ASCUTNEY — When Richard Knight was working as a guard at the former Windsor State Prison in the 1970s, he approached his boss with a request.

“Richard asked if he could meet with an inmate outside his cell,” recalled Mike Coxon, who was the prison’s acting warden at the time.

The inmate had confided in Knight that he was considering self harm and Knight wanted “to talk the man down out of a very bad situation.”

“We said, ‘No, you can’t meet outside the cell,’ ” Coxon said.

Prisons have rules.

Determined, Knight grabbed a chair and placed it in front of the prisoner’s cell, sat down on it and spent the next hour and a half, his face inches away from the prisoner’s behind the cell’s bars, talking intently “one-on-one” with the prisoner.

Coxon never knew what the two men exchanged. But he did observe that whatever they said to each other, Knight brought the inmate back from the abyss.

“He was conversant with most of the inmates. They respected him,” Coxon said. noting that Knight “held a more progressive attitude” in how to work with the inmate population than was shared by other guards at the time.

Knight, who grew up in Windsor, was an Army veteran who served two tours of duty in Vietnam, worked as a prison guard in his home town before going on to become a probation officer in Hartford, died at age 79 on May 20 at the Village at White River Junction after a rapid decline due to Alzheimer’s, his partner Maggie Giffin said.

A devout Christian deeply involved in the life of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Windsor, an accomplished skier, a self-taught handyman and builder, a personal investor whose knack at picking stocks enabled him to retire early, Knight is remembered by family and friends alike as a doting uncle to two generations of nieces and nephews with whom he shared his love of skiing.

But whether it was his working life dealing with people many consider outcasts or his personal life which he led with an upbeat nature, a singular willingness to be at the side of others in their lowest moments defined Knight, family members and friends agree.

“He was the angel who supported me when I needed it most,” said his niece, Jennifer Knight, who remembers him dropping everything to drive down to Connecticut when she was going through her divorce to help take care of her kids — including building a treehouse for her daughter in the backyard.

“He had this positive energy that would lift you up when you were struggling,” she said of her uncle, who taught both her and her sister to ski, sometimes treating them to all-expense paid ski trips to Park City, Utah, and Banff in Alberta, Canada.

Knight’s empathetic skills were rooted in those of the Knight family, who for three generations, beginning with his father, have run Knight Funeral Home in the Upper Valley. Although he did not follow into the family business, it is a profession, notes current owner Jeff Knight, a nephew of Richard’s, which requires empathy and compassion with people struggling in grief.

Skills that are not dissimilar to the internal resources and emotional intelligence a person needs to have working in the criminal justice system, Jeff Knight acknowledged.

“You have to like people,” Jeff Knight said of both professions.

And faith in good outcomes.

“Richard really believed in rehabilitation,” his nephew said. “Not punishment.”

An avid swimmer and skier in his youth, Knight, after graduating from Kimball Union Academy, went on to Springfield College in Massachusetts, where he majored in physical education with plans to become a gym teacher.

(Robust physical activity was to be a constant throughout Knight’s life. A Professional Ski Instructors of America Level 3 certified instructor, Knight taught skiing at Mt. Ascutney, where he learned to ski himself growing up).

But it was when Knight was a student in Springfield in the early 1960s that he volunteered as a “house father” and counselor at a home run by nuns for troubled youths, said Paul Cabot, a lifetime friend of Knight’s going back to their own youth together growing up in Windsor.

That experience showed Knight had a talent, a unique ability, to work with people who are shunned by society. And he dug into his own pocket to give others something he believed they should have.

“He spent a lot of his own money outfitting the kids with skis and skiing equipment,” Cabot said, foreshadowing what was to become a habit later in life when Knight would do the same for his nieces, nephews and then yet again later with their own children.

Knight’s time at Springfield College was followed by a master’s program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Before finishing his degree, Knight volunteered for the Army to serve in the Vietnam War.

Although set for officer training, Knight “soon found his gentle nature would not allow him to make the calculated decisions of acceptable casualties,” the Knight family wrote frankly in their sibling’s obituary.

He instead served as an “enlisted personnel.”

Knight never shared much about the darker aspects of his Vietnam experience, instead preferring to relate how much he loved the people and the county’s beautiful countryside, even to the point that inspired his niece Jennifer Knight a half century later to make her own visit to Vietnam.

“It must have been pretty horrific because when he came home he had ground his teeth down so much that he had to have dental work,” she said.

Back stateside, Knight went to live with his childhood friend Paul Cabot, now married with a young family. For a year, he worked with Cabot in his land conservation business.

But “he really wasn’t suited for it,” Cabot said.

At the time, the Windsor prison was in desperate need of security personnel and Knight — unable to find work as a gym teacher — took a job as a guard.

He was assigned to the B and C blocks, Coxon said, which housed inmates who committed the worst crimes.

The prison’s long-time guards were not known for enlightened views when it came to managing inmates.

They looked warily upon the college and graduate school-educated Knight who “had a more progressive” approach to his job, Coxon said.

“He probably wasn’t the most popular person with the other officers,” Coxon recalled, citing the time that some grumbled over testimony Knight gave in federal court against sending an inmate serving a lifetime sentence for murdering the Manchester police chief to an out-of-state prison.

“Richard testified that (the inmate) was doing well, taking courses, and could be kept in the state safely,” said Coxon.

The judge, however, disagreed and the prisoner was sent to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth in Kansas (later, when the prisoner was returned to Vermont, he hung himself).

When the Windsor prison closed in 1975, Knight became a probation officer in Hartford, where he showed that empathy for clients called also for firmness when required, said Knight’s life partner, Maggie Giffin, of Ascutney.

Once Knight was attending a wedding where he ran into one of his parolees who was not allowed to consume alcohol. Knight saw him drinking at the wedding celebration.

Not wanting to interfere with the joy of the occasion, Knight did not interfere. There would be a time and place to deal with the infraction.

“Richard waited until after the wedding the next day to follow through with the consequences,” Giffin said.

Some people who become probation officers “don’t work out very well because they want to be bossing people around,” Giffin observed.

Instead, Knight drew upon his training as an educator and approached the role like a teacher “to let them know the rules.”

“That was the teaching piece in him. That’s what he did,” Giffin said.

A frugal New Englander, Knight managed to save enough money and did so well with his investments that he retired from the probation office early.

“He said he quit when he was making more money from his investments than his salary,” Giffin said.

He bought an apartment building on Main Street in Wilder and planned to convert it into a combination residence and school for troubled youth like the one he worked at in Springfield, but the plan never came to fruition.

Fond of Chevrolet Corvairs — “they were cheap,” Giffin explained — he bought one after another. When one died, he parked it in his backyard and harvested the parts from it for the next one.

He eventually accumulated “seven or eight” Corvairs which he had stacked one on top of another in his backyard.

Although he didn’t spend much money on himself, Knight could be a spendthrift when it came to treating his nieces, nephews and then his great nieces and great nephews, family members said.

Naturally, he did it with an eye on a bargain.

Knight would scour thrift and discount sales and buy up ski equipment — skis, boots, poles, apparel — load it all in the trunk of his Corvair, and have the trove waiting for his nieces and nephews when they got to the ski mountain, remembers niece Jackie Goodwin.

And he did the same for Goodwin’s and her sister Jennifer Knight’s kids.

“He would have his car filled with all sizes, make me measure the kids’ feet with a tape measure, then have a fitting session,” Goodwin said.

“The more crazy the outfit, the more he enjoyed it,” according to Goodwin.

Knight favored neon-colored ski apparel and teaching his great nieces and great nephews how to ski through the woods and around trees “inches apart,” marveled Goodwin, admitting the daredevil plow through the “glades” at times made her worry — to no avail.

“Now my kids love skiing through the glades,” she laughed. “Every time they do it, they say, ‘Oh, Richard would love this!’ ”

Per his request, Richard Knight was fitted out in his ski clothes when he was laid to rest.

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.