Lebanon
First he planted the 1936 Ford sedan in which he’d driven his wife Liz, a cat and a puppy home from Fort Sam Houston in Texas.
Over the next 4½ decades, his family lost count of the number of vintage cars Downes added to the collection while also teaching a high school band, running an upholstery business, playing baritone horn for and conducting several community bands, shepherding a church choir, helping to preserve Lebanon’s architectural heritage and volunteering for several civic organizations.
Finally, about three years after a collision between his 1984 Thunderbird and another car left him with injuries that all but confined him to the farm’s Federal-style brick house for the last three years of his life, Downes let his family start downsizing the Garden. One day, before the buyer of one of the cars came to haul it off, Downes asked his daughter Sue Downes Williams, to check whether a snake that had taken up residence still occupied the vehicle.
“She came back and said, ‘It wasn’t one snake,’” Liz Downes recalled on a recent warm afternoon, while sharing a cascade of chuckles with her daughter. “ ‘It was a family.’ ”
By the time Downes died on March 18, 2017, at age 74, only two cars remained: That 1936 Ford, and a black-and-yellow 1955 Ford Sunliner convertible with which he tooled around town and displayed at rallies of vintage cars.
“I think that was probably Dan’s favorite car,” Enfield resident John Carr, with whom Downes played in the Lebanon High band during the late 1950s, recalled. “He drove it whenever he could.”
The car impressed Lebanon resident Fran Hanchett long before she served with Downes on the committee governing the Soldiers’ Memorial Building in downtown Lebanon and on the board of the Lebanon Historical Society.
“Way back when I was in school,” Hanchett said, “I remember Danny driving around in his ‘Bumble Bee,’ as we called it.”
Whatever he was driving on a given day, Downes invariably met the many obligations he shouldered.
“He always showed up for the meetings,” historical society member Ed Ashey recalled last week. “Some get there periodically, but not for every meeting. He was always there.”
Downes learned that punctuality and loyalty in no small part from his parents Lloyd and Emmeline Downes, who lived across Meriden Road from the farm, next to Lloyd’s auto-repair garage for many years.
“I remember once with the Upper Valley Band, it must have been the early 1980s, we were playing on the Norwich Bandstand and it started to rain,” Downes told the Valley News after his father died in 2009. “People were running to their cars. Pretty soon, he and my mother were the only two people left on the green.”
While playing trombone for the Lyme Town Band, for the Hanover-Norwich Community Band — which under Downes evolved into today’s Upper Valley Community Band — and for the Oompa’s & Ma’s Band, Willy Black knew that Downes would arrive in plenty of time to conduct and to play.
“Danny was always prepared,” said Black, a former Hanover selectwoman now living in Lebanon. “You never had to worry about him showing up. You gave Danny a piece of music, he would play it. He could pick it up and play it.
“You could depend on Danny. When he said he’d do something, he’d do it.”
“It” over the years included jump-starting the Lyme Town Band, touring New England summers with the Yankee Brass Band, directing the choir at the Community Lutheran Church in Enfield, and coordinating the annual Thanksgiving dinner at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Lebanon and the weekly community dinners at Enfield’s United Methodist Church.
“He was always concerned and contributed to the benefit of others,” Carr said. “When he set up the meal program at the Methodist Church, he invited me there as a dishwasher. He put so much effort into making that community meal beneficial for everyone who attended.”
Somehow, Downes juggled paying work and his family with his devotion to his cars, to his music, to his diners at the churches, to Lebanon’s history and to the Lebanon Elks Club, the American Legion and the Mascoma lodge of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows.
After leaving a teaching job at South Royalton School in 1976, he used support from the GI Bill to acquire an associate’s degree from the New Hampshire Technical Institute in Claremont and start his upholstery business at the farm.
There, his daughters Sue and Carolyn soon “became his minions,” Williams recalled.
Her mother added, “He’d say, ‘I’ll buy you grain for your animals if you take this carpet apart.’ ”
The menagerie of ducks, chicken, geese and rabbits, as well as a long-lived goat named William (“Not Billy, but William,” Liz Downes said) and Liz’ hobbies, balanced out Dan’s obsession with his cars.
“Anything any of us ever wanted to try,” Liz Downes said, “he was fine with it.”
During his final three years, he was even fine with his family emptying out The Car Garden … except for the 1936 Ford and the Bumble Bee: “Those were sacred,” Williams said.
Over the past spring and summer, the family found worshippers willing to resurrect Dan Downes’ prized possessions.
“The Bumble Bee left on a flatbed just the other day,” his daughter Sue said two Mondays ago. “It was hard to see it go.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and by calling 603-727-3304.