Lynn Amos was 19 when she took part in one of Bermuda’s earliest ducking stool re-enactments.

In August 1957, 1,500 spectators crammed the rocky shoreline to watch Mrs Amos and two other “wenches“, Marilyn Kyme, and Anne Bindon Cherry, get dunked.

It was all part of Dip Her Again, a production written by drama teacher Constance Bainbridge. Loudspeakers were set up along the coast so that boats watching from just offshore could hear the dialogue.

While women in the crowd threw rotting vegetables for a truly authentic touch, Mrs Amos played Mary Prosser, a 17th century woman sentenced to be ducked in the sea for shouting foul language at the town sheriff.

“The event was probably meant to entertain the tourists,” she said. Sixty-six years later what she remembers most was the shock.

“I was a little stunned by the force of the entry and the exit into the water,” the 85-year-old said. “I was holding tight to the arms of the chair. It was just such an unexpected thing, even though I knew it was going to happen.”

She wore yards of white fabric and a bonnet, which became sodden and heavy in the water.

“I really felt the weight of it when I went to climb out,” she said.

Her boyfriend, Tony Amos, was one of the burly men operating the stool.

They met at the Bermuda Musical & Dramatic Society where Mrs Amos’ father, Manuel Raymond Cabrall, often helped with lighting, props and sets; her mother, Azalea, did a bit of acting.

In 1958 the ducking stool was moved to The Town of St George for Bermuda’s 350th anniversary celebrations, where it still remains.

While re-enactments today are much smaller affairs, they largely follow the framework that Mrs Bainbridge set back then.

Mrs Amos never took part in another ducking stool re-enactment, but she did have small parts in several other productions and fashion shows over the next few years.

She grew up on what is today Poinciana Estate, across from the entrance to Devonshire Bay.

“It was not called that in those days,” she said. “It did not really have a name at all. We lived up on a hill. I remember there were these nice big fields.”

Her grandfather farmed in the neighbourhood. Her father put down cable for the Bermuda Telephone Company.

She went to the Whitney Institute in Smith’s until she was 15, but eventually decided to change, because she wanted to take Oxford and Cambridge examinations.

“Whitney could not prepare me for that,” she said. “There was no way I could afford to go to the Bermuda High School, even if they would have me, so I chose Mount Saint Agnes Academy.”

Her first job after she graduated was doing clerical work for Winifred Peniston, a posh women’s shop that sold things like tennis skirts.

With nine younger siblings at home, some of the money she earned went to helping her parents.

She and Mr Amos married nine months after they met, but things did not go smoothly. She grew annoyed with the endless parties her husband wanted to attend.

“I always say I came down out of the tree house to get married,” she said. “We were both just 20. We were together in Bermuda for three years and then it all fell apart.”

Mr Amos went to New York and became an oceanographer and she went to London.

“We were both pursuing other affairs,” she said. “It was the 1960s and a bit riotous.”

However, they found their way back to each other. After three years they remarried and stayed married for 59 years.

They both moved to New York where they worked for Columbia University.

“Tony was a very able fellow, with a good grounding in physics, chemistry and maths,” Mrs Amos said. “He ended up working as a marine technician. He would go to sea on research vessels, mostly in the Atlantic off of New York. He was in seventh heaven. He loved the ocean and never got seasick.”

Meanwhile, she became executive assistant to the director of the biological oceanography department at Columbia.

When the director took a job at the University of Texas at Austin’s marine lab in Port Aransas in 1976, the Amoses went with him.

“My husband worked beyond his retirement because he became interested in rescuing, rehabilitating and releasing stranded sea turtles along the South Texas coast,” Mrs Amos said.

He dealt with green turtles, logger heads and hawksbills, but was very interested in Kemp’s Ridley, some of the world’s rarest sea turtles.

“We have often thought that some of the green turtles we helped may have gone up to Bermuda,” she said.

Her husband founded a rescue and rehabilitation centre for sick turtles, sea birds, terrestrial tortoises and turtles on Mustang Island off the Texas coast and won many awards for his work with nature.

Mrs Amos did her part by managing the office for many years.

After he died in 2017, the Animal Rehabilitation Keep became the Amos Rehabilitation Keep (ARK) in his honour.

“It is still in business today as one of the outreach programmes at the University of Texas Marine Science Institute,” Mrs Amos said.

She is now a member of Friends of the ARK, a charity organisation that supports the animal rehabilitation centre.

“They raise money for ARK by selling T-shirts at various turtle releases,” she said. “It has a small endowment that friends put together years ago.”

She still lives on Mustang Island, and has not visited Bermuda since 2010. She said at her age, it is challenging to travel the 2,000 miles to get here.

“I am 85, so I am not doing a lot right now,” she said. “At the moment, I am making a rag rug on my loom.”

She has one son, Michael, and two grandchildren.

• Lifestyle profiles the island’s senior citizens every week. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com, with the full name and contact details and the reason you are suggesting them