Wednesday July 16, 2025

REGIONAL – The residents of Newburyport and nearby North Shore towns and cities lost one of its most charming, colorful, kind and effective people when Roberta Flynn passed away on, July 7th, after a sudden illness.

Known as Bobbi to friends and family, the 92-year-old Newburyport resident helped many people from the students she taught to dozens of adults trapped by addiction. Mid-career, she returned to school to earn her master’s degree in history, followed by a master’s degree in Counseling.

She used her counseling skills, working on a suicide prevention hotline for several years. And she acted as a sponsor, mentor and sounding board for many men and women who are sober and productive today because of her.

“She was kind, generous, curious and a delight to be around. Hers was a life well-lived, and she will be missed by many,” her obituary states.

For a brief time, she was the nanny to the great-grandchildren of the famous newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer. That allowed her to travel to Europe with the Pulitzer family.

She had a special relationship with her sisters Rosemary and Joan, and their husbands, George and Charles Cashman, some of the leading residents of Newburyport. George Cashman was a founder of Yankee Homecoming in 1958. Bobbi was like a second mother to her many nieces and nephews whom she adored, and who “adored her in return,” her obituary said.

The daughter of the late Dr. William A. Flynn and Rosemary Carr Flynn of Amesbury, she grew up there and attended St. Joseph School, Amesbury High School, Jeanne D’Arc Academy in Milton and Regis College in Weston.

She spent her early professional career working at the Boston Gas Company, and Studio 350, also in Boston, where she helped organize photography for printed advertising. She often used nieces and nephews as subjects in these photos, which were published in many local newspapers and magazines.

She spent the majority of her career as an elementary school teacher, primarily at the Bagnall School in Groveland, where she taught fifth and sixth grade for 30 years. She took great pride in helping to shape the lives of many school children, and delighted when she would meet them again later in life as adults.

She had a long relationship with the Catholic Church, and was a lector, eucharistic minister and member of various church organizations. She spent countless weekends enriching her faith at remote retreats. She also studied the works of Catholic writers like Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating. “Her faith in the saving power of the Eucharist was complete,” the obituary reads.

A Funeral Mass was held on Tuesday, July 15th, at St. Joseph Church in Amesbury, followed by burial near her parents at St. Joseph Cemetery. In lieu of flowers, donations in Bobbi’s name may be made to the Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center at 2 Harris Street in Newburyport, MA 01950.

Arrangements were by Paul C. Rogers Family Funeral Home, Amesbury.  ♦

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