Etna, N.H. —
In 1963, he met his future wife, Ingrid Coucheron-Aamot of Stuttgart, Germany, who was in town visiting her brother, also stationed at CRREL. They were married in Stuttgart in December of 1965. Ed and Ingrid settled on their farm in Hanover Center in 1970, where they raised their two daughters. Ed single-handedly renovated the 200-year-old farmhouse, a labor of love and never-ending project he was still working on during the last months of his life. He loved his farm, and on any given day he could be seen riding his Kubota tractor.
In his younger years, he was an avid tennis and hockey player. With Ingrid, he skied the Wildspitz in Austria and Tuckerman Ravine on Mount Washington. During the 1970s, he coached Hanover youth hockey and was a ski instructor with Ford Sayre. For several decades he was a member of the Geriatric Adventure Society, participating in annual ski trips to the Dartmouth Grant. In recent years, you could find him most mornings biking the Northern Rail Trail.
At CRREL, Ed worked on the team that took the first deep ice cores of the Greenland ice cap, which returned a 100,000 year climate record. His work took him to polar and sub-polar regions of Earth, including drilling and engineering projects like the Alaska pipeline, the first off-shore pipelines in the Beaufort Sea, and underground storage facilities for nuclear weapon materials in Russia. He authored more than 120 reports and papers and twice received the Army Corps of Engineers’ highest honor for research and development.
After Ed retired in 1995, he began to collect, research and write about slide rules. He served on the Board of Directors of the Oughtred Society, an international slide rule collectors’ club, edited the monthly newsletter and never missed the opportunity to travel to a collectors’ meeting. He became well known throughout the organization for his keen intellect and vast knowledge of slide rules.
After Ingrid’s death in 2008, Ed worked diligently on a story about her life and Norwegian family history. He also delved deep into the life of the notorious Stephen Burroughs, a former resident of his house. He loved to regale people with stories about Ingrid’s and Stephen’s lives.
Ed leaves a huge void in the Upper Valley conservation community. He was a long time member of the Hanover Conservation Council where, starting in the late 1990’s, he served as liaison between the Council and Hanover Conservation Commission, stepping up to chair the Commission in 2009. He served on numerous Committees and it is unclear if even Ed could count how many meetings, trail projects, bridge building projects, and land protection projects to which he gave his time. In 2013, Ed achieved his goal of connecting community to conservation by conserving his beloved Alswell Farm with support from the Upper Valley Land Trust.
The month prior to his passing, he travelled to Switzerland, Germany, Finland and the Lofoten Islands of Norway. Typical for Ed, he packed the trip with visits to family and friends, the annual European slide rule conference and research on Ingrid’s family history. The weekend prior to his passing he finished mowing his fields in anticipation of winter.
Ed is survived by his two daughters, Christina Chamberlain and Karin Chamberlain, both of Etna; his brother David Chamberlain of Livonia, Mich., as well as a niece and five nephews in the U.S., Germany and Australia. He was predeceased by his wife Ingrid. He was especially close to the neighborhood children of Wolfeboro Road and his friend Anne’s grandchildren, who affectionately called him Farmer Ed.
Gifts can be made to Friends of the Northern Rail Trail in Grafton County (http://northernrailtrail.org) or the Upper Valley Trails Alliance (www.uvtrails.org). A memorial service will be held at the Church of Christ at Dartmouth College on December 2 at 1 p.m., followed by a reception at Alumni Hall in the Hopkins Center for the Arts from 2 p.m.to 5 p.m.