Senior College Stories

November 23, 2025

An interview with Ellen Sander and John Nickerson
by Monica Morris

We talked with Ellen at the Waldo County Climate Action Coalition's 2025 Climate Resilience Fair. She stopped at our table and told us that she met her husband because of Senior College. We thought our members would enjoy hearing about their love story.

Q - You have both been here since 2010, right?

J - I've been here since 2004. My family's from Ducktrap, but my dad was a Marine, so we lived all over and I worked many, many years in Hawaii. I came to Belfast to retire, of course, to come home. I retired in 2003.

Q - When did you meet?

E - John was married when we first met, and when his wife passed away in 2016, we were already friends. The only time we ever saw each other was at Senior College. One day he asked me out for lunch and I figured, I’ll keep him company. His wife had just died after a long illness and we started hanging out. We soon realized that our relationship was a little more than just friends, comforting each other. We now say, once a week, how lucky we are. We just totally know how lucky we are.

J - This is our third marriage, for each of us. I was not going to do it again. We found each other somehow. I mean, maybe I was 70, and Ellen was 66 years old? And now we are in our 80s.

Q - So what was the first course that you took together?

J - It was a course on short stories of J.D. Salinger and Raymond Carver. We had a long break between the morning class and the afternoon. We had a break each class, with coffee and refreshments. There was a lot of mingling. When we were both taking morning and afternoon classes, we would go to Bell the Cat and have lunch.

Q - So do you remember the second course you took together?

J - Yeah. The Beatles. Neil Harkness was teaching a course on popular music. It was in the big auditorium at the Hutchinson Center. Neil taught Motown, Reggae, and Country and Western.

Q - Did Neil have a radio show on our local radio?

E - I’m not sure but I have a radio show of poetry. I am a past poet laureate for Belfast in 2012 and 2013. My show airs Wednesdays at 7:00 pm., but you can hear it any time in the archives. So we had Neil's class on some kind of music. Oh, John wants to show you a picture. We have a brick on the pedestrian bridge. Look at that. Our anniversary is next week. This interview is so timely.

Q - When is your anniversary? What day?

E - The 12th of November. Wow.

Q - And how many years?

E - Six years. Maybe the secret to being married all your life is to marry late.

Q - Do you remember the next course that you took?

E - We took Astronomy, physics, Shakespeare, poetry, international relations, Dickens. Bell the Cat used to give us Senior College people a 15% off at the restaurant.

J - I still have my discount card.

E - Back then we didn't call each other and say, "Are you going to take this?" It just happened that we took the classes together.

J - We also were friends on Facebook, so when I signed up for a course, Ellen would say, “You're taking this?” Good old Facebook, right? It was so much fun, choosing what to take. There were so many times I said, ”Oh, boy. There are too many choices.”

E - We took a photography class together. I don't know if we were dating yet, but I took pictures of him. I took pictures of everybody.

Q - Do you remember who the instructor was?

E - It was Jim Kosinski. He's a really good teacher. He didn’t care if you had a phone or a camera for taking pictures. You know, it's not just knowing your subject. So many instructors were not only good instructors, but they knew their subjects really deeply. And Neil, he could teach any music. He would be totally prepared, and he made it interesting. He would get the audience to be part of the whole experience. I guess that's the trick, isn't it? No one wants to sit there and be lectured at. We took a birding class together– we learned about a lot of local birds.

Q - So do you still take courses?

E - No. Not since Covid. We tried the Zoom classes but we weren't really together. It was isolating and the technology didn't always work well. And you don't have the same dynamic. The other thing that Senior College had in those days is that you could audit any University of Maine class if you had the instructor's permission. Wow. For free. That was here at the Hutchinson Center. I got into a digital editing class. It was basically a Photoshop and InDesign course, digital image editing, and it was life changing. She was so amazing. We used Adobe. The stuff was very expensive, but Adobe had a special student price, which I qualified for, and so I got the software, which I've been able to update since at the student rates, because once you have the student stuff, they don't take it away. That was maybe my first or second year of Senior College, before I knew John. And so I thought, I'll take a lot of college courses. I just went down that rabbit hole

Q - John, do you remember some courses you took before you met Ellen?

J - Yes. The first one I think was a theater course. The instructor would hand out your parts and we’d do a scene. Towards the end of the course, the instructor said, “There's a part you might be interested in at the Maskers, you should go audition for it.” That's what I did, and they gave it to me. Wow. So it sort of got me into the Maskers. The play was “Boys Next Door.” We took two or three courses from Charlotte Herbold, who has since passed away. She was good. I think she also taught classes on modernism. There also was a science teacher who was incredible. Tragically, he died in a freak automobile accident. I took a course about films. In another one I liked, we read lots of mysteries. And I got huge lists of authors to read. I spent a lot of time reading those books and I still do.

E -I have to say that my life was really enriched by Senior College. I mean, it was not just from having met John, which is certainly the most consequential thing, but I have learned so much, made so many friends. I got a pair of ice skates. I don't even remember who the man was. I was talking about how I used to skate, but I don't even have skates. He said, “My wife has to get rid of her skates. What size do you wear?” and when I told him, he said, “Oh, that is the same size. I'll bring you her skates." I forgot about it, but the next time I came to Senior College, this man handed me a great pair of ice skates, which I have by now turned over to my grandchild.

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Thank you, Ellen and John, for sharing your story!