When Marlene first drove north from Syracuse, it was 1970. She was a young woman following a job ad in a state where Speech-Language Pathology was still very new.

She landed the job at Pine Tree Society in downtown Bath, at a clinic on Front Street right next to Reny’s.

“In those days, you wore a dress to work, and you hit the road,” Marlene recalled.

Marlene was part of a small, pioneering team that loaded into automobiles to bring screenings to schools that had never heard of a speech therapist. Her license number was “2”—a badge of how early she was to the table.

Pine Tree Society wasn’t just an office; it was a family. Marlene remembers her wonderful boss, Bill Haney, and everyone having lunch together in the kitchen; ten people sharing a meal and a mission.

“There was a unique freedom in those halls,” she said. ”You never got turned down. If a child needed help, we gave it. We found a way to do what was needed.”

Bureaucracy didn’t stand in the way of the care.

As the years passed, the organization grew, especially when Vicki Simpson arrived in the early 80s and sparked an expansion into Occupational and Physical Therapy. Marlene eventually took the reins as Director of Speech and Hearing; overseeing the organization’s mobile hearing evaluation program.

For many years, Pine Tree Society audiologists travelled to parts of Maine where there were no other resources for people to have hearing evaluations. This meant taking mobile testing equipment to rural schools, clinics, factories and paper mills where hearing loss was a significant problem.

“Pine Tree Society was the only organization addressing that need in the state,” she said.

Later, Marlene married Greg Ouellette, longtime Director of Pine Tree Camp. For over 25 years, she and Greg poured themselves into Pine Tree Society and Camp. Their son, now 39, was even born during one of those camp summers—a true child of the Pine Tree family.

“I loved being at Pine Tree Society and I’ve called Maine home ever since.”