Lebanon
Dustin raised four children in Lebanon before going back to college in her late 30s, then worked her way up from a social worker to become executive director of the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council.
When not with her grandchildren, Dustin also threw herself into civic life, first as a member of the Lebanon Planning Board, and then on the City Council, where she fought to protect funding for social service programs.
And she worked, both for seniors and for the greater good of the city, until she was 78 years old.
“Carol didn’t do any anything halfway; she did it all,” Lebanon Mayor Sue Prentiss said. “The thing about Carol was she loved her city. She was a dedicated community servant.”
It’s her hard work, commitment to Upper Valley seniors and love of family that Dustin’s relatives and friends say they’ll miss after she died on May 22, 2018, at 80.
“She had a work ethic that was second to none,” said Beth Schibley, who worked for Dustin at the senior citizens council. “There wasn’t anything she wouldn’t do.”
Dustin was born on Feb. 14, 1938, in Rutland, to Joseph and Mary Whyte, and was the oldest of five children.
The family lived in Lancaster, N.H., when she was a child, and ultimately settled in Rutland. Even as a teenager, family members remember Dustin as active and on the go.
“She played clarinet, and I think she was on the yearbook staff and the school newspaper” at Rutland High School, said Sarah Whyte, Carol’s youngest sibling.
After obtaining a high school diploma Dustin left home for the University of New Hampshire.
It’s there that she met her husband, Clarke Dustin, at a fraternity party.
“She was very smart and very capable of speaking her mind,” he recalled. “We liked one another. It was as simple as that.”
The two were married in 1957, roughly a year after first meeting, and moved to Gorham, N.H., where Clarke Dustin was hired as a high school guidance counselor. They then began building a family in the North Country.
The couple ultimately moved to Lebanon about six years later, when Clarke Dustin began working as a guidance director at Hanover High School.
“We were impoverished, as anyone who’s ever worked in the schools would know,” he said. “But we had a very happy family. We did a lot of things together as a family and even still do when we get the chance.”
Whyte, who was only a few years older than Carol Dustin’s children, remembers the Dustin house as a hub of family activity.
“I spent a good time of my growing up in Lebanon and I’ll always remember (Carol Dustin) as being a second mom,” Whyte said.
And not just as a mom, but as a cool mom — one that would take a teenage Whyte and friends to Simon and Garfunkel and Ray Charles concerts in Hanover.
“They were just really, really kind of special,” Whyte said of the Dustins.
Once her children were old enough to begin taking care of themselves, Dustin went back to college, earning a bachelor’s of science in social work at UNH in 1977. She then went on to earn a master’s in social work from the University of Connecticut in 1982.
“I really watched my mom just notice that I was growing up and increase her involvement outside our home,” said Leslie Dustin, Carol’s youngest child. “I think it taught me to be independent.”
“I always admired her very much,” Clarke Dustin said of his wife’s decision to go back to school. “She had a lot of courage and was willing to work very hard.”
After receiving her bachelor’s, she began work as a social worker at the White River Council on Aging, and later was acting director of the senior center. It’s during that time she wrote the grant application that would kick-start construction of the T.D. Bugbee Senior Center, a single-story building in White River Junction that now is home to the White River Council’s senior programs.
Dustin took over as executive director of the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council in 1984, and helped usher in a period of growth, according to Roberta Berner, who succeeded her in 2003.
“She was a major force in getting several of the senior services buildings built,” including facilities in Haverhill and Plymouth, Berner said.
Carol Dustin also helped connect existing services during that time, essentially creating the 10-community network that now provides services to Grafton County’s senior population, Berner said.
But more importantly, Dustin also created a philosophy of advocating for seniors and helping them navigate old age that continues through the program now, Berner said.
“I think she had an absolute commitment to older adults living the way they chose to live with dignity and with their health and wellness supported,” Berner said. “I think her philosophy really lives on through the work that we do.”
Dustin was more than just a colleague, Berner added — she also was a close confidant.
“As a co-worker, I learned so much from Carol about our work,” Berner said during remarks at Dustin’s memorial service.
“As the daughter of aging and ailing parents who lived a long way from here, I learned so much from Carol about how to be a long-distance caregiver and how to support my parents in the choices they made about how they lived at the end of their lives,” she said.
Dustin also was known to be a calming force at the senior citizens council who could see staff through turbulent changes, said Schibley, who was hired in 2001 as the organization’s director of information systems.
At the time, the council was moving out of the Upper Valley Senior Center to its own administrative offices, and Dustin managed the move.
“She would treat the trauma, not the drama,” said Schibley, adding her former boss rarely got frazzled.
Dustin took the time to know everyone who worked for her, and wasn’t above getting her hands dirty. Schibley remembers her boss clearing storage sheds, pushing lawn mowers and recruiting her husband to help install shelves.
She also was knowledgeable and helped teach the next generation of advocates, said Schibley, who worked in Lebanon until 2013 and now leads a Meals on Wheels program in Houston.
“She understood the political environment as it stood in different towns,” Schibley said. “She knew people, she knew systems. She was always the first one there when I got there in the morning and she was always there when I left in the afternoon.”
Even after retiring in 2003, Dustin continued working at the senior citizens council as a caregiver specialist for ServiceLink and then as a social worker at the Mascoma Area Senior Center. She also continued to work closely with those in leadership roles, offering advice and time to listen.
“I loved talking to Carol and just getting her point of view,” Berner said. “She had a really active intellect and a very clear way of seeing through things.”
Her volunteer efforts also helped found what now is the Alice Peck Day Auxiliary Spring Antique Show, and contributed toward work at Planned Parenthood and hospice services.
Dustin also was known to love art, and would take trips to visit museums with her husband. She was an accomplished knitter, quilter and sculptor.
She also devoted time to being a grandmother to her seven grandchildren.
“My mom was really my babysitter a lot of the time,” said Leslie Dustin, adding her mother’s help was necessary early in her career as a teacher.
“She really did have a whole nother chapter of her life as a really involved and helpful grandmother,” she said. “For me, she was just a rock as I was kind of working modestly. She was really right there to do things when I needed her to.”
In 2011, Dustin decided to use her professional skills on the Lebanon City Council, where she was elected to replace former Councilor Denise McLeod.
“Carol was extremely easy to work with. She was very thoughtful and listened before she spoke generally,” former Lebanon Mayor Georgia Tuttle said. “She was often the last to jump in.”
But while Carol Dustin was a good listener, she wasn’t easily pushed aside, and focused her efforts on the human side of city policy.
For several years, Dustin advocated for the city to increase its contribution to area social service groups and helped educate officials of each group’s mission.
“Carol helped us stay on track to develop the criteria we needed to make intelligent choices and fair choices to spend taxpayers’ dollars in the community,” Tuttle said. “I always kind of looked at Carol as our moral compass on social issues.”
She also pushed the City Council to keep a closer eye on the city’s financial standing, and asked that the group receive quarterly updates.
“My initial reaction was, ‘They’re hard enough to read during budget season, let alone four times a year,’ ” Tuttle joked, adding the City Council continues to receive quarterly reports.
Like Tuttle, Prentiss, the current mayor, remembers Dustin for her strong advocacy of social services and willingness to work hard to further city projects.
“She was able to transfer her policymaking experience, her outreach experience, her fiscal stewardship to her role as councilor,” Prentiss said. “She seemed to have an eye for things that might be overlooked by others.”
One of the areas Dustin contributed greatly to was on the Lebanon Heritage Commission, which oversees historical initiatives in the city. It’s there she served on a task force that worked to restore the city’s fountains.
“She was knowledgeable, she was farsighted, she was thinking about the city as a whole,” said Commission Chairman Robert Welsch, who said he looked up to Dustin as a role model. “She was just really an engaged citizen and really cared about the people of Lebanon.”
Dustin stepped back both from volunteering and civic life as her health began to deteriorate in 2016.
It’s during that period that her children began to fully understand the importance of her life’s efforts, Leslie Dustin said in remarks at her mother’s memorial service.
“We’d heard her talk for years about how important it was for people to have the choice to stay at home when they wanted to,” she said. “We really began to understand why and how that mattered.”
Seeing her mother cared for in a comfortable surrounding at home with Clarke Dustin at her side made Leslie Dustin aware not only of existing family bonds, but also the importance of the workers, like her mother, who help seniors in their final years.
“They give loving, practical support to people they devote their lives to treating with dignity and true compassion,” she said. “It is beautiful work.”
Tim Camerato can be reached at tcamerato@vnews.com.