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Keyword search: ALife

By KATE ODEN

LEBANON — A longtime community volunteer and board member at Upper Valley organizations and a first grade teacher at Plainfield Elementary for 26 years, Betty Ann Heistad succeeded in “making a difference in the world” child by child, her son Sven...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

STRAFFORD — As a social worker and mental health counselor, Margaret Ruth Whybrow understood she could often help someone by listening well.Whybrow explained her approach in a Valley News profile in the 1970s in which she described her work with The...

By ULLA-BRITT LIBRE

ORFORD — Catherine Butman Eastburn would sit in a folding chair at Lower Baker Pond’s boat launch in Orford and watch the loons for hours at a time.As a community science observer for the New Hampshire Loon Preservation Committee and an amateur...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

GRAFTON — Many will say there is good in everyone but Janet Sullivan believed it, and searched for it, never giving up on anyone battling a crisis in their lives.Sullivan moved from Massachusetts to Grafton with her husband, John, and two sons in...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

WINDSOR — After years in nursing, Mary Louise Sayles had developed her own vision for care, but finding a place to make that vision a reality seemed a long shot.Sayles, in her early 50s, was administrator of the Sullivan County Nursing Home in Unity...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

NORTH POMFRET — When landscapers came to cut the grass for Lysle and Elaine Chase, Elaine saw it as another opportunity to do what she had done so often in her life: Share with others.“My mother was an amazing baker, and when my father could no longer...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

NORTH HAVERHILL — Richard “Dick” Fabrizio cherished, and often reread, a letter he received about 35 years ago one March from a family that was returning from a vacation in the White Mountains the previous fall. They were looking for a place to pick...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

NEWPORT — Elaine Frank knew when, where and how to do the right thing for others.She could establish an instant connection with a large, diverse audience when talking about firearms safety and suicide prevention, offer support and comfort to someone...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

THETFORD CENTER — From her early years at Norwich Elementary School to her ministry later in life, Bertha Brown lived her faith of service every day and never wavered from her principles of dignity, acceptance and compassion for all.Brown felt a...

By PATRICK O'GRADY

ASCUTNEY — Royal Houghton struggled in elementary school, left high school after his junior year to join the Navy as World War II was winding down and he never earned a degree.Still his artistic talents, engineering aptitude, volunteer work...

By FRANCES MIZE

HARTFORD — Returning home from an errand run in a thunderstorm, Linda Wilson was stopped by a felled tree blocking the road. She got out of her car — where her young daughter Amy remained seated — slapped on some chaps and revved up a chainsaw, which...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

WINDSOR — Motorists who use the Cornish-Windsor Covered Bridge may at times wonder whether the anachronistic warning that failure to walk one’s horse across the bridge will result in a $2 fine was really enforced or whether it was put there to humor...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

FAIRLEE — Herbert Hodge’s outlook on life could best be summed up in the William Butler Yeats quote, “There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met yet.” From his hometown of Fairlee to wherever he might travel, Hodge considered all those...

By NORA DOYLE-BURR

WOODSTOCK — Charles Andrew’s first job out of high school in the early 2000s was working as a dishwasher at the Prince & the Pauper restaurant on Elm Street.At first, Andrew, now 38, didn’t much like his boss, Paul Wright “Shultz” Langhans.“Shultz had...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

SOUTH STRAFFORD — It is not an exaggeration to say that just about everywhere you turn in South Strafford, you will likely see something Peggy Thorp had a hand in organizing, creating, renovating or acquiring.Whether it was the abundant recreational...

By NORA DOYLE-BURR

ASCUTNEY — In 1981, Loraine “Cookie” Shand told a Boston Globe reporter that she had decided to join the Ascutney Volunteer Fire Department six years earlier in order to spend more time with her husband.“At first I didn’t have much enthusiasm,” Shand...

By PATRICK O’GRADY

PLAINFIELD — When Plainfield voters at Town Meeting approved a proposal to establish a police department in 1975, resident Steve Taylor, who supported the idea, remembers the words of the first chief, Terry Kelley.“He said, ‘Being police chief in...

By NORA DOYLE-BURR

ORFORD — For nearly 30 years, Tony Patterson was a fixture behind the counter at Patterson’s Grocery and Deli.In recent years, he put in as many as 80 hours a week and sometimes worked alone at the Orford store, which sits at the corner of Routes 10...