Janet Johnston Drummond died Feb. 20 at Windemere, shortly after her 100th birthday.

Although Janet fell asleep leaving no immediate relatives, since 1946 she has enjoyed an extended family of Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as her dear friends Beverly Folts and husband Frank Folts, and client families (she was their "Nanny" Drummond, a professional governess, for a period of more than 55 years) scattered across the United States.

Many members of her "family" were privileged to visit with her up to her final moments. She will be remembered with enormous respect, affection and love.

In 1987, Vineyard author Dorothy West did a piece on Janet for the Vineyard Gazette. Janet had a full, unusual and rewarding life in what was a different time. Excerpts and information from that piece follow.

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She was born in Glasgow, Scotland, and she will be 80 come her next birthday. But except for one knee that occasionally bothers her, there is nothing about her joyful voice, her clear and steady eyes, that suggest time's torments. She was born ageless in both her spirit and her ways.

She is Mrs. Janet Drummond and she lives at Hillside Village, the retreat for those in retirement from the accelerated pace of former years. Mrs. Drummond has not slowed down. Her skills are loving and nurturing. The need for them is always there, as is she to fulfill that need.

Nurturing was not her first occupation. That was to come later when she realized her true calling, for which her grandmother, a midwife, may have laid the foundation in her cherishing of new life.

Her first job in Glasgow was tea taster for Polson, Deacon and Webb, tea importers. She and her fellow tasters sat before a row of bowls, Ceylon tea, Madagascar tea, Indian tea, orange tea, orange pekoe tea, green tea, American tea and South American, up to nine or ten different bowls of different teas, the names of their origins attached. The tasters would sip a spoonful of each. Then the teas would be blended, with the tasters not knowing which teas were in which blend. The best tasters with the most sensitive taste buds could tell which teas were in each blending, and rate them as excellent, good, fair or poor. And thus the blended teas were ready for market.

That job ended in 1929 when Janet married William Drummond, a young man in his early 20s, a childhood sweetheart who had gone to Springfield some three years before to work for a motor car company on the engines of their Rolls Royces. Several of his aunts and uncles had emigrated to Springfield and knew of job openings.

Janet returned to Springfield with him. In that same period, Polson, Deacon and Webb wrote to ask her if she would like to be a tea taster for them in a new factory they were opening in Montreal, but the new bride was not interested.

She began to work with babies in the beginning of the thirties. Off and on she had worked for doctors, caring for baby patients in their homes. The well-to-do communities of Longmeadow and Glen Aiden who wanted their sick children cared for at home rather than in hospitals were very pleased with her services. Soon the doctors began to recommend her regularly, and her work was steady - two, three or four or more weeks staying in pleasant homes with grateful families, whose babies responded well to her care.

Then came the time when she was asked to stay on with the Duryea family, whose seven-year-old daughter she had nursed back to health. They were soon to have a new baby, and they asked her to live in and take care of it.

At the time, Janet's marriage had faltered. Her husband's mother's entreaties had been more persuasive than hers. He had returned to Glasgow. She had not wanted to. There was so much in America to explore. The Duryea household was a busy, interesting one, in particular Charles E. Duryea, the senior head of the family, who had built the first gasoline-powered automobile, which was tested in Springfield in the late 1890s, two and a half years before Ford was tested by Henry Ford.

Later she worked in Connecticut for the Will Redway family just before Pearl Harbor. The Redways had just had twin babies. Mr. Redway, who had been a lieutenant in the Army, went to Texas for training, his family and Mrs. Drummond going with him. When he went overseas to India, the rest of the family and Mrs. Drummond went to Washington to stay with Mrs. Redway's father, Judge Parker. When the twins were seven and off to the Cathedral School in Washington, Mrs. Drummond went to Cambridge, where she had lived at one time before, and resumed her care of children, but no longer wanting to live in. She was nanny - as she is called by those she cared for in all the years past and to those she cares for now - and any other name would feel uncomfortable to her.

It was from Cambridge that she came on her first visit to the Island, coming with various families, the Peter Stones of the Ludlow Manufacturing Company family (Peter Stone is an Episcopal minister), the Endicott Peabodys and their three children, and others. Each visit to the Island and all it offered became more deeply ingrained in her. She could think of no better place to spend her summers. She began to think there was no better place to come to live.

Then suddenly she decided to change her occupation. For 10 years, she worked in an electronics factory on Route 128, testing circuit boards. At first it was exhilarating, the drive to work, the work itself. But the company grew and grew, the highway grew more hectic. And suddenly she was ready to retire.

Her retirement lasted a month. She was totally bored. She put through a call to Harvard, said she wanted to resume her baby work, recited her references, and was immediately hired. Within a half hour she received a call from Mrs. Katherine Auspicz, who had just returned from France with a two-year-old child, Rachel, who did not speak a word of English. Mrs. Drummond became Rachel's nanny, and the mutual affection between Mrs. Drummond and the Auspiczes increased.

The Auspiczes are Harvard professors, both writers, and Mr. Auspicz a lecturer, too, many times crossing the country. Rachel is now grown, in college, also in the state of marriage, and planning to be an actress. There is a son, Benjamin, now 13. The family's address is Somerville, where a room is reserved for Mrs. Drummond whenever she chooses to come.

The Vineyard has been her year-round home since 1980 when a Cambridge friend, Beverly Folts, decided to move to the Island and encouraged her to do so too, and give up her city apartment with its three flights of stairs to climb. Beverly found a cottage for her on Franklin Terrace in West Chop, the section of the Island with which Mrs. Drummond was most familiar. But the house felt too big to her and she moved into an apartment in Vineyard Haven. There she stayed until this very satisfactory move to Hillside Village.

The children come to her there, one child two days a week, staying all day; another comes two mornings a week from 9 to 12, another; three-year-old Hubbard White, who goes to the Montessori School and then comes to her every afternoon; and a little girl who comes Tuesdays and Fridays from 1 to 3. She is a godsend to the parents, the children are a daily blessing to her. She really cannot live without the sound and sight of children.

In the summer Christopher Wallace, Mike Wallace's son, deposits his children with Mrs. Drummond, and Mike Wallace's stepdaughter, Pauline Dore, leaves her little girl and her baby in Mrs. Drummond's charge.

Mrs. Drummond has been a Jehovah's Witness since 1946, and her free time is devoted to meetings, studying and services. All of her days are full and rounded and soul satisfying.

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A memorial service for Janet will take place at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses on State Road, West Tisbury on Saturday, March 24, at 1:30 p.m. In lieu of flowers, contributions for the world-wide voluntary ministry of Jehovah's Witnesses may be made to the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11201-2483.