GILFORD ---- Gilford High School alumni and town residents are mourning the death of Faith Rupert, the founder and longtime director of the school’s noted theater program, who died Monday, June 26, 2023. Rupert, 92, taught theater, English and public speaking in Gilford from 1978 until 1994, leading students and community members in staging dozens of plays and Broadway musicals. Less known to her neighbors was her work, in the 1960s, for America’s Civil Rights Movement.
Under Rupert, Gilford’s theater program won awards and became a prominent host of local, state and New England-wide theater festivals. Beyond public notice for her stage productions — and professional careers of some of her students in theater, film or television — “Faith’s impact was huge in the lives of thousands of high school students” in New Hampshire and New Jersey, where she also taught, said Scott Piddington, who has been technical director for 45 years at Gilford High’s theater.
“Teenagers often struggle, of course, to define themselves and who they will be in adulthood,” said Piddington, a former high school student and lifelong friend and colleague of Rupert’s. “Faith used the stage and her high school classrooms to inspire teenagers, especially those who faced emotional troubles, to build their later paths in life. She gave them the confidence to achieve things that they initially thought impossible for them.
"Rupert’s theater program was notable for its technical excellence and for its wide inclusion — far beyond what is typical — of the school and community,” said John Beyrent, Gilford High’s former music director. “Faith always had a bigger vision than producing just another show on the stage,” Beyrent said. “Her vision was of building community.”
Faith Crowson was born in 1931 and grew up through the Depression and World War II, the daughter of a fundamentalist Methodist minister in West Virginia. He supported Faith’s first grade teacher in forcibly converting her natural left-handedness. That abuse, which included tying down her left hand and corporal punishment, was rooted in centuries-old religious and cultural prejudices that left-handed people carry spiritual or emotional illnesses. The forced conversion complicated Faith’s ability to perform math and to distinguish left from right for the rest of her life. While U.S. schools halted such conversions in the 20th century, many societies worldwide continue the practice.
Faith’s father, the Rev. L.E. Crowson, enforced cultural and religious restrictions on his two daughters, disallowing popular music or dancing and teaching them lifelong submission, as women, to male authority. He allowed them to attend college only at his alma mater, the religiously conservative Asbury College, now Asbury University, in Kentucky. After graduating in 1952, Faith taught and led youth work in West Virginia Methodist churches. Four years later, she married James "Jim" Rupert, then studying for the ministry. To prevent Faith’s father from obstructing their marriage, of which he disapproved, the couple traveled to Virginia and were secretly wed there weeks before their public ceremony.
The couple moved to New Jersey in 1959 for Jim to study at Drew Theological Seminary. Over the next decade, their work within the Methodist denomination supported the American movement for racial desegregation and civil rights. At their first church, they organized congregants to join the August 1963 March on Washington highlighted by Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. While that march is remembered today as a model of peaceful protest, participants faced fears of the violence and police brutality then confronting civil rights protests in the Deep South. “We knew that going to the march was exactly the right thing,” Faith said in a 2013 interview. “But with everything going on, it was scary. We thought it was very likely that marchers would end up arrested.” Against that possibility, while Faith stayed home to care for the couple’s children, she prepared and packed extra food for her husband in case he wound up in jail. In 1966, the couple was serving a church in Salem, New Jersey, as local white supremacists threatened Black residents with a wave of cross burnings. The hate campaign was part of a nationwide white supremacist backlash against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other laws against the racist segregation enforced by the Jim Crow system in the South and by cultural and other means in other states. When local authorities failed to respond, Faith and Jim joined a few white leaders in supporting peaceful protest marches led by the Black community. Authorities then quickly arrested and prosecuted two local white supremacists, ending the intimidation campaign. But opposition to civil rights activism within the church’s white congregation forced the couple’s transfer out of town. They began careers as full-time teachers.
Faith founded and led a theater program at Washington Township High School, in New Jersey’s Philadelphia suburbs, for a decade before the family moved to New Hampshire. In 1978, she began teaching in Gilford. There, “Faith drew in the kids from the music, art, home economics and the vocational shop classes, the athletes” and teachers and community members, said Beyrent. With Piddington as the theater’s technical director, she made her program “a welcoming home for all kids, including those who felt they didn’t have another place to fit in,” he said.
Faith carefully selected plays — such as Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” or Jerome Robbins’ “West Side Story” — that advocated social justice, inclusion and compassion. “If you don't think what she does is a ministry," her pastor husband said in 1994, "You don't understand what ministry is.”
Faith’s death triggered an outpouring on social media, where former students recalled her care, with phone calls and invitations to meet and talk, when she knew a student was facing trouble. “She didn’t see you as you were,” recalled a former student from New Jersey, Rosemary Flaherty. “She saw you as you could be.”
For her family, friends and thousands of students, Faith’s gift was that of any excellent teacher and compassionate friend. It was the measure of strength that she gave to those whom she saw doubting their own abilities (and even, at hard moments, their own value). In the gardens of our souls, self-doubt is a thorny native species, a weed of fear that grows to block the paths we aspire to traverse. If we’re lucky, we meet heroic teachers like Faith. Their hand on our shoulder is a gift of encouragement, their unblinking gaze into our eyes a gift of purpose. And their grasp on our hearts is a gift of expectation — that we will get busy in that inner, spiritual garden, uprooting our weeds and clearing our paths. In recent days, her family has heard from scores of people thanking her for just this gift of inspiration and confidence.
Faith cherished the memory of her husband and best friend, Jim, for a decade after his death in 2013. Now those who treasure them both include their children’s families: Jim, Sarah and Aisha Rupert, in the Washington, D.C., area; Beth and Dick Pilling of Gilford; Chris Crawford of St. Petersburg, Florida; Katy Proko of Laconia; and Mark, Melissa, Erika and Kelan Rupert of Boulder, Colorado.
In lieu of flowers, the family welcomes memorial gifts to the Gilford Community Church, in support of its many programs strengthening the community that Faith joyfully called home for fully half of her life.
The Rupert family and the Gilford Community Church, 19 Potter Hill Road, will hold a Memorial Celebration of Faith’s life on Saturday, August 12, 2023 at 11 a.m. at the church in Gilford Village.
Wilkinson-Beane-Simoneau-Paquette Funeral Home & Cremation Services/603Cremations.com, 164 Pleasant St., Laconia, NH, 03246, is assisting the family with arrangements. For more information and to view an online memorial, please visit wilkinsonbeane.com.