WHITE RIVER JUNCTION — For her 40th birthday, Rhonda Littlefield decided to take a flyer.
Literally.
She persuaded her husband, Gordon (Shaver) Littlefield, to join her in a parachute jump out of an airplane in Maine. Although Shaver said he initially thought the idea was “nuts,” he decided to give it a go.
When the plane reached an altitude of 12,000 feet above the Maine landscape, Rhonda was the first out the door.
“See you at the bottom?” Rhonda teased the uncertain Shaver as she dove into the sky, her backside harnessed to the front of a professional parachutist.
Her husband dutifully followed.
“Rhonda was a thrill-seeker,” Shaver Littlefield acknowledged with a laugh last week, adding they also went parasailing together in Hampton Beach.
“Then she wanted to try bungee jumping which she never got to,” he noted.
Fearless with an indefatigable work ethic, “tough as nails,” selfless, loyal, a skilled seamstress and devoted to her extended family and friends, Rhonda Littlefield died on Sept. 28 at the Jack Byrne Center for Palliative and Hospice Care in Lebanon, eight months after she received a fatal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
She had turned 65 years old just 40 days earlier.
The fourth of five children of Fred and Betsy Davis — the Davis family goes back seven generations in Hartford — Rhonda Littlefield and her siblings grew up in a house behind where tow truck operator Sabil & Sons is located on Route 14.
As nearly the youngest in a brood of five — and countless older neighborhood kids coming over to the Davis house — Rhonda learned to hold her ground early.
Inside the family, she was called “Newspaper” because of her well-trained antennae to pick up sibling shenanigans —which, they recall forgivingly, she didn’t hesitate to report.
“There were no secrets with Rhonda,” recalled David Snow, who is married to Rhonda’s sister Linda Snow.
After graduating from Hartford High School in 1978, Rhonda got a job at Lebanon Crushed Stone in West Lebanon. Despite the roughneck workplace, she had no problem fitting in.
“One thing about Rhonda: she was tough,” her brother, Steve Davis, said.
Rhonda worked her way up to “running the scales,” weighing the incoming and outgoing trucks, doubled in the office as a bookkeeper, bid on jobs, processed Department of Transportation paperwork, even oversaw the employee drug testing requirements.
“She was always driven,” said Davis. “If you hired Rhonda, she ran the job like it was hers. When she wanted a house, she got a second job working nights at Sears. She had two jobs most of the time.”
Lebanon Crushed Stone changed hands and Rhonda switched to RDS Transportation in White River Junction, where she spent the next 15 years, first as dispatcher, then safety director. After RDS closed, she returned to LCS (now Pike Industries) as scale master.
Back at her former employer, many of the young truck drivers with whom she had worked previously were still there. As before, Rhonda held crusty crew in line.
“That’s why the guys liked her so much. They’d make a crack at her and she’d just sling it right back at them. There was no bullying Rhonda,” David Snow said.
One of the longtime truckers at Pike was Shaver Littlefield, who first met Rhonda in 1980 when he was 20 years old.
She was dispatching trucks to jobs and “sending me all over the Valley,” Shaver related.
A marriage to her first husband, Michael Murphy, did not last but Rhonda now had two young children, Kristen and Ryan.
A romance blossomed.
Shaver said Rhonda’s “piercing ice-blue eyes” hit him like “kryptonite to Superman.”
“Everywhere we went together somebody would say to Rhonda, ‘You have the most beautiful blue eyes I’ve ever seen,’ ” her husband recalled.
Besides their daredevil airborne activities, Shaver said Rhonda loved to “ski, golf, (go to) the beach, or just go off, ride around, stop and have lunch somewhere,” as well as spending time at the Davis family camp at Island Pond, Vt., in the Northeast Kingdom.
“She was always a happy-go-lucky all the time,” he marveled.
Rhonda’s seemingly inexhaustible capacity for work did not sideline her from an abiding commitment and generous love of her family and and friends.
The members of Hartford High School class of 1978, to this day, remain very close. And much of the credit for that goes to Rhonda who acted as the unofficial class secretary, said Donna Sheppard, a classmate and childhood friend.
Active in the alumni association, Rhonda would make sure classmates continued to celebrate each other’s birthdays, organize outings, spearhead fundraisers, build floats for parades and meet on the weekends for lunch at Harpoon Brewery in Windsor.
“She could take charge of any situation,” Sheppard said.
More than 70 members of the class of 1978 attended Rhonda’s memorial service at Knight Funeral Home on Route 5, family members counted.
“It felt every other person that was coming through shaking hands was, ‘I’m a classmate … ‘I was a classmate’ … ‘I was a classmate,’ ” Rhonda’s stepdaughter, Kesstan Nestle, said.
The reception was at the Elks Club in Hartford — which was founded by Rhonda’s great grandfather, Fred Davis — and one of her favorite places to socialize with friends.
Her attentiveness and giving nature came naturally.
Kristen Connors, Rhonda’s daughter, said her mother “was always willing to jump on and help out when it came to any of our childhood activities.”
“But the most valuable lessons she taught me – and I quote – ‘learn to drink black coffee, so you will always have a cup to drink; learn to drive standard so you can always drive in an emergency; and learn to be an independent and strong women, so you can always care for yourself and your family.’ “
She recalled her mother “the hardest working woman I ever have known and those values are ones I am incredibly grateful to her for.”
Rhonda “never met a person that she couldn’t somehow take care of or be there for the worst of the worst. She was a mother figure,” said Kesstan Nestle, who became Rhonda’s stepdaughter when her father married Rhonda in 2003.
Nestle said that although she didn’t meet Rhonda until she was an adult with her own family, her stepmother unhesitatingly embraced and welcomed her into her life.
“I was really nervous about a stepmom,” Nestle said. “She emailed me first saying, ”Just to answer any questions … I love you and can’t wait to meet you.’ The same with my three kids. My youngest was 3 and it was like an instant Grammy.
“There was never an awkward adjustment period,” she said.
Rhonda’s 12 grandchildren became the focus of her life.
“Once the grand kids started popping out, she couldn’t ask for anything ever,” Shaver said.
Rhonda’s passion was sewing and she would be up and working in her sewing room at 5 a.m. on a weekend morning.
“She really showed her love through making things for people. She always made sure it was personalized for you, your favorite colors or your favorite animal,” Nestle said.
Rhonda made everyone in the family their own Christmas stockings with their names embroidered on the top.
“You get a new baby and you’d get a new stocking to match,” Nestle said.
Rhonda planned to make a quilt for each one of her grandchildren and had completed 10 out of 12 at the time she died. Shaver estimates she stitched nearly 50 quilts over the years, bestowing them on all family members.
The quilts were “super-important to her, especially towards the end,” Rhonda’s son, Ryan Murphy, said. “She stressed it over and over again how she wanted them for everybody. Her heart was in those quilts.”
As she was getting sicker, Rhonda knew she wouldn’t reach her goal. So she designed the patterns, selected the cloth, and left detailed instructions in notebooks for Nestle and Murphy’s wife, Jenna, so they would be able to finish them for their own children.
“She was able to have all that laid out for us. And now we’re just putting them together,”
Nestle said.
When Rhonda got word of her cancer diagnosis in January, she kept it low-key, waiting several weeks before calling the family together for a pizza dinner to break the news.
As family members began to cry, Rhonda would have none of it.
“She said, ‘Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine,’ ” Rhonda’s sister, Linda Snow, recalled her gently insisting.
“She didn’t want sympathy,” said her brother, Steve Davis. “At the end of the day, she never asked for anything.”
“She wanted to give us hope,” Ryan Murphy, her son, explained.
In the last months of her life, Rhonda continued to go in to work because she wanted to make sure that the person taking over her duties — she had reluctantly consented to “retire” — would be properly trained in the tasks.
“She would take her chemo on Friday so that she could rest all up weekend and go back to work Monday,” Betsy Davis, Rhonda’s mother, said.
The end came quickly, family members said.
When informed that the cancer had gotten to the point where her option was to “go to the ICU unit or the Jack Byrne Center, she looked at me and she looked at the doctor and said, ‘I want to go be comfortable,” Shaver, Rhonda’s husband, recounted.
Less than 24 hours later, Rhonda Littlefield died.
“She wasn’t afraid,” Shaver said.