CANAAN — A funny thing happened to John Dow on the way to what looked like a long career in architecture — and a long way away from his native Canaan.
Make that two things, each of which conspired to lead the 1964 graduate of Mascoma Valley Regional High School back home for the last 43 years of his life.
First, in the early 1970s, his wife Chris’ mother mailed them a Prescott Lumber ad for someone to organize construction crews out of its yard in Meredith, N.H., where Chris had grown up. John took the company up on the offer, even though he was doing fine drawing up blueprints and plans for a firm in Boston, in the years after he graduated from that city’s Wentworth Institute and then served a stint with the Army in Vietnam.
“You know those Tudor buildings along the Everett Turnpike south of Nashua?” Chris Dow recalled last week. “He designed all of those, and a lot of hospitals and nursing homes down there and in Boston.”
Before long, Prescott figured out that its Meredith hardware store would benefit best from Dow’s expertise and instincts in architecture and all other aspects of building.
“The Lord had him right where he wanted him to be,” Chris said.
Well, an hour’s drive east of the ultimate destination. The second funny thing happened at the end of 1975: Hunting for someone to take over Webster and Sons Hardware Supply on Depot Street in Canaan, Myrl Webster called his daughter’s son in Meredith and offered to sell the business to Dow.
“It was totally out of the blue,” Chris recalled. “Our accountant told us, ‘If you do this, you’re crazy.’ But we decided that this was the best place to raise our kids.”
They ultimately raised four kids, the youngest of whom, Robin Dow Parker, now runs what her father, who died on March 30 at age 73, renamed Canaan Hardware & Supply in 1976 and turned it into an anchor of the village.
Bill Bellion estimates that the elder two Dow kids had arrived by the time he and his wife, who also had two, met John and Chris. And Bellion, who was teaching French at Mascoma High, quickly lost count of how many ways John Dow became an anchor, too.
“He was a very generous person, full of common sense,” said Bellion, now Canaan’s fire chief. “If I ever needed help, if anybody needed help, he would always be there. If he knew anything that would benefit the community, he wouldn’t hesitate to participate.”
Dow oriented himself back into his community in roles ranging from chairing the building committee for the Mascoma Community Health Center and umpiring baseball and softball games to tackling projects for the Canaan Lions Club and the Masonic lodge in Canaan.
“I never knew he was an architect until I started working with him on the building committee,” Canaan town manager Mike Samson said last week. “His experience came into play, and also his leadership ability. He gave us direction and kept us focused.”
Dow’s focus on whatever the task in front of him was sometimes a double-edged sword, even for those who admired him most.
“He had a lot going on, between the store and the community, and the recreational things he liked to do,” Robin Parker recalled. “Our mom always made sure to schedule him so that he could make it to our games and other activities, and so that we could take vacations together.”
Especially while Matthew, Robin, Johanna and Bethany made their way through Canaan Elementary School, Indian River School and Mascoma High, Bellion recalled, “John was very supportive of the school district. He would get up at school meetings, and if it was a tough year for teacher contracts, he would speak up for the teachers, and for the school budget in general.
“He knew the value of education.”
John and Chris spent their first few years at the store educating themselves about running a small-town business, as well as teaching their customers how to tackle projects around their homes and their work sites. During about 10 years at the Depot Street store, which John’s great-grandfather established in 1923, they added electrical, plumbing and paint departments and remodeled the sales floor … all while weathering almost annual floods in the basement and also maintaining four apartments upstairs.
“Once he went up to one of the apartments to change a bulb,” Chris recalled. “Somehow he went through the floor and found himself picking himself up in the tub in the bathroom downstairs.”
The high-maintenance factor helped prod the Dows to buy the former site of another family business, Webster Motors just east of the town common, from John’s cousin Gifford Webster, in 2005. They built a new store there, and in 2006, with the help of more than 100 volunteers, moved the inventory into the brand-new space.
Around the same time, Robin Parker was mustering out of the Air Force, where she’d worked as a mechanic. While pondering what to do next, “I started working on a part-time basis for a while, while also trying things like real estate and waitressing,” she said. “When I was a kid, I’d helped out sometimes after school, or at least hung out there, between sports seasons.”
Upon her return, Parker found the store much busier than she remembered from the old location, thanks in part to her older brother Matt’s efforts before he decided that running the place wasn’t his path. During Robin’s one or two days a week, “my perspective changed,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time shadowing him, following him around. And I started thinking, ‘It wouldn’t be that bad to take over the store and carry on.’”
During that apprenticeship, John Dow led his daughter into the family business more by example than his grandfather Webster had done with him.
“He was very, very gentle about it,” Parker said. “He never pushed the store on any of us, even though he really hoped we could keep it in the family. I looked at the growth of the store since the time I was a kid, and at how he was the go-to guy for customers who wouldn’t even talk to other people in the store.”
Once Parker started working full time in 2009, her father gradually introduced her to the customers and to the business.
“He was always so supportive,” the daughter said. “He never doubted my ability. I’d come in in the morning, and we’d sit down and talk about Canaan, talk about the store, about what we were going to do next.”
The partnership paid dividends to both. In 2011, Parker and her husband, Colin Parker, bought the business, giving John more time to golf, to go fishing with friends, particularly Brent Stevens, one of his many cousins. And in 2018, the trade magazine Hardware + Building Supply Dealer named Canaan Hardware one of the 100 best hardware stores in the United States.
“He was so proud of what Robin has done,” Chris Dow said. “She’s the go-to person now. She really walked in her dad’s shoes.”
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.