Wells River
In 1969, Delbert Leete was just 42, too young to be having a heart attack, he told Shirley Leete, who had never seen her Delbert looking like this in all their 21 years of marriage. He was big-framed, and all that farmwork had made him strong as a bull, but now he was lying in his nightshirt, sweating on the bed’s cool sheets. He looked as shaken as she felt.
“Back then, it was different,” she said. “You didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know what to expect.”
The kids were still sleeping, all four of them. Outside, in the darkness, the Leetes’ cows were quiet, huddled together in the big, round red barn on Route 5.
Shirley Leete called the family doctor.
“She was a good doctor,” she said. “From Wells River. She came right away.”
Leete, proud, struggled into a set of clothes in the bedroom so that he wouldn’t appear indecent when the doctor arrived.
When she did, she took one look at him and called for an ambulance.
Shirley Leete called Delbert’s mother, who lived up the road, to come look after the kids, and then got into her car. She followed the path the ambulance had taken to Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover.
She wondered if her husband — a man who prided himself on Yankee values of hard work and simple living — would still be alive when she got there.
Hardworking Yankee
By the time the heart attack struck, Leete had already put in a lifetime of work. The Leete family culture revolves around a strong work ethic that he learned growing up on his parents’ farm in Groton, Vt.
While attending Boltonville’s one-room schoolhouse, he earned about $50 a year doing janitor duties. He arrived early each day to build a wood fire in the furnace, and then went to a nearby farm to haul a bucket of drinking water for his classmates to dip into throughout the day. After school, he used his brother’s bicycle to deliver bottles of milk to neighborhood houses, making as much as 8 cents a quart.
After completing eighth grade, Delbert quit Newbury High School in favor of logging, loading hay, raising cows, harvesting corn and, during World War II, scavenging tires to sell to support the war effort.
In 1947, after a day of haying, 21-year-old Delbert and Shirley, 18, were married in a no-frills ceremony at his brother’s house, after which they threw themselves into farming and raising a family. They sometimes took the kids to a drive-in movie in Woodsville, knowing the kids would fall asleep so quickly that they could get back to the farm in time to wake up for chores the next day. Once a year, they took the kids to Lebanon and bought them plates of fried clams for $1.95. Occasionally, after the morning milking, they would pack up and drive to Wells Beach, Maine, to spend a few hours at the seashore, arriving home in time for the evening milking.
Don Gregory, the longtime partner of Leete’s daughter, Linda Laviletta, reminisced about those days with Shirley, the two of them sitting at the kitchen table in the farmhouse on Route 5 that Leete built.
“He believed in good husbandry with his cattle,” Gregory said. “If he went by a farm that was sloppy looking or run down, he would just shake his head. If you ever saw his farm, you would see he was particular.”
He turned to Shirley Leete.
“Were you ever scrubbing the milk parlor much?”
“You kidding?” she shot back. “Twice a day we washed the milking parlor. It was all white walls. Every night and every morning, we would wash the walls. It was always spotless.”
Though he worked hard, he was also always looking for ways to do things more efficiently, said his daughter Linda. She learned this when she was 7, she said, he took her to collect the apples from the abandoned orchards near Tinney Pond.
“He would bang the truck into the tree, so the apples would fall into the bed of it,” she said.
The day after the heart attack, Leete didn’t come home from the hospital. Laviletta and her siblings watched as her uncle came to lead them in doing the chores on the farm.
They learned that their father was alive, but still in the hospital. They couldn’t see him.
“It was different than today,” Shirley Leete said. “They wouldn’t let the kids or people go in to visit like they do now.”
But the kids soon learned that Leete was on the ground floor. They knocked on the window and waved. Leete waved back, said his wife.
He was weak, but “he didn’t intend to be laid up long,” she said. Two weeks after the heart attack, he was in his milking parlor, waving off her concerns.
“I used to tell him (to take it easy) all the time but he wouldn’t listen to me,” she said.
Every morning, he was up at 4 a.m. without fail, ready to head to the parlor, where the work was only getting harder as the size of the herd approached 250 milking cows.
Watching him take pills to thin his blood, she wondered how long it would be until his heart gave out for good.
If he shared her concerns, he never voiced them.
“He was really more worried about me than himself,” she said. “Even until he died, he was worried about me — my leg, my eyes.”
A Second Life
In the 1970s, Leete didn’t die.
He lived. And he worked.
“Living on a farm is very satisfying,” Leete wrote in a memoir he self-published under the title My Time in Vermont. “Every day is a challenge. I would plan the work for a week. We had to do milk and do chores the same every day. … After milking and my day’s work was done, I could go back to the field and plow or harrow or plant corn.”
In 1973, they moved their dairy operation to Newbury, where Leete took care to haul in a lot of extra fill as he built his new cow barns, to ensure that the interiors would be higher than the low-lying land outside.
“He was a looking ahead-type person,” Gregory said. “I don’t want to say a schemer. But a thinker.”
In July of 1973, Delbert and Shirley celebrated their wedding anniversary by going to spend a weekend in Maine, while their son Gary looked after the animals.
On the way back, it rained heavily.
“We got into Plymouth and we saw all the flooding,” said Shirley Leete. “So we headed home as fast as we could come. Sure enough, the road to the farm was underwater.”
For days, the water from the Connecticut River was high enough that the year’s young corn plants, in some cases two feet tall, were underwater. But, though the fields had become a lake, Leete’s barns functioned like an island.
“He and I and his brother and our son would go out to the barn in a rowboat to milk the cows,” Shirley Leete said.
In 1979, with the kids grown, the Leetes opened a truck stop, Del’s Diesel, on his land on Route 302, just off Interstate 91, which had recently been completed.
“When I had it we had a Vermont menu,” Leete wrote. “There was a breakfast special, chicken pie on Friday and baked beans and hot dog on Saturday. When we started the diner it was open until 11 p.m. Shirley and Phyllis Carpenter would cook and clean on that late shift. They had homemade pies and doughnuts. Very good food.”
Shirley Leete said balancing the needs of the farm and the new business could be challenging. One moment, Leete would be called to fill in for a sick employee on a graveyard shift at the 24-hour truck stop (which is today the P&H Truck Stop), and the next, he might have to tend to a cow having a difficult birth.
In the 1980s, as Leete entered his 60s, his heart kept beating, no matter how much work he subjected himself to.
He opened a sand pit to sell fill to other farmers and contractors in the area, and a landfill on Route 5.
“We bought old second-hand tractors and hired some people with their own bulldozers,” he wrote. “We had plenty of sand to cover the rubbish. At that time the town signed a contract with us each year for $7 per person a year.”
He said he helped balance the checkbook by accepting waste from the East Ryegate paper mill, “part rolls of paper and loads of wet colored mash and pieces of waste.” He eventually sold it to the Casella family.
Leete also went into the sausage business.
Sitting at the kitchen table, Shirley Leete pulled a small sheet of plastic with printed lettering out of a scrapbook.
“This was one of the wrappers for the sausage he made,” she said. “One day, when the Legislature had a legislative breakfast in Montpelier, they called. They wanted to serve Delbert’s sausage for their breakfast, so we went over and they did.”
She read from the label, words her husband had written 30 years ago.
“Made from quality beef and pork. Less fat and very lean. A new Vermont product.”
She looked up, her pride evident.
“This is what our sausage was made of,” she said. “It was very good.”
In 1993, Leete, then 66, decided to sell the farm. It was getting more difficult for him to keep up with all of his enterprises, and their son, Gary Leete, who they had come to rely on to help run the farm, was in poor health.
Even so, it was a hard decision, said Shirley Leete. They’d attended so many cow auctions over the years, and now their own herd would be the one that was sold off.
Though Leete gave up his farm, he never gave up farming. He still attended auctions, nodding sagely when a cow went for a good price. And he and Shirley had taken to traveling, always through an agricultural association to tour farming operations in other states and countries.
He saw an old Spanish ranch in Mexico, where fishermen caught fish in nets and set them by the roadside to dry on sun-warmed cement slabs.
He visited a sheep farm in England, driving past caravans of colored wagons where Roma people dried piles of peat moss and sold their wares to travelers.
In France, he watched people scour potato fields, looking for leftover pieces that had been missed during the harvest. And at the thermal springs in New Zealand, locals cooked kettles of food by setting them on cracks in the rocks and covering them with burlap.
“Some people spend very little money,” he observed approvingly.
All along, Shirley Leete said, she was at his side.
“We did everything together. Couples today, the wife goes here. The husband goes there. But that’s not the way we believe,” she said.
In his 70s, Leete continued to find pleasure and rewards in working. He became a fixture on Route 302, where he would sell vegetables or eggs out of the back of his pickup truck. He opened a sugar house and began selling maple syrup. He was no longer strong enough to get the chains on his truck anymore, so they bought a home in Florida and began spending winters there.
When he was in his 80s, he could be seen in Florida, selling authentic Vermont maple syrup by the side of the road or at local flea markets.
In 2015, when Leete was 89 years old, the doctors told him that, 47 years after his heart attack, his heart was finally giving out. For most 89-year-olds, they told him, the risks of surgery outweighed the benefits. Not so for Delbert Leete.
“He never was a smoker. Never was a drinker, per se. Worked hard,” said Gregory. “The doctor said, he is the perfect candidate for going through that operation. Because he had the body of a 70-year-old.”
“He surprised them down there when he came out of it,” Shirley Leete said.
Earlier this year, a 90-year-old Delbert was looking forward to the couple’s 70th anniversary. He’d planned a party to celebrate. Many evenings, he would play dominoes or cards with family members. By then, he was in and out of the hospital with a variety of complaints, but his appetite, famous in the family, never waned.
But one afternoon in June, he didn’t come home from a doctor’s appointment.
“We expected him to come home that same day but he didn’t,” Shirley Leete said. “He got over to the hospital and they just kept him there.”
He had been having problems with his liver, and at one point, his wife said, they thought he might have colon cancer. In the end, it was his kidneys that failed him.
But not his heart.
“His heart,” said his wife, “was good.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.