Claremont
Merrill was a young mother, with a 3-year-old and 2-year-old twins, who was eight months pregnant in the fall of 1962. She and her husband, George O’Clair, recently had moved into an apartment on Bellic Street near Veterans Park with plans to buy a house on the same street for their growing family. But those plans came to a shocking and dreadful end when her husband left to go fishing on a Saturday morning and never returned.
What Merrill, who later remarried and now is semi-retired in Wyoming, vividly recalls from that terrible time is the small but meaningful gesture of the officers who came to take a police report.
As Merrill remembers it, they observed her serving her children breakfast and quietly looked around the apartment. Two hours later, they returned with two bags of groceries.
“You have no idea what that meant to me,” Merrill said in a phone interview last week. “It was wonderful.”
The kindness remained with Merrill all these years, and in August she sent a letter to the Claremont Police Department recounting how the officers’ kindness made a world of difference for her. She enclosed a $5,000 donation to the department.
The Claremont City Council accepted the donation last week and the department will start a fund in Merrill’s name to use the money for similar acts of service by officers, Police Chief Mark Chase said.
“Their kindness and quiet understanding of my situation was amazing,” Merrill wrote of the officers in her Aug. 8 letter to the department. “I had often thought about the officers; I am sure no one from that time is still at the police department but I wanted you and your officers to know that the good these officers did was lifesaving for us.”
Merrill said she gave police a description of her husband’s vehicle and a photo. Authorities later found the vehicle and some equipment on the New York side of Lake Champlain, but never found his body, and Merrill never heard another word.
“I was numb,” she said, describing her mood in the days and weeks after his disappearance. “You get up, feed the children, you do things. The next day you do the same thing.”
But with three children and a fourth on the way, Merrill, who had met her husband in Berlin while he was stationed in the service, needed to find a way to push forward with her family.
She said the city and county helped her find an apartment on Crescent Street. She began receiving assistance for food and worked nights in Hillsboro, N.H., for Sylvania Corp.
“They used to send a bus up to pick the workers up,” Merrill said, adding that a neighbor’s teenage daughter would sleep at her apartment to watch her children.
Her fourth child, a daughter, was born on Dec. 3, but because of some complications, she spent her first few weeks at Mary Hitchcock Hospital.
With no driver’s license, Merrill said, she relied on a woman in the city who would drive her to the hospital twice a week before her daughter came home, just before Christmas in 1962.
Happy to be working but hoping for something closer to home, Merrill regularly went to the area employment office on Pleasant Street.
“I next got a job at the Woven Label Co. (currently the Common Man restaurant on the Sugar River off Water Street) and worked there for a few years,” Merrill said.
It was during one visit to the employment office that everything began to change for the better for Merrill and her family.
She recalls the man in the office telling her about the federal Manpower Training Act that would pay college tuition and give her some money for housing and food.
“The young man working at the employment office said to me, ‘Have I got a deal for you,’ and then told me about the opportunity to go to school to become a (licensed practical nurse),” Merrill recalled. “I said, ‘Sign me up.’ ”
Merrill was in the second graduating class — Class of 1970 — of the new vocational technical college on Route 120, where she earned her credentials to become a licensed practical nurse. That led to a job at Mary Hitchcock Hospital, again at night.
“I really liked nursing. That was for me,” Merrill said. “I felt like nursing was my profession.”
She went on to earn an associate, bachelor’s and master’s degree, all in nursing, taking courses at different colleges and through correspondence classes.
At Sylvania, a co-worker introduced her to his nephew, Larry Merrill, who would become her second husband. He was in school to become a teacher, and graduated from Gorham State College (now the University of Southern Maine) in 1973.
“During that time, while he was in school, I worked at Maine Medical Center in their special care unit,” she said.
The family moved to Maine in 1970, then returned to live in Charlestown for a few years when Merrill worked at Springfield Hospital. In 1980, they moved to Wyoming, where her husband had a job opportunity in the education field.
“The kindness of the officers and the help that Sullivan County gave to me was the start of my career. I will ever be thankful to them and I plan on continuing to support the efforts they make in assisting people in need,” Merrill said in an email. “The schooling and the continuing education which I obtained in the U.S. Army (I retired as a colonel in 2002) from the Wyoming National Guard was my main way to independence and raising my family.”
Chase, the police chief, said he attempted to find officers who were on the force in the early 1960s, but none could remember the name or incident, which he said is not unusual for service calls. But Merrill remembers it clearly.
“Most people have no idea what it means when someone helps you like that,” Merrill said, sounding as appreciative today as she was in 1962. “It gives you a leg up and from there, I fly. It makes you want to move forward and do better.”
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.com.
