Laconia, n.h.
I didn’t know Elizabeth Howard when I arrived as managing editor of the Laconia Daily Sun in May, though as months went by I came to appreciate her as the elegant writer from New York City who graced our Lake Style section every two weeks.
Things took a turn on Oct. 2, when I opened her column and read the words, “Forty-five years ago, in January 1973, I boarded a Greyhound bus in White River Junction, Vermont with one suitcase and a satchel of books headed for a garret apartment in Greenwich Village.”
Having grown up just across the Connecticut River from White River Junction, that sentence sparked my curiosity and led to a series of email exchanges and an improbable 50-year reunion.
I asked where she was from over that way. She had grown up in Littleton, she said, but her family moved to Lebanon for her last two years of high school.
I mentioned that I also was a Lebanon High graduate and, among other things, had worked as the news director at WTSL, the local radio station.
Her response completely floored me.
“We must know people in common,” she said, before mentioning, “My brother David was the news editor at WTSL.”
“Don’t tell me Betty Howard was your mother!” I replied.
Not only was she, but she still is.
Her mother, I was delighted to learn, was still alive at the age of 97 and, even better, lived about five minutes away from me in Laconia.
I have only faint recall of most of the adults from my elementary school years, but I remembered Betty Howard.
She was the librarian at the Hanover Street School in Lebanon, a woman who exuded sweetness and grace when my third-grade class visited the library for the first time.
“It’s important that you read,” she said softly to our group in a melodic voice. “It doesn’t matter what you read, as long as you read something.”
“Even comic books, huh?” I cracked from the back of the room, ever the wiseguy.
She looked right at me, her face kinder than ever. “If that’s what you like to read, that’s fine. As long as you read something.”
Wow, I thought, Mrs. Howard just gave me permission to read comic books. I told Elizabeth that story when she called me, and told it again when I called her mother, who seemed as sharp as ever on the phone. Her voice was strong and she sounded half her age.
I also told them about my fond memories of David, who was the first reporter I ever knew.
When I went into foster care in 1972, my foster father owned a small weekly paper. It was where I hung out most days after school, trying not to get underfoot, and David was the paper’s lone reporter. I can still see him — straight brown hair parted on the side, his square jaw set in determination — hunched over an old manual typewriter, banging out stories. I also remember that he made time for me and was kind to me at a time when I didn’t have a lot of friends.
David seemed so mature to my 13-year-old eyes, and he was, even though he was only about 19 or 20. He had graduated from Lebanon High, too, but hadn’t gone to college because he already had three reporting jobs. Besides the newspaper — and the radio-station gig Elizabeth mentioned — David also anchored the 11 o’clock news on the local TV station from a primitive hilltop studio that required a tractor to get to in the winter.
Who had time for college?
Finally, at the recommendation of an older fellow reporter who had befriended him, David enrolled to study journalism at the University of Richmond.
He graduated in May 1977, and by that fall I was a freshman in college. David was working for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a top-notch paper where he had interned as an undergraduate. He had a passion and knack for reporting, and he seemed on the fast track to great things.
Then, in early October of that year, my foster father called and told me David had suffered a brain aneurysm and died. He was only 24, and just like that, a bright light went out.
I shared a few memories of David with his family, for whom the timing of our reacquaintance was especially poignant, coinciding as it did with the anniversary week of David’s death.
“Oh my goodness,” his mother said on the phone. “I feel like I’ve got a part of him back.”
It was my turn to well up.
The notion that I could give that to a woman in her sunset years was more than I could ever hope for, and I felt touched by grace.
That alone would have been enough, but I got something else out of it, too.
My wife and I were invited to a Saturday breakfast at Betty’s, where we met Elizabeth for the first time. She was as elegant in person as she was on paper. She is, after all, her mother’s daughter.
We also met David’s twin brother, Peter, and his wife, Janice. My wife — Janis — and I felt an instant connection to them.
And Mrs. Howard — she’ll always be that librarian to me, even as she has become something much more — and I hugged in an everlasting embrace neither of us wanted to break. Even after we finally did, we held hands for the longest time.
It felt like a long overdue family reunion, one we repeated at Thanksgiving and shortly before Christmas.
Roger Carroll can be reached at roger.carroll.nh@gmail.com.