WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — In less than an hour that day in 2007, David Munro dispelled any doubts that Jeanne McLaughlin harbored about taking the reins of the nonprofit Visiting Nurse and Hospice of Vermont and New Hampshire.
Truth to tell, the agency’s guardian angel won her at “hello.”
“When I came for the interview, he picked me up at my hotel, took me to dinner, and then drove me on a tour around the Upper Valley,” said McLaughlin, who retired as CEO in 2018. “He talked about the Upper Valley with tremendous fondness for the culture, for the kindness and generosity of the people. He talked about the advantages of having Dartmouth College and Dartmouth-Hitchcock here. He was just so earnest about the area, and he was so proud of the VNH.”
Until he died on June 26 at age 82, the Massachusetts-born Munro wore that pride on his sleeve. Make that sleeves, both of which he first rolled up to help jump-start a home-health agency in White River Junction in the 1970s.
“In the beginning, we held meetings in farmhouses, in church basements, in our own living room,” said Sally Munro, his wife of 56 years. “It was a great way to get to know the community. He didn’t mind calling people and saying, ‘Hey, We need somebody to serve on this committee and that committee.’ ”
Munro also helped shepherd the nonprofit through a succession of mergers with health agencies small and large, with the aim of keeping pace with the rising population of aging residents on both sides of the Connecticut River. And he did it while juggling his day job in the purchasing office of Dartmouth College — and a variety of volunteer and elected positions in the town of Hartford — including stints as town auditor and justice of the peace — with the activities of his and Sally’s daughters Sara, Heather and Hope during the 1980s and 1990s,
“Mom was an operating-room nurse, which made it hard for her to get away during the day, so Dad was our chauffeur,” Sara Munro, who now lives in Burlington, said last week. “Usually our meets and practices coincided with his work schedule, and he still kept up with the different things he was doing in the community and especially the VNH.
“It was very much a part of who he was. With both of our parents, having served in the Navy, there was never a question that they would give back somehow. This was the cause they cared most about.”
Munro devoted still more time to the VNH after the girls finished school and after he retired from full-time work in 2000. Even during the two or three months that he and Sally spent at their seaside cottage in York, Maine, “he had his phone,” Sally said.
“If there was something important going on, he’d go back to deal with it,” she said.
Between his terms as chairman of the board — four in all — the VNH’s staff could count on seeing the former Navy lieutenant at headquarters in White River Junction at least once a week.
“He knew all the people there, all the names, and he would walk around the building, asking how they were and thanking them for their work,” McLaughlin said. “He was one of those engaging, genuinely thoughtful, kind people. He understood that face-to-face was so much more important than emails.”
Taxpayers around the Upper Valley, especially in Hartford, grew accustomed to seeing Munro’s face at the microphone during the first half of March.
“He was always the champion of going to the towns, particularly on the Vermont side, on Town Meeting Day,” Lebanon resident Gary Mayo, a 10-year member and former chairman of the VNH board, said last week. “He always wanted to make sure people understood what they were paying for in the annual appropriation.”
When he wasn’t championing the agency with the public, Munro “kept us on the straight and narrow path at our meetings and at his committee meetings,” current board Chairman Steve Whitman said. “He was very serious about everything, from how money was spent to following the bylaws. He had seen it from a very small beginning through a lot of growing pains to what it is today.”
While Munro “was very strong on governance, a stickler for performance improvement,” McLaughlin said, “he also loved to tell stories of people he knew who had had a good experience with the agencies. It was really his baby.”
In declining health, Munro finally relegated custody to the next generation of board members in June 2018, the same month that McLaughlin retired and about two years after VNH, serving more than 140 towns in a 4,000-square-mile area, became an affiliate of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health.
That enabled Munro to spend more time in York with Sally and to more deeply indulge his love of reading and watching the change in tides.
In addition to the VNH, his family is encouraging contributions in his memory to the Howe Library in Hanover, for maintenance of the mobile app the library recently started.
“Dave never stopped working for the community,” McLaughlin said.
David Corriveau can be reached at dcorriveau@vnews.com or 603-727-3304.