By Steve Landwehr
Everyone's life has a story. In "Lives," we tell some of those stories about North Shore people who have died recently. "Lives" runs Mondays in The Salem News.
IPSWICH — Some voids are forever vacant. Or so it can seem when they open and we begin trying to fill them.
Lifelong Ipswich resident Antonia "Toni" Poltack left one of those empty spaces — well, two actually — when she died of cancer Sunday, July 26, at the Kaplan Family Hospice House in Danvers. She was 61.
The list of Poltack's survivors is short but very close-knit. There's her mother, Bessie Viator; her two kids, Frank Jr. and Stefanie; two grandchildren, Taylor and Brittany; her brother, Ted Viator, and his wife, Wendy, and their kids, Dexter and Ashley.
But Toni the Tiger — that's what they called her — readily acknowledged another family, and their names would easily fill a page of this newspaper.
They are the hundreds of colleagues and thousands of children, many of them now parents with their own children, who were under her wing when they passed through the doors at Ipswich High School over the last 30 years.
If you pricked her, she might well have bled orange and black, the school colors.
She was a graduate of Ipswich High, Class of '66, and like a homing pigeon returned there as a cafeteria worker in 1979, a pivotal year in her life. She soon moved into the front desk in the principal's office, where her sociability and love of children fit the job like a glove.
"We're going to miss her terribly," schools Superintendent Rick Korb said. "Her big smile was only exceeded by the bigness of her heart."
The look
Poltack was born Feb. 21, 1948, in Ipswich and lived there all her life. After marrying Frank Poltack, she became a stay-at-home mom, raising their two children until a freak accident changed the course of her life.
Frank was on Storrow Drive in Boston on Jan. 9, 1979, when a car flew off an overhead pass and landed on Frank's car, killing him.
"She never really recovered from that," brother Ted said.
So she worked two and sometimes three jobs, as a waitress at the old Millstone Restaurant in Ipswich and, after it closed, Stromberg's in Salem.
And, of course, there was the work she loved best, at the school.
She was, in some ways even more so than the principal, the face of Ipswich High, the first person visitors met when they came into the office, and the tracker of wayward children.
After raising her own kids and shepherding so many others, there wasn't a teenage fib that could pass her sniff test.
"You couldn't pull the wool over her eyes," her mother said. "She knew if a child was forging an absence slip. There was many a parent who got a phone call from her."
If she really disapproved, she pulled out the heavy artillery.
"The look," nephew Dexter said.
"She'd just stare at you," Bessie chimed in.
"You knew right away you were in trouble," Dexter said.
Poltack was first diagnosed with breast cancer 14 years ago and had one breast removed. Five years ago, the cancer was back, and her other breast was removed. Three years later, she was back in treatment again.
"I have faith in God," she said at the time. "But I've come to not trust medicine and not trust machines. They tell you you're in remission, and then it's back again."
It was an uncharacteristically pessimistic note for Poltack, who was usually a "glass-is-half-full" type, but there was at least one other time when her optimism waned.
An easy choice
She lived kitty-corner across Lafayette Road from where a January 2000 fire led to the deaths of Lisa Collum and her two daughters, Lindsay and Carly.
Poltack soon became one of the more vocal proponents of improving and expanding fire services in town, but when a Town Meeting vote only approved buying some new equipment, Poltack's participation slowly evaporated.
Asked what she was up to several months later, she said she only had so much to give and had to pick between continuing her grass-roots efforts and channeling her energy into the schools.
You knew how that would turn out.
"She was very devoted to the schools and the children, and they were devoted to her," Bessie said. "And it showed."
School Committee member Hugh O'Flynn attended high school under Poltack's watchful gaze, and so did his children.
"Toni was very well-loved by our family," O'Flynn said. "She performed a critical function. She was the eyes and ears of the school — and the caring heart."
Poltack met death on her own terms, refusing to continue treatment when it became clear she wasn't going to get better this time.
"She made peace with her God," Bessie said. "She wasn't scared as long as she wasn't in pain."
There was a line out into the street at her wake, and standing room only for her funeral at the Assumption of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church, where the Rev. John Govostes was a close friend.
Cindy DiZio was the sister of Poltack's sister-in-law, but she was as close as any sibling. She said her friend always saw the good in others.
"Anyone who knew her was lucky to have known her," DiZio said. "She was a gift."
