Victory, Vt.
“It was seven days a week, all day long and half the night,” recalled family friend Raymond Swift, of Norwich.
Somerville died on Nov. 3, at the age of 88, at his home in Victory, Vt. With his wife, Marlene, he had retired to the Northeast Kingdom town in 1996 after selling his dairy farm on Turnpike Road.
After a lifetime milking cows and tending crops, Somerville savored the freedom retirement offered — not that he slowed down much. He kept his commercial driver’s license and trucked cheese for Cabot Creamery, a pastime his son, David, described as “one of his real passions.”
He also entered his antique green Oliver in tractor-pulling competitions. “He was always trying to find something to do to it to make it better for his next pull,” David said.
Somerville grew up on his parents’ farm in Norwich, and began haying its fields at age 14. After graduating from Hanover High School, he entered the Army. His younger brothers Sherman and Jack also enlisted in the early 1950s, serving during the Korean War. While never sent overseas, Somerville was nevertheless a “proud veteran,” who marked his service by joining the American Legion and walking in town parades, said former neighbor Jay Van Arman.
On leaving the military, Somerville returned to Brookmead Farm in Norwich, eventually taking over for his parents. With his first wife, Greta, he raised an outstanding herd of Holsteins, with an average weight among the heaviest in the state.
“Genetics has come around in the last 30 years such that an 1,800-pound herd average is not much now,” Van Arman said, “but it was phenomenal at the time.”
Decades of experience and a strong work ethic contributed to the couple’s success. “You had to basically know which cows to cull out of your herd and you needed to know how to breed them,” David said.
David moved to Indiana in his 20s, but he remembers well working the farm during his youth. On occasion, the rest of the family — Dale, Greta, and sister Jennie — would depart on a two- or three-week vacation, leaving David to operate the farm on his own.
“For the first 15 years of him farming, he probably never took a vacation,” David said of his dad, “so when I got old enough that I could actually assume responsibilities, then he did periodically.”
The farming life required Somerville to be frugal. “He’d hammer nails straight and reuse them,” Van Arman said. “You can’t afford to pay mechanics every time something breaks, so he was kind of a jack-of-all-trades.”
Given the precarious nature of the farming business, Somerville thought often about the price of milk. One morning, he broached the topic with a teenaged Swift, who was helping milk his cows. “You know, farmers are their own worst enemy,” Swift recalled Somerville saying.
Somerville continued, “They’re making a pretty good living milking 40 cows, so they think they’ll make it better on 60. And when they get up to 60, they’ve got to hire a full-time person to help out, because they can’t do it on their own, and then to pay that full-time person you’ve got to go up to 80 cows so you’ve got enough milk to pay the person you’ve hired, and then the market gets flooded and prices go down.”
The competitiveness of the milk industry made life harder not just on Somerville, but also on the rest of Norwich’s dairy farmers.
“When I came to town there were 13 farms shipping milk, and now there’s none,” Van Arman said. “Zero.”
Swift’s son Joshua was the last to bow out, in April. But before he did, he met Somerville, when the retired dairy farmer returned to Norwich for a visit. Swift observed their conversation from afar.
“Dale was standing in there with my son, standing in the back behind the cows, and you know, they both had their arms crossed, and they were just talking,” Swift said. “I’m sure they were talking about the price of milk. It made me feel good to have my son learn a little something from him, too.”
Somerville was quick to lend a hand to young farmers, as his neighbor Roger Howes learned when his daughter Sarah approached him asking to buy a show heifer. Somerville was happy to oblige, and charged her just $25, a fraction of the going rate of $75 or $100. “I said, ‘Are you sure? Were you standing close enough to Dale? Are you sure that’s what he said?’ ” Howes asked his daughter. She’d heard correctly; Somerville even accepted payment in the form of rolls of nickels and dimes.
After Greta died of cancer, Somerville remarried, gaining five stepchildren. It didn’t take long for Anne Foley to develop an appreciation for her stepfather’s generosity. He rented her an apartment, and charged much less than he could have.
“It’s not because I was related,” Foley said, “because the house I live in has two apartments in it, and the other apartment has been rented to strangers, and he won’t raise the rent. I kept telling him, ‘You should raise the rent.’ ” But Somerville would reply, “No, no need to.”
Somerville spoke in a classic Vermont accent, and in a measured tone. His voice was so muted friends occasionally had trouble making out his words.
“Dale was extremely soft-spoken,” Howes said. “If you were in the barn with him and they were milking — you know, the noise from the cows and the noise from the milk machine — I had a hard time hearing him sometimes. You had to step right along to hear him.”
Somerville’s quiet way of speaking belied his popularity in Norwich. He made friends easily, through farming, trucking, snowmobiling, or at town Selectboard meetings.
“When he did speak you should be listening and paying attention,” Swift said, “because just about everything he said you could learn something from.”
Gabe Brison-Trezise can be reached at g.brisontrezise@gmail.com.