Lebanon
“What I remember was her smile — just radiant,” Dunten, who lives in Wilder, recalled last week. “And she really, really loved music. When we were in the choir, I sang flat and she sang sharp.”
Mae Papademas sang at a sharp pitch, an anomaly in most western European and North American choirs and more common in her parents’ native country of Lebanon, for as long as Linda Armstrong could remember.
“She used to say, ‘I know I sing sharp; that’s the way the music is from there,’ ” Armstrong, 71, a lifelong member of Lebanon’s Methodist Church and now its choir director, said. “She still was always accurate on the notes.”
Almost until she died in June at 95, Papademas cut to the chase as sharply in person and in print as in song.
“She wasn’t quiet about letting you know how she felt about anything,” said Enfield resident Marilynn Capron, with whom Papademas bowled in a women’s league during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Lebanon officials heard that voice early and often in the spring of 2008, during the project to widen School Street, aka Route 120, for bike lanes.
First, she confronted workers who had just cut down, with no warning, the two sugar maples she had planted in front of her three-story house more than 30 years before.
Then they tried to get a word in edgewise, advising her to call City Hall with her complaint.
“Forget that!” Papademas recalled replying, in a May 2008 story by Valley News columnist Jim Kenyon. “’I’m going to call a lawyer.’”
The widow of former Grafton County Attorney and Lebanon District Court Judge N. George Papademas, and the mother of Lyme lawyer Nancy Papademas, wasn’t bluffing. Before long, the City Council was pledging to limit the widening project to a single bike lane instead of the planned two, and to plant mature trees in front of Papademas’ house and others along School Street that lost trees.
By this time, Papademas’ convictions were already familiar to readers of letters to the editor to the Valley News, particularly after her husband of 56 years died in 1999.
Aside from poor grammar, few things annoyed her more than Republicans. She lambasted President George W. Bush for his policies, foreign and domestic, in a number of letters during his presidency, then castigated GOP leaders in Congress for obstructing President Barack Obama’s effort to establish the Affordable Care Act.
“I’ve been home for a short while after being in the hospital for five months with a fractured back,” she wrote in October 2009. “Three months of that was spent waiting — for appointments with specialists, for appointments for tests and test results and for another needed operation, all of which could have taken only two months instead of five. That is a lot of wasted time and money for me and for Medicare. … If our president wants to pass a partisan bill, I think he should do it, because it’s for the good of the country and not for the Republican Party, which put this country into the biggest mess it’s ever been in.”
Marilyn Dunten appreciated her friend’s feistiness.
“We were both outspoken,” Dunten said. “We could have a talk and argue about something and not take it personally.”
Well, except maybe for the time they were discussing a court case in which Dunten was involved.
“At one point she told me, ‘Oh, then it was your fault,’ and I had yelled and screamed and left,” Dunten recalled. “But by the time I got home, she had called and apologized to me. She said, ‘I thought about it and I didn’t realize how easy it was to blame the victim.’
“She was not afraid to say she was wrong.”
Nothing much scared Papademas, who grew up in northeast Massachusetts, the daughter of mill workers.
Later in adulthood, she was one of the Methodist Church parishioners most passionate about steering the congregation to adopt an “open and affirming” policy of welcoming members of various sexual orientations — one of just six in New Hampshire at the time.
“We had a lot of meetings and educational events to become a ‘reconciling’ church,” Linda Armstrong said. “It was kind of an act of rebellion against the larger denomination. She had that courage.”
Throughout her life, music helped Papademas to smooth out the sharp edges, and she shared her love of the art’s charms with her daughters Diana, Nancy and Linda. Linda, the youngest daughter, has sung in nearly every local chorus over the past 40 years, and ran a small steel-pan ensemble in the early 2000s.
“Ma told me that for a long time she played piano by ear,” Linda Papademas, who now lives in Enfield, recalled recently. “When I was a baby, apparently, I screamed so much, she didn’t do it as often. But she always, always sang — sang in the choir, and sang little songs to us. She loved little kids beyond measure. She was on the floor playing with you, singing I’m a Little Teapot and Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”
Mae’s devotion to hymns, and to the Methodist Church, deepened as her daughters grew up and left the School Street house.
“When I was growing up in the church I didn’t notice characteristics of people as much, but I did know that she was just there, always there,” Armstrong said. “You didn’t overlook her. She was very busy.
“And when I came back and started directing the choir, I noticed that she was hands-down the most faithful member. She won the prize for always being there. … I can still see her puttering down the sidewalk in the snow for rehearsals, with her walker.”
Even as time, deteriorating hearing and that back injury slowed her down, requiring long rehab stays at Genesis HealthCare’s Lebanon Center, Papademas welcomed every chance to raise her voice.
“When members of the choir went to the nursing home to sing Christmas carols, there was one instance when I had pitched Silent Night a little on the low side,” Armstrong said. “She didn’t snap at me, just corrected me. ‘I had to have a C,’ she said. She knew that she needed to do that in order to sing the alto part.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com and at 603-727-3304.