Canaan —
After receiving a phone call from Fleetham’s grandmother, letting him know that Fleetham’s mother, Fanny, was in labor, the doctor took off in his horse and sleigh, only to get stuck in a snowdrift. The doctor then hopped out, put on snowshoes and made his way up Canaan Street to Cobb House, an inn owned and operated for decades by the Fleetham family.
“When he gets there, I’m sitting there waiting for him,” Fleetham said in a recorded interview with Ann Wadsworth, chairwoman of the Canaan Museum Curator Committee, in 2012. The doctor “always said, ‘Here comes that impatient man.’ ”
Fleetham, who died in his sleep at the age of 104 in September, had a sense of humor and remained active in a wide range of community activities throughout his long life, most of which was spent in Canaan.
Fleetham’s legacy of volunteerism includes founding the Canaan Lions Club, serving as a Boy Scout adviser to the Order of the Arrow program, managing trails for the Mt. Cardigan Snowmobile Club and delivering lunches for Meals on Wheels. He served on the school board when the first Mascoma Valley Regional High School opened in 1963; he was an active member of Canaan’s historical society, serving as president for 25 years; and he was a long-time town moderator.
He received numerous awards for his service over the years, including a special certificate, commander’s coin and 2012 Department Convention pin from the American Legion in honor of his 100th birthday. And, he earned the Masonic Service Award from the Northern Masonic Jurisdiction of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite Freemasons in 2011. It was only the second time the award was granted to someone in New Hampshire.
He passed on his sense of the value of serving the community to his children and grandchildren.
“I’m involved in a lot of clubs,” said his daughter Patte Sarausky, a recently retired teacher who lives in Laconia, N.H. “We call it the Fleetham curse. You’re out three nights a week.”
At Christmas one year, he took Sarausky’s two children with him on his Meals on Wheels rounds, “to show them how some people live,” Sarausky said. And to impart: “Be grateful for what you have.”
After growing up in Canaan, Fleetham first left town to attend Norwich University in Northfield, Vt. in the 1930s. There, he was a member of the Theta Chi fraternity, which his son, Dan Fleetham Jr., would join as a Norwich student later on. Fleetham left Norwich in 1934, before completing his degree, because his bank failed — this was during the Depression — and left him without savings with which to pay his tuition.
He then joined the Navy. During his service in Hawaii, he was a competitive high diver and helped to train athletes for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. He served for four years and then left, only to be drafted when World War II broke out.
During the war, as a chief petty officer, Fleetham helped train pilots to shoot. To convey the concept of aiming in front of a target in order to hit it, he used a garden hose, said his friend and fellow Lion and Legionnaire Harry Armstrong, of Canaan.
“Those people were educated (but they) didn’t have common sense,” Armstrong said of the pilots.
Fleetham also exercised his common sense as a municipal court lay judge in Canaan for 30 years. He was chosen for the position by the previous judge, the police chief and a state trooper because they liked how he ran meetings as town moderator and how he handled aggressive parents on a ballfield, he recalled in the interview with Wadsworth in 2012.
“ ‘The thing we really like about you — the way you umpired the Little Leagues,’ ” he said. “ ‘You made no bones about it; if a father kept yelling at his kid, you ordered him off the field.’ ”
Lay judges in New Hampshire ruled on minor misdemeanors, which usually resulted in fines, until 1982, when the state moved away from the system. In Canaan, Fleetham was known to some as the “25 Buck Judge,” for the fine he most commonly handed down.
Fleetham often held court proceedings in his Canaan Street inn — in his office or in the dining room if there was a crowd. His approach was a combination of the principles he learned through training and his own sense of how things ought to be — “50 percent legal by the laws and the rules and 50 percent common sense,” he said.
“I think it’s been a success,” he said. “It proves out.”
Many townspeople made their way through Fleetham’s courtroom, including his son.
“When I screwed up, I got a double dose,” Dan Fleetham Jr. said in a recent phone interview.
In 1964, the younger Fleetham said, “I was really into campaigning for Goldwater.”
The campaign sent the teenager a box of bumper stickers, which he proceded to affix to “every pole up and down the road in Canaan.”
His father’s punishment for this transgression?
“I had to go and take them down,” Fleetham Jr. said.
Keeping the inn was a labor of love for Fleetham and for his wife, Betty. Both had family roots in Canaan innkeeping. Though Betty grew up in Boston, her mother also ran an inn, the Crystal Lake Lodge, in Canaan during the summer.
It was Betty’s older sister Margaret who initially attracted Fleetham’s notice. He regarded Betty as a buddy, good for playing baseball or tennis, or hiking or swimming. She “was a typical tomboy,” he said in a 2003 interview with the Valley News.
But, on Labor Day, Betty missed a ride to The Jungle, a dance hall on Newfound Lake. Fleetham, who was planning to take Margaret, suggested Betty tag along with them. Margaret didn’t like that suggestion, which forced Fleetham to choose between the sisters. He chose Betty.
“Before the dance was over, I had found a different Betty,” he said in 2003. “I found there was something more than a baseball player and an athlete — there was a really sweet girl.”
The two were married in 1940, though they were separated by war soon after. Fleetham returned to the Navy and Betty joined the Army.
The Fleethams’ different military backgrounds became a familiar theme for their jokes, Sarausky said.
“They loved to tease each other,” Sarausky said.
On St. Patrick’s Day, Fleetham would wear orange, the color of Protestant protest, to pull Betty’s leg, as she had Irish heritage. But Fleetham would also buy his children shamrock treats, Sarausky said.
After the war, the Fleethams returned to Canaan where they ran the Cobb House and Fleetham installed TVs and radios.
When the train stopped running and Interstate 89 was constructed, Canaan’s tourist industry declined and the inn’s business dried up. The Fleethams sold the inn, which has since been demolished, to Canaan College, but reserved some of the lakefront land knowing they would return to Canaan in their later years.
Fleetham and his family moved to Center Harbor, N.H., for a time. There, Fleetham, at age 60, completed his bachelor’s degree at Belknap College. He also served as building and grounds director there.
Upon retirement, Fleetham returned to Canaan and built a home on the property he retained. In the summer months, he spent most evenings in his boat on Canaan Street Lake. He welcomed neighbors and friends aboard and hosted gatherings on his lakefront lawn for the many organizations in which he was active.
“One of the nicest things he did was every organization in town had summer picnics on his land on Canaan Street Lake,” said Canaan Selectman Scott Borthwick, who knew Fleetham through the snowmobile club and the Masons. Fleetham was a 60-year member of the Masons, Borthwick said.
The gatherings would include a cookout and a trip around the lake on Fleetham’s pontoon boat.
They “never went very far, but he always drove it,” said Borthwick.
Fleetham joked that among the organizations he hosted, he included the senior center “because he liked to entertain the old people,” Borthwick said.
Fleetham’s legacy is evident in all of the organizations in which he participated, particularly in the Lions Club, which Fleetham founded, Borthwick said.
Fleetham also headed the Lions in its 50th anniversary year in 2003, at the age of 90. He agreed to do so under one condition, the Valley News reported at the time: “I run it MY WAY.”
“What’s my way?” he said. “Delegation!”
His friend Harry Armstrong, who served as the Lions Club secretary at the time, said recently, “I had trouble keeping up with Dan.”
The Lions provide community members with eyeglasses and hearing aids. They collect used medical equipment and loan it out to those in need. They host blood drives and community dinners.
Fleetham’s efforts were aimed at giving young people opportunities, Armstrong said. Fleetham founded the Lions Club as a way to support the town’s Boy Scouts, he said.
“He was always doing things for kids,” Armstrong said.
For fun, Fleetham taught many young people, including Armstrong’s son, how to water ski.
“He was a wonderful mentor really,” Armstrong said.
Fleetham and his son also maintained a close relationship, even as Fleetham Jr. spent most of his working years as a Boy Scout administrator, in farflung locales such as Honolulu, Los Angeles and Illinois. He returned to Canaan to live with his father after Betty Fleetham died in 2003. Together, father and son delivered Meals on Wheels, often to people younger than the senior Fleetham.
Every few years, the two traveled together to a gathering of members of their shared fraternity, Theta Chi. The trips were part of a deal between the two: In exchange for the older Fleetham’s continued longevity, the younger Fleetham paid for the travel.
They made it to Orlando, Fla.; Palm Springs, Fla.; Minneapolis, Minn.; and Atlanta, Ga. They were looking ahead to Las Vegas in 2018, but Fleetham’s time ran out.
“The time we had to spend (together), I’d never give that up,” Fleetham Jr. said.
Fleetham passed on a love of the outdoors and outdoor recreation to his children, said Sarausky. She recalled hiking Mt. Cardigan and sleeping in a tent as a young child. She also remembered skiing with her father when she was a teenager and he would have been in his early 60s. (Fleetham was 44 when his daughter was born. She is nine years younger than her brother.)
“He kept himself active,” she said.
As to the secret to his longevity, Fleetham had some simple advice, his daughter recalled.
“Don’t sit down, stay busy,” he said. “That’s when it’s all over, when you sit down.”
Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
