
“It was the best job anybody could ever have,” she said.
When Starr-Pfahler began her role, she was the only art teacher. Over the years the school added another art teacher position. When that happened, given her seniority, she was able to pick which grades she’d teach for the year and her favorites were always middle school students.
“I chose the middle schoolers because you (have) to act like a middle schooler and think like a middle schooler to teach middle schoolers,” she said. “And I still act and think like a middle schooler!”
According to Starr-Pfahler, the attitude of a middle school student is marked by imagination and unseriousness, and allowing herself to teach that age grade gave her the opportunity to indulge in the same.
“It’s whimsical. It’s silliness. It’s allowing yourself to be ridiculous,” she said. “I’m much more comfortable being ridiculous in front of children than I ever am in front of adults … because you can be yourself and they don’t mess with your brain: you are who you are and they’re okay with that.”
Some of the challenges in the classroom for Starr-Pfahler included students who didn’t believe they could do art, which, she said, “is a bunch of baloney.”
“Art is full of so many things. You can have photography … drawing skills … there’s crafts, there’s all kinds of things, so I made sure that there were an array of materials so that (the students) could feel successful, because so often, kids don’t feel successful in school,” she said.
In addition to making art accessible to everyone by presenting as much opportunity as she could, Starr-Pfahler taught art history as well because she believes contextualizing an artist and their art is an important component of learning art and art history because it makes a connection.
“I feel like it’s really important to learn from history,” she said. “I think that tie and that connection between what is going on in the world, what was going on at the artist’s time, why they did things the way they did things, we would into doing projects.”
While in she was a teacher, Starr-Pfahler and her husband took advantage of the seasonal vacation by spending time in Maine, something the two of them did separately when they were growing up.
“John and I packed our bags, came up here, and fell in love with it all over again. It had been awhile since we had been there and we just … that was it,” she said.
In the late 1990s, Starr-Pfahler said she and her husband were camping over in Oxford County when they picked up a copy of Down East Magazine. In the back of the publication was a small ad for a cottage rental on Pemaquid Pond and they decided to investigate.
When the family arrived to the cottage, they were blown away.
“We were like this is it, this is where we want to live, we are happy here” she said.
In the early 2000s, Starr-Pfahler and her husband bought a home on Pemaquid Pond in Nobleboro to continue to summer in and visit whenever possible.
“It was like a dream, it was heaven,” she said.
When Starr-Pfahler retired from teaching in 2013, it wasn’t easy, but she said she did it because her kids, Mollie and Eden, both wanted to attend the University of Maine and the family needed to consolidate its finances.
“It was a hard choice,” she said. “But John and I were like wow, we can’t afford two houses and two kids in college so guess what? We sold the Hackettstown house.”
That year, Starr-Pfahler and her husband moved up to Nobleboro full time and have been there since.
Starr-Pfahler said she saw a lot of differences and similarities between her home in New Jersey and Lincoln County.
“One of the first things we noticed when we moved up here was how community oriented everybody is: volunteering and doing so many things to make the community a better place. That was one of the biggest things we saw that we loved,” she said.
It wasn’t long before Starr-Pfahler found work at Sheepscot River Pottery, where she is now the assistant studio manager at the business’s Edgecomb location.
“I ended up here and that was like magic, you know because I could still do art and still be able to be creative and get paid for it,” she said.
When she isn’t painting the latest seasonally themed ceramic ware for Sheepscot River Pottery, Starr-Pfahler is helping organize Damariscotta’s largest event, the Damariscotta Pumpkinfest and Regatta.
Starr-Pfahler has been a member of the Pumpkinfest committee since 2018 and has been decorating pumpkins weighing a few hundred pounds for Sheepscot River Pottery longer than that.
“I’m also the announcer for the (pumpkin) derby because I’m the loudest person that they know!” she said, laughing.
This fall, Starr-Pfahler made a return to teaching by taking a position at the Central Lincoln County YMCA, where she teaches art classes for children three times a week.
“I absolutely love doing art again with the kids,” she said. “I remember one time, about the third week I was there, one of the parents stopped me as I was walking out and she goes, ‘I pass you every week and you always have a smile on your face when you’re leaving.’ And I was like, that is awesome, that is exactly how I feel, just happy, happy to be there, happy to do art with the kids.”
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