Lebanon
So it was there, on Abbott Street, aiming to have a little fun, that Connelly lost her footing and crashed to earth, breaking her ankle.
“I’m sure she was very embarrassed,” said Anna Phan, one of her eight grandchildren. “But my grandmother was predisposed to do anything she wanted at any time.”
It was another slightly unusual occurrence in a long life full of them. Connelly, who died in June at 105 at the Laconia Rehabilitation Center, was born before World War I started and had her first child during the Great Depression. She wasn’t always inclined to adhere to the narrower roles given women in those times or in succeeding decades.
A seven-time letter winner in field hockey, basketball and track at Maine’s Wilton Academy, Brenda Gilman was also president of her 1931 graduating class and of the student council. The inscription with her yearbook picture, featuring a toothy grin and a curlicue of hair on her forehead, read:
” First in sports, First in school, First in the hearts of her schoolmates, That’s our ‘Shrimp.’ ”
The youngest of five girls in her family, she might have been diminutive in stature but she acquired an adult’s work ethic early in life. The family lived on a farm near Dryden, Maine, roughly a two-hour drive from Berlin, N.H., and while the first four girls helped their mother in the house, Brenda was her father’s assistant in the barn and fields.
The girl would ride a horse to school when the weather was good, tying it up behind the building. But the family moved to Wilton, then with a population of 3,000, when she was 12, after her father headed into the woods with an axe and didn’t return. His wife found him crushed beneath one of the trees he had cut down.
Wilton featured a woolen mill in which one of the Gilman sisters found work. Brenda came to know Robert Connelly, the mill’s superintendent and a man 12 years older, through that connection and when he would visit her house to borrow hunting dogs.
Connelly would also make sure to be outside polishing his car when he knew Brenda would be walking past his house. They were married when she was 18 and the couple soon moved to Lebanon so Robert could oversee a mill there.
“He asked her mother for (Brenda’s) hand in marriage and she said, ‘I guess so,’ ” said Nell Townsend Wirtes, one of Brenda’s grandchildren. “They knew of each other, but I’m not sure how much dating, if any, took place.”
The Connellys welcomed the birth of their first child, Doree, in 1932 at Hanover’s Mary Hitchcock Hospital.
A son, Robert, followed four years later and the family also suffered the death of an infant.
Doree Townsend recalls living first on Perley Avenue and then on Abbott Street, each location an easy walk or bicycle ride to the School Street elementary school.
While her daughter was in class, Brenda Connelly was at home, not only cooking, cleaning and doing laundry, but also mowing the yard and tending to a large vegetable garden. She also cared for Robert, who became mentally disabled after suffering from whooping cough as a youngster. He eventually moved to an institution and lived to be 58.
“She was a very hard worker and often tired at home,” said Doree Townsend, now 85 and a resident of Madbury, N.H. “But they’d still hold dinner parties with people from my father’s work and she’d do whatever needed to be done.”
That included cooking, of which Brenda knew next to nothing before her marriage. Her granddaughters recall her saying that she did things “however Betty Crocker told me to,” and being aided in her studies by her husband, who was more experienced in the kitchen.
“He had three older sisters, so there was a lot of pressure on her to perform,” said granddaughter Anna Phan. “It had to be pretty tough when you were brought into the family and didn’t have the skills you were supposed to have at that time.”
Connelly loved to read and along with omnipresent hunting and fishing magazines, numerous Reader’s Digest abridged books of the classics and beyond could be found around the house. Also in the mix was the latest in a string of English setters, which acted not only as companions, but as bird dogs for hunting trips to northern New Hampshire.
“They’d go to Back Lake in Pittsburg during Thanksgiving vacation week and almost always got a deer,” said Townsend, noting that the couple would often bring their house cat along to make the hunting camp seem homier. “That would provide venison stew.”
The Connellys’ Lebanon stay of more than 30 years ended when Robert retired in the 1960s and they moved to Sanbornton, N.H., midway between Concord and Plymouth. Twice a year, the couple would make the long drive to Florida and back, Brenda at the wheel, to ferry her in-laws to and from the Sunshine State.
The Sanbornton house was close enough to wooded areas that bears were frequent visitors and the Connellys would leave paw prints they discovered on the windows to show their grandchildren when they visited. The creatures would snuffle around outside the house at night and raid the bird feeders. One of them even approached Connelly as she was hanging wash outside one day, but she kept working with sheets and clothespins.
“She treated them with respect and didn’t worry about them,” Doree Townsend said.
The bears presumably kept their distance when Townsend, a nurse, and her husband, a military flight surgeon, arrived with a brood that would grow to eight children and usually included a dog. A red and yellow Volkswagen van with a tiny sailboat strapped to the roof would putter up the Sanbornton driveway or to the Back Lake cabin and chaos would ensue.
“My grandmother was very anxious to please us but I think she got a little stressed out,” Phan recalled with a laugh. “I have a feeling they prepared for weeks when we came and that their grocery budget was thrown way out of whack.”
The grandchildren swam in the lake, sunned themselves on its edges and hiked through the adjacent pine woods, its floor so thick with fallen needles that it was like walking on carpet. They hunted for crayfish under the dock and picked bushels of blueberries that their grandmother whipped into pancake batter.
Stuck in the minds of Connelly’s grandchildren is how she could sail or row a boat, fish as well as anyone on the lake and then cook the catch up into a delicious dinner or breakfast. She was not inclined to stand idly by, waiting for someone else to tackle a task.
“I always appreciated that about her and made sure my daughter grew up with that same approach,” Phan said.
As Robert Connelly slowed with age, his wife cared for him and the house. He died in 1989, but she remained in Sanbornton for another decade, by which time, maintaining the residence and property had become overly difficult.
She drove until she was 94 and stopped a year before her final state license expired because she didn’t want to buy a car to replace one that had rusted out.
Connelly could have had a private room at the Laconia nursing home where she lived during her final years, but she took a roommate and became fast friends with her. That was a woman named Flo Palmer, who kept Connelly aware of the start times for the Boston Red Sox baseball games and New England Patriots football contests she never wanted to miss.
Nursing home aide Linda Morse said that although Connelly was quiet and inclined to keep to herself, she was nonetheless beloved by the staff because of her upbeat personality and consistent gratitude.
“I know she must have been in pain at times, but you’d never know it,” Morse said. “Some people there are never happy and complain, but she looked for the good in life. I think that’s what kept her going for so long.”
Connelly sent handwritten thank-you cards to her doctors, ordered Florida grapefruit and oranges for the staff at Christmas and paid to keep a full bird feeder hanging from the eaves outside her room.
She enjoyed watching the acrobatics of thieving squirrels on the swaying container, as well as catching sight of groundhogs, foxes and deer on the edge of the nearby woods.
Morse bought Connelly a large stuffed bear for her bed. Nearby was a plastic container with numerous drawers filled with bite-sized candies and bars, free to whomever entered the room. For each of her birthday celebrations from 100 on, Connelly was treated to a martini with her specific preference of three olives.
“It was so cute to see her cheeks pink up,” Wirtes said.
On her final day, Connelly told the nursing home staff she wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want breakfast. She stayed in bed and died soon after, having lived on her own terms until the end.
“She was really interesting and someone I wish I’d known better,” Phan said. “She was a stronger female character than many of that time and she had a really healthy frame of mind.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.