WWW@100: A Dad’s Legacy

Today is June 22, 2012, and it’s a momentous occasion. Who knows why? If you guessed because it’s the 76^th birthday of Kris Kristofferson (the man I consider absolutely the best American songwriter ever and, yes, the man on whom I’ve had a serious crush for forty years), you’d be only partly right. Today is also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of my dad, William Walton Wight.

Dad was an amazing man. He was talented, smart, and capable. He could build anything, fix anything, figure anything out. He loved poetry and liked to quote it, especially Robert Frost, Robert Service, and Holman Day. He was born in Oquossoc and raised in Bethel and he was the quintessential Mainer—practical, resourceful, and outdoorsy—until the day he died, even though he spent the last half of his life living in exile in Connecticut.

He liked people, and they liked him. “Everyone loved your father,” my mother once told me, a touch of bemusement in her voice. (No doubt she felt a bit mystified, a little wistful—the sentiments with which we introverts regard those Others: the ones who light up a room, whose personalities draw people to them and effortlessly hold them enthralled.)

My dad worked hard at his job—he had majored in metallurgical engineering and worked at Pratt & Whitney Small Tool in West Hartford—and, with a partner, he started his own small metals heat-treating business on the side which, remarkably, still exists today, more than 60 years later. (While he was involved with the company, it was very much a shoestring operation—he used to bring metal rods home and get my mother to temper them in her oven.)

But as busy as he was, there was never any question that his first priority was family. He took my four older siblings hiking, camping, and rockhounding. He helped lead my brothers’ Boy Scout troop. They all built a wooden boat together from a kit—it, too, still exists today. They played Scrabble, did jigsaw puzzles, went

to church, got a family dog.

 

 And he and my mother brought the kids to Maine as often as possible. They learned the names of all the trees in the Maine woods and all the Maine minerals they found. In the mid-1950s they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and then, together, they built our camp.

 

In a way, it’s remarkable that I know this much about my dad, when you consider that he died in 1958, more than eight months before I was born. But it’s a testament to his legacy, to the far-reaching influence he has had on my siblings and, indirectly but inarguably, on their children and grandchildren as well.

And on me. I remember asking my mother once, when I was quite young, “How old was I when Daddy died?” She looked confused, and explained gently that he had died before I was ever born. Then it was my turn to be confused. “But I remember him,” I insisted. And it seemed to me that I did. His legacy was to remain a vital part of the family he left behind, during my childhood and beyond—even now, more than five decades after his death.

His legacy is in the wooden boat and the family camp—with his musty suede camp jacket and plaid wool shirts still hanging in the closets. It’s in the fact that by the time we went to kindergarten we could all identify feldspar, mica, quartz, beryl, tourmaline, and—our favorite because we loved the way it rolled off our tongues—lavender lepidolite. It’s in the way, over the years, we’ve all been drawn to the state of Maine—three of us to stay—and the way, I think, we all consider Maine our true spiritual home. It’s in the way we all love the woods, the water, our kids. It’s in every part of our lives.

70 Years Ago Today...

Seventy years ago today, my parents got married. It was a Monday, at 2:30 in the afternoon. (Why they chose to get married on a Monday is a mystery to me; maybe it wasn't that uncommon back then, or maybe the church was tied up every weekend with all the couples who were rushing to get married before the husbands were sent overseas to fight.)

My father was nearly 30, and my mother had just turned 22. Both had graduated from the University of Maine, but they were several years apart and hadn't met there. In fact, although they were both Maine natives, they met, in the summer of 1941, in Connecticut, where my father was working as a metallurgical engineer and my mother was working for the Aetna Life Insurance Company (and living at the "Y" with several other girls from Maine).

From all accounts, it was a whirlwind romance; my mother told me once that my father produced an engagement ring on a Labor Day weekend trip home to Maine, barely two months after they had met. "I said, 'Oh, no, Bill, it's too soon,'" she told me, "and I made him keep the ring until Christmas."

They were married just a little more than three months later, in Bangor, where my mother had grown up, and where her father still lived. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Littleton, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains (yes, in early April!), where they stayed at the historic Thayer's Inn, built nearly a century before.







They snowshoed up the trail to the Flume gorge and took pictures (none of which I am able to find at the moment, but here's a photo of the same place, 70 years later, at approximately the same time of the year, taken recently by my friend Ryan).



On their way back from New Hampshire, they stopped in Bethel to see my father's mother and grandmother, who ran a small restaurant (Farwell & Wight's) together. They strapped on their snowshoes again and hiked up a mountain, to the old Farwell homestead (which the women had abandoned nearly two decades earlier, after both lost their husbands the same year, to move to town and go into business together). There, they liberated an old spool bed, already an antique, which was first theirs, then eventually became my sister's, then my niece's, and is now in the guest room at camp.

They moved into a tiny, boxlike house in Newington, Connecticut, then, after the kids started coming--four of them in the next seven years--a bigger house with a bigger yard (and a sidewalk running all around it--a racetrack for my brothers' bikes). Eventually they moved to Westfield, New Jersey for my father's job.

From my mother's accounts of those years, I think she loved being a young wife, raising her family in a place filled with other young families, baking up a storm ("a pie, a cake, or a batch of cookies, every day"), coffee-klatsching with the other neighborhood wives ("we'd all get together and call in our grocery order, and they'd deliver it to wherever we were having coffee that morning"), taking camping trips in a leaky tent with all the kids and the family's cocker spaniel.

Then in the mid-1950s, itching to get back to Maine for at least part of the year, they bought a lot on North Pond in Woodstock and started to build a camp, and that quickly became a major focus of their lives. My parents always knew that one day they would retire together "to a house on a hill in Bethel," and spending their summers on nearby North Pond was a step in the right direction.

My mother was married for just over 16 years, and was a widow for nearly 46. (I never knew my father, who died a week shy of his 46th birthday, and more than eight months before I was born.) She wore her rings until the day she died, and I believe she always considered herself still my father's wife. The day after my mother retired, in June of 1982, she left Connecticut for Maine, there to stay for the rest of her life (except for her trips to Alaska and Colorado and England and Scotland and France and Germany and Australia...). She started a journal that day with these words: "June 22, 1982--Your 70th birthday, Bill, and a very good day to close out my Milford life and get ready to carry out our dream of retirement on a hill in Bethel!"