Quechee
With an eye for details, Lovell, who died in August at the age of 96, was known for taking a careful look at the town report and expressing a fiscally conservative view.
At Town Meeting in 2003, Lovell said Selectboard members should receive a flat rate of compensation for their time, without additional payments for attending extra meetings.
“I’ll be damned if I ever OK a bill for somebody to fill their gut at a legislative breakfast,” he said, according to a Valley News report at the time.
In addition to an empty chair at Town Meeting, Lovell leaves a void in historical knowledge of and deep concern for Hartford and its residents. Lovell served as a member of the Selectboard and as a lister. He sat on the charter committee and building and finance committee.
“He loved the town,” said his son David Lovell, of Quechee.
While his views sometimes may have come across as critical, Lovell had the best interests of Hartford residents at heart, his son said.
“He had a vision for this town,” said David Lovell. “He wanted people to be able to stay here (and) he wanted things to be affordable.”
Known to the community as an “old-time Vermonter,” Lovell relied on handshakes instead of contracts. He worked hard and expected the same of those who worked for him. He also offered help to his neighbors in times of need and had a smile worth earning.
Lovell was born on Feb. 6, 1920, to Clair Lovell Sr. and Lucy Jane Lovell in Springfield, Vt. The family — which included a younger sister, Rachel “Betty” (Lovell) Fountain, who now lives in Montana — moved to Wilder when Lovell was 10.
Once in Hartford, he attended a one-room schoolhouse on Christian Street for a year before going to a village school in Wilder. He graduated from Hartford High School — housed in what is now the White River School — in 1939. After graduation, Lovell briefly worked for a baking company before taking over the family-owned Lovell’s Market — located on Route 4 in White River Junction where the Pleasant View Motel is now — which specialized in processing meat. He also delivered meat and other groceries by cart.
White River Junction resident Michael Blood, who operated Blood’s Catering and Party Rentals on Route 5 until his son, Brendon, and daughter-in-law, Sara, took it over recently, remembers accompanying his father, Denny Blood, to help Lovell butcher deer during hunting season.
“My father would tell me time after time that Clair was probably one of the best butchers in the area,” said Blood, whose father worked as a meat cutter for a time.
Blood was 20 when his father died of a heart attack. Since then, Blood said he looked up to Lovell.
“He was just like a father to me,” Blood said.
He also found Lovell to be a ready business consultant. No matter what Lovell was doing, he would stop and say, ” ‘Yeah, I’ll meet you for coffee,’ ” Blood said.
It was perhaps his experience living through the Great Depression that made Lovell a successful businessman who was willing to try anything, Blood said. He encouraged the same fearlessness in other members of the business community.
” ‘Just have a lot of confidence in yourself and you can do it,’ ” Blood said Lovell advised him.
In addition to the meat cutting and delivery business, Lovell ran a farm off Route 4 in White River Junction, where Casella Waste Systems now has a location. There, he raised pigs which he sold as smoked ham and bacon and operated a slaughterhouse.
When Interstate 89 was built in the 1960s, it split Lovell’s farm in two and he moved to Quechee. There, he established a maple syrup business and developed the Sugar House Complex, the plaza along Route 4 that now includes All Decked Out, Barrow’s Point Trading Post and a barber shop. Lovell also built several homes in Quechee, some of which his relatives still live in today.
“He wasn’t happy unless he was building something,” David Lovell said last month outside the Sugar House Complex.
The complex, partially built in the late 1960s, originally housed Lovell’s sugarhouse. At its peak, the Quechee business sold 7,000 gallons of syrup a year, he said in a 2004 interview included in Hartford Historical Society oral history project.
“Maple has always been in my blood,” he said in the interview. “I tapped my first tree in Springfield when I was about 8 years old and boiled the sap down on a perfection oil burner, didn’t make much but had a lot of fun.”
Lovell, who chaired the Windsor County Sugarmakers’ Association, embraced technological advancements in sugarmaking over the years. For example, he was the first in the county to install a pipeline system, said David Lovell.
“He was willing to try anything the researchers came up with,” David Lovell said. “For being an old-time Vermonter, he was very open to technology.”
He shared his love of sugaring with others. Peter Schaal, of Wilder, purchased used equipment from Clair Lovell.
“He always encouraged us to stick with it,” Schaal said.
As a role model and through direct instruction, Lovell cultivated a strong work ethic in his son and granddaughter, Sandy (Lovell) Kempton, 43, of Quechee, as well as his employees and contractors.
“All Dad ever asked for was an honest days work for an honest dollar,” said David Lovell.
He invited contractors he liked to return time after time. At the end of the job, they wouldn’t leave without getting paid.
“It really hurt him to owe anything,” Lovell said.
Schaal, of Wilder-based Schaal Electric, was one of those who said Clair Lovell was a man of his word.
“You knew right where you stood with him,” Schaal said. “When you got your job done, he wanted to be squared up. I wish there were more people like him.”
Lovell’s fairness extended to his treatment of town officials. He asked a lot of questions, but he gave officials a chance to respond before bringing up questions at Town Meeting, said longtime Selectboard member and current chairman Dick Grassi.
“There are some people who like the ‘gotcha question,’ ” said Grassi. “He would pose the question and give you a chance to respond.”
Lovell’s trust, respect and friendship were hard-won, said Jim Tonkovich, of Wilder, who served on the Selectboard and charter committee with Lovell.
It was a give and take with Lovell. Showing him respect gradually won you his, Tonkovich, who later served on the School Board, said.
“Even though Clair was like anybody else looking out for his own pocket, he also put the town’s interest above anything else that might have swayed him,” Tonkovich said. “I respected the positions that he always came from.”
The two had opinions which sometimes put them at odds.
“He really hated the town spending a dime unless it was a really valuable thing for that dime to go to and a really necessary thing,” Tonkovich said. In contrast, “I sometimes thought the town should spend more than a dime.”
Lovell sought a balance between progress and preservation, Tonkovich said. As a businessman, entrepreneur and consciencious taxpayer, Lovell saw the need for development and building the tax base.
But, he also aimed to protect some elements of the past. For example, Lovell was among those who worked to preserve the old Wilder school, which closed when Dothan Brook School opened, Schaal said. Lovell also was sorry to see many of the region’s family farms fade, David Lovell said.
Overall though, Lovell “embraced change,” said David Lovell. “He knew it was the way it had to happen.”
And, his son recalled, he had a ready response to people who showed signs of not-in-my-backyard syndrome: “You could have bought that piece of property and left it the way it was,” Lovell would tell them.
Beneath Lovell’s sometimes gruff exterior, there was a smile worth earning, Tonkovich said.
“A lot of people never got many smiles out of Clair,” said Tonkovich. “If it was a smile like he was really glad to see you, that was really something.”
Kempton also fondly recalls her grandfather’s smile. He had a particular fondness for her daughter and grandaughter, and when they would visit Lovell at Cedar Hill Continuing Care Community in Windsor — where he lived from March 2015 until his death of dementia on Aug. 9 — he would smile and look for the girls.
Kempton’s relationship with her grandfather grew over weekly pancake breakfasts at the Howard Johnson’s Restaurant in White River Junction, which at the time purchased maple syrup from Lovell. Breakfast was not exempt from the range of Lovell’s opinions. He had a specific way he liked his bacon cooked, Kempton said. Crispy, and the old butcher wasn’t shy about telling that to the kitchen staff.
In addition to weekly breakfasts until she was about 16, the two bonded over maple candy. When Kempton spent the night with Lovell and his second wife Joyce (Holt) Lovell, she would brush her teeth under Joyce Lovell’s supervision. Then, before bed, Lovell would slip Kempton a maple candy.
In retrospect, “it was cute,” Kempton said. “She probably knew. He thought he was getting away with something.”
Lovell trained Kempton to work in his maple store in the Route 4 plaza. She began by dusting shelves. Once she mastered that task, Lovell asked her to do things like bag items, find things in storage and, eventually, to run the cash register.
“He always told me, ‘You’re going to be a hard worker,’ ” she said. “If you’re going to do a job, do a good job.”
Though he carefully watched expenses, he would spend his hard-earned money for important items for family and friends. Kempton said she was born with her father’s top jaw and her mother’s bottom jaw and the two didn’t match up. Her grandfather paid to correct her bite with braces when she was in middle school.
Quechee resident Henry Small, who often did small jobs such as lawn mowing for Lovell, also experienced Lovell’s generosity. Lovell and his wife weren’t able to attend Small’s retirement party when Small retired from his job as a security guard at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, but they did bring him a fishing net and two gallons of syrup, he said.
In another such instance, the motor on Small’s wood splitter broke a few years ago.
“I’m going to have to wait until I get some money to (fix it),” Small told Lovell.
Lovell told him to come to his house. Once Small arrived, Lovell asked his wife to write Small a check for $300, the cost of a new motor.
“I’ll get it out of his hide,” Lovell said.
And he did. Small paid him back in labor.
“He treated me fair; he treated everybody fair,” Small said. “He was one of them fellas, if he was a car salesman you could buy a car off him unseen.”
Nora Doyle-Burr can be reached at ndoyleburr@vnews.com or 603-727-3213.
Correction
Quechee resident Henry Small worked in security at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center before his retirement in 2009. His employer was incorrectly identified in an earlier version of this story.
