LYME — Don Penfield knew his way around boats. Even at the end of his life, he was repainting hulls and examining engine rooms.
But understanding the measure of bliss in ignorance, Penfield didn’t let his innate wherewithal keep him from aquatic adventure.
On a spring morning, Penfield took his young children in a canoe ripping down the chutes of a snowmelt-socked White River. The adventure ended with a human chain of onlookers hoisting Penfield’s four children, ranging in age from 2 to 8, to safety on the shore.
“I don’t think he was worried,” his daughter Tracy said.
“I know I wasn’t,” his wife, Abbie, said.
With a family life spent on boats, the Penfields were each other’s first mates.
“We needed crew, so we created one,” Abbie said. She met Don while he was in college at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn., and she at Wellesley. They were married in 1955, a week after they graduated.
Penfield died Dec. 13, after a decades-long war — with many battles won — against cancer. He was 90 years old.
Born and raised in Illinois, Penfield fostered a love of sailing with his father on Lake Michigan.
Later, with their four young children in tow, Abbie and Don moved to the Upper Valley from the suburbs of Chicago when Don enrolled in Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business in 1964. The Penfields made Lyme their home and have stayed since. Together, Don and Abbie took to rural life — its challenges, its opportunities — with zeal.
When they weren’t on boats, they were on horses, which they learned to care for together. Penfield bought a beat-up trailer, which came with a bargain horse, to haul his children and animals to 4-H equestrian club meetings in Woodstock.
Through the course of Penfield’s professional life, he stood at the helm of a number of wide-ranging companies. He was president of H.W. Carter, a work apparel manufacturer in Lebanon, for four years starting in 1967. After a stint running the Deerskin Trading Post in Deerfield, Mass., Penfield took over as fiscal dean of the Dartmouth Medical School in 1975. He oversaw the colossal task of merging the medical school, Mary Hitchcock Hospital and the Dartmouth Clinic.
But his name, he joked, was an acronym for “Doctor Of Nothing.”
Ever the matchmaker, Penfield introduced longtime family friend Dick Schellens to his second wife. He also got him a job at the medical school.
“His secretary would come in with about two minutes until the hour and say ‘Don, remember, you have a meeting with the board of overseers at three o’clock.’ And there would be all this frantic activity in his office and grumbling. One minute after three he’d come tearing out of there with his briefcase and papers all over the place, and he’d dash out of our office,” Schellens said.
“Everyone would breathe a huge sigh of relief.”
Where the play-it-by-ear-attitude caused some drama in his work life, the same style fostered adventure in his travels.
Just before he turned 50, Don left his job at the medical school and, along with Abbie, sold their house in Lyme and put their horses and dogs in someone else’s care. The two bought a barge in Europe and took to the continent’s canals and oceans, beginning a chapter in their life that saw more than 100 visitors aboard Zeepaard, christened the Dutch word for seahorse.
“He’d never had a barge in Europe before, or a barge in general,” Schellens said, describing Zeepaard as “a great big iron claw-foot bathtub, but without the feet.”
“It’s not something you can just take a class on. But I think Don said, ‘We’ll figure this out.’ And they did. The family stepped on board one day and said, ‘OK, let’s head off somewhere.’”
In that first year on Zeepaard, outrunning winter as it crept down to southern Europe, the Penfields decided to take to the seas.
“That boat was designed to be in the canals, in protected waters,” Schellens said. “And here it was, out on the open Mediterranean.”
Schellens, who was invited to join the Penfields along the coast of Italy, remembers Penfield weathering the combative shouts of lockmasters, in Italian, as the barge pulled up to locks unannounced. Don would try to charm his way through with smiles and waves.
Penfield prided himself on his ability to make connections with people. The skill extended to building connections between others, too. “He was really good at helping people communicate with each other,” Tracy said.
He’s remembered for maintaining lifelong friendships across the country and the world, and the networks that he so carefully maintained, he liked to put to work.
“He was a savvy businessman, and he did not do things for no good reason,” said Lyme Town Clerk Patty Jenks, who knew Penfield since she was a child herself growing up in town. “And you could trust him to be candid. You could trust him to say no to a bad idea, and that meant that you could really think through projects with him.”
Jenks and Penfield bounced ideas off of each other regarding senior housing and conservation in town. He was active in LymeCommunity Cares and the Lyme Utility Club. He was a prolific donor to a number of other local philanthropies, including Dartmouth Hitchcock, Northern Stage and SafeArt.
Penfield was initially diagnosed with throat cancer in 2000. “He almost died that first time,” Tracy said.
Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation bought him more than two additional decades. “His primary care physician said, ‘Don, I don’t know what’s keeping you alive,’ ” Tracy said. “It was his will, which was intense and strong.”
The staunch will also meant that Penfield could be aggressive and irreverent, she added. “It would be an incomplete picture without including that,” she said.
“If he wasn’t on your side, you’d better cross the street,” Abbie added.
But the irreverence was balanced with its inverse. “He also had a lot of reverence — for people who strived, for honesty, for courage,” Tracy said. “He was a supporter of the underdog.”
Penfield badly wanted to see a female U.S. president. He stumped door to door for Hillary Clinton in 2016. He was the first treasurer of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England.
After returning from Europe in the 1980s, the Penfields built a new home in Lyme — an eight-sided jewel that sits high on a hill with wraparound views. In a nod to Zeepaard, the Penfields named their property Seahorse Hill. The house is decked out in seahorse iconography.
“Don just always liked the idea of an octagonal house,” Abbie said. He hauled the granite himself back home from a quarry in a pickup truck.
Penfield ran Hanover Transfer and Storage from 1986 until he retired in 1999. Tracy recalled driving down Main Street in Hanover and seeing her aging father on a ladder, hanging flags for the Fourth of July. In the winter, when his business was short-staffed, Don would be out back on the streets in the middle of the night, plowing snow.
Five years ago, Penfield was put on a feeding tube, a particular hardship because “speaking and eating were two of his favorite things,” Tracy said.
But it’s what he had to do to extend his life.
He had promised one of his granddaughters he would dance with her at her wedding, which was on their property in Lyme last July. Penfield did just that, and he and Abbie danced together, too.
Tracy remembered climbing the hill back up to the house after the wedding around midnight and seeing her father, changed into jeans, still in his nice shirt, sitting alone and listening to the party below.
“In that moment, I knew he was content with the life he had made,” Tracy said. “That wasn’t easy for a guy who was always looking for the next thing.”
Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at fmize@vnews.com or 603-727-3242.