Submitted photo Educators Mary and Jack deVille of Austintown met as teachers at the U.S. Navy base in Rota, Spain. They were married May 8, 2000. The Rock of Gibraltar is in the background.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is one of a series of Saturday profiles of area residents and their stories. To suggest a profile, contact features editor Burton Cole at bcole@trib today.com.

AUSTINTOWN — Unbeknownst to Jack and Mary deVille, each was traveling with the other in parallel worlds of positively impacting many children’s lives.

Toward the end of their travels, their trajectories intersected and an unforeseen reward was bestowed upon them.

“I met Jack while I was a teacher at Rota,” a naval station in Cadiz, Spain, Mary remembered. “He proposed to me in 1999 and we got married on May 8, 2000.”

By that time, Mary, a 1963 Austintown Fitch High School graduate, had spent nearly three decades teaching elementary school as part of the Department of Defense Dependence Schools program, which is comprised of a network of primary and secondary schools that serves children whose parents are in the U.S. military or are civilian workers. The program operates in Europe and the Far Pacific as well as in the Eastern U.S. and Caribbean regions.

Before retiring in 2001, Mary had spent 31 years working with students, many of whom had parents in the Vietnam War.

After three years of teaching first-graders at Woodside School in Austintown, Mary, a Youngstown College English major, applied to be in the Dependence Schools program, then received her first assignment in 1970 on a military base, where she lived in officers quarters in Yokohama, Japan.

After a year in Yokohama, Mary spent the next two teaching elementary school students at Tachikawa Air Force Base, which she described as “one of the main jumping points for people going to Vietnam.”

By this time, she was enhancing her education, making friends and becoming more culturally enriched, largely by traveling throughout the world with fellow teachers to Hong Kong and Kabul, as well as New Guinea, India, and the Philippines, she recalled.

“The clothes people wore made me feel like I was back in biblical times,” Mary said about her experience in Afghanistan. “The people were really nice.”

Afterward, she taught most subjects to fourth- and fifth-graders for 19 years in Mainz, Germany. One of her students was Jessica Schwarzkopf, daughter of Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who led coalition forces during the Gulf War.

“He wrote me a letter to express his appreciation for how I taught his daughter,” she said.

After that military base closed in 1995, Mary was transferred to Rota, where, a few years later, she met Jack, who also was teaching there, before she returned to the U.S. in 2001.

After getting married, the couple had their pictures taken on the Rock of Gibraltar on the Iberian Peninsula.

For his part, Jack taught two years in the Fairbanks school system after having earned a teaching degree from the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Then the Cordova, Alaska, native applied to work overseas, which led to an eight-year career beginning in 1961 in Japan, where he taught all subjects to fourth-graders at an American school on a Japanese Air Force base that housed a hospital.

“We were teaching the children of soldiers, mostly pilots. They would bring back the wounded to our base,” said Jack, adding that the school also had a teacher of Japanese culture.

To further his education and cultural acumen as a new teacher, he said he also sat in a classroom to learn Japanese, along with the country’s culture and traditions. He also helped an orphanage in need of supplies.

Initially, his father was worried about Jack taking on such an ambitious career and wanted him to be a commercial fisherman in Cordova, a small fishing town near Anchorage.

A year earlier, the longtime educator had taken on another challenge: joining Japanese students to climb to the top of 12,388-foot Mount Fuji. On the trail about a half-mile from the top, he nearly quit — until seeing the perseverance of an older woman with a cane who had difficulty standing up.

“I said, ‘If she can do it, I can do it,'” he said.

To further ingratiate himself in Japanese culture, Jack became adept at photography and soon began capturing people working in the rice fields, along with some of the homes and architecture, he added.

When he and Mary moved to Austintown after their return from Japan, they brought their deep love of world cultures with them. The couple joined numerous such clubs in the Mahoning Valley and began volunteering for the Austintown and McGuffey Historical societies, the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, the Austintown Log House and the Strock Stone House and for a local travel club.