Sharon
Potter’s grandson, Dustin, recalls that as a child when his family got a new puppy, his grandfather told him a distemper shot was to keep the puppy from turning mean, or developing a bad temper.
Dustin’s father Dale, one of Potter’s three sons, eventually gave Dustin the correct information — the canine distemper vaccination protects against a respiratory virus. From that experience and others like it Dustin, now 35, learned to ask his grandfather: “Is that the truth or are you just pulling my leg here?”
“He was so good at keeping a straight face,” said Dustin.
The challenge of discerning fact from fiction in his grandfather’s words, however, didn’t discourage Dustin from going back to “Gramps” time after time for advice on a wide variety of topics, including maple sugaring, gardening, carpentry, foraging, hunting, fighting fires and throwing horseshoes.
“He taught me many things you can’t read from a book,” Dustin Potter said.
But now Roland Potter, who shared his knowledge, time and talents with many in Sharon during decades of service to the town, is no longer available to dispense sage or humorous advice. He died on Jan. 16, 2018, at 87 at Gifford Medical Center in Randolph after pneumonia, a fall and several years of battling cancer.
“I don’t have that person to call anymore,” Dustin Potter said.
Leon Sheldon, a close friend of Potter’s, would also call on Potter when he had a question about how to tackle a job.
“Roland was a true Vermonter, you know,” said Sheldon, who moved to Sharon from Massachusetts 30 years ago. “He knew how to fix just about anything.”
Born to George and Helen (Kenyon) Potter on Sept. 1, 1930, Potter grew up on his family’s farm in Pomfret. He was the middle child of seven.
He attended school in Pomfret through the eighth grade. Afterward, he worked on their family farm.
One of Potter’s pastimes as a young man was going to dances at nearby grange halls, where participants would waltz, polka and square dance. It was at one of these dances that 17-year-old Roland Potter, dressed in a white shirt, necktie and jacket, met his future wife, the then 15-year-old Phyllis McDonald.
“Oh, God, he was a good dancer,” Phyllis said.
They’d dance all different kinds of dances and at the end of the night, Phyllis said Potter would take off her glasses “so we could lean in real close.”
The couple married on Oct. 14, 1950, at her family home in Sharon.
A man of many talents, he worked for a time at the nearby Gibson Saw Mill and then worked the McDonald family farm on Route 14, which the couple purchased from Phyllis’ parents.
He switched gears, however, after Interstate 89 cut through the Sharon property. He worked as a butcher, operated his own carpentry business and, until last year, served as a caretaker for an out-of-town Sharon property owner. He also was a skilled dowser and forager.
“He did a lot around, but that wasn’t his main thing,” said Phyllis. “His main thing was family.”
The couple had four children: David, Dale, Darlene and Darryl; nine grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren.
Though Potter was often busy, he almost always came home for meals, his granddaughter Georgia Potter said. Phyllis cooked. Dinner was always a vegetable, mashed potatoes with butter and some kind of meat, Georgia said. For dessert, Phyllis would bake pie or cookies, or “some type of sweet,” Georgia said.
Phyllis had her own way of managing Potter’s seemingly endless stream of jokes: “She’d say ‘Oh, shut up, you smart ass,’ ” Georgia said.
“They just had that kind of old-school relationship,” said Georgia, who as a kid spent much of her time with her grandparents while her parents worked. “It was just fun to be around them.”
One of the reasons Dustin Potter so valued his grandfather’s advice was because it came from a different era. Because he had farmed before farming became highly mechanized, Potter recognized the difference technology has made. Growing up using hand tools to cut hay, Potter told his grandson that the first sickle bar mower pulled by horses was like “sliced bread.”
Potter shared a similar view with a Valley News photographer in 2008, when she captured a photograph of him plowing snow with an International L-Boy tractor. He said at the time that the tractor “saves me a lot of shoveling.”
Potter’s decades of service to the town included helping to found the Sharon Volunteer Fire Department Association, and serving as town fence viewer, road commissioner, dog warden and town constable. He also helped found the Sharon Community Television Service and the town’s horseshoe league.
Georgia Potter, 26, credits her grandfather’s long-time role as town constable for her career in law enforcement. She currently works in the Windsor County State’s Attorney’s Office.
Sharon doesn’t have a police department of its own, so the constable is responsible for keeping an eye on things in town. Potter helped control traffic during town events such as the Old Home Day parade and during the annual Sprouty road race. Traffic control was something he continued even as his health deteriorated. Georgia said he would stand in the road with his oxygen tank.
Potter also did a fair amount of dog catching, enough so that he and Phyllis had an informal pound behind their house.
“If you were to ask a lot of people, they know him through the dog-catching business,” Georgia Potter said.
A tribute in this year’s town report celebrates Potter’s years of dedication to the town, including the good humor he brought to his role as a poll watcher.
“More than one generation of voters will recall Roland guarding the ballot box at Town Meeting and November elections,” the report said. “There were few dull moments at the polls. Roland was a great prankster — hiding unguarded coffee cups, papers, pens, and belongings of other poll workers. His laughter was contagious.”
His younger sister, Norma Vincent, the last remaining of the Potter siblings, also lives in Sharon and fondly remembers working and laughing next to her brother during town voting. She would check in voters while Potter was tending to the ballot box.
“He would hide my Thermos,” Vincent said in a phone interview from her winter home in Arizona. “I’d bring a pillow to sit on and that would be missing. He just was that type of guy.”
Roland and Phyllis also took in Vincent’s young family years ago when the Sharon apartment they were living in was destroyed in a fire.
The family, which at the time included a 3-year-old and 6-month-old, “needed a place to stay,” Vincent said. “Of course they welcomed us in.”
Potter also shared generously of his time and talents with other groups in town. Potter and Sheldon often teamed up to make repairs at the Sharon Congregational Church, where Phyllis plays the organ. They strung the Christmas lights each year.
And Sheldon, who worked as janitor at The Sharon Academy until last June, knew he could call on Potter to give him a hand any time.
Potter was “a real good friend,” Sheldon said.
Together, they did things like build railings for a ramp at the town’s food shelf, Sheldon said. Knowing Sheldon could use a hand, Potter would also help him sharpen the blades on his John Deere riding mower.
“I was always a flatlander, and flatlanders don’t know anything,” Sheldon said.
Sheldon, like Dustin Potter, grew to be wary of Potter’s sense of humor. One of Potter’s favorite tricks was to come into the church through a side door while Sheldon was vacuuming, pull the plug and then watch while Sheldon tried to figure out what was wrong with the machine.
“After I looked the vacuum cleaner over, I started going to the source and there he was,” Sheldon said.
Kidding aside though, Potter taught his friends and family the value of being an active member of the community, Dustin said.
When “he saw there was a need for something, if there was a way for him to do it he’d do it,” said Dustin, who is one of several members of the Potter clan now serving on the town’s fire department and playing in the horseshoe league.
In a fitting tribute, people turned out in the hundreds for his funeral in January, Dustin Potter said.
The line of cars, nose to tail, stretched the mile from the Sharon church to the fire station where the reception was held following the funeral.
“We paused the town for him,” he said. “You don’t really get that kind of notice … unless you were somebody that really touched the community.”
Valley News Staff Writer Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
