On a visit to his mother’s home in Warner 40 years ago, Van McLeod realized where he was meant to be.

He had studied theater in Iowa and attended film school in Boston, where he booked performers, including a then-unknown Jay Leno, worked the lights at rock concerts and founded a theater company. His friends talked about taking their careers to New York, but Van McLeod’s heart, and his commitment to a life in the arts, would stay here.

“I went out for a walk after dinner, and I looked up and saw every star in the sky and I breathed good air,” he told the Monitor in 2007, “and I said, ‘I’m not moving to New York; I’m moving home to New Hampshire.’ ”

He founded the Kearsarge Theatre Company and the North Country Center for the Arts and served for 24 years as the state’s commissioner of cultural resources.

“I am a producer, and I know how to cast people,” he once told his wife, Joan, which explained his leadership. Without a pause, Van McLeod lived the joy of connecting people and ideas through the arts, while caring for our state’s rich history, and nurturing new artists. His was a virtuoso performance.

The light in the capital city dimmed with sadness Monday morning when we learned that Van McLeod, who was 70, had passed away. He loved New Hampshire, he loved all the arts and he was a tireless promoter, his friend Steve Duprey remembered. Aspiring actors, producers, artists and craftsmen, filmmakers, musicians, furniture makers, dancers and schoolchildren benefited from Van McLeod’s ceaseless efforts to enliven the arts community and generate opportunities for creativity. He was one of a kind.

Officially, the Department of Cultural Resources is the state’s “collective voice” for the arts, the state library, historical resources, film and television. But Commissioner McLeod was our most valuable cultural resource.

In public service, he was uniquely suited to be our guardian of arts and history. He always found some common ground with those who doubted supporting the arts was a “core” government function – which Van McLeod so firmly believed. “It’s who we are,” he would say.

He was “an incredibly kind guy” who always found the good in everyone, Duprey said. In the arts business, which can be full of big egos, Van McLeod was described as a “fabulous buffer.” He was genuine and down to earth, on every stage.

“This was Van, and it was always the same Van,” said state Rep. Steve Shurtleff, “That’s what endeared him to people.”

At the state library in Concord, on the lawn below the windows to Van McLeod’s office, a site is reserved for a memorial to Gov. John Winant (1889-1947), citing his “accomplishment, courage, humility.”

Winant has been credited as among the first to secure public funding for the arts, and his support for Depression-era jobs creating and selling arts and crafts led to the formation of a treasured cultural resource – the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen.

Shurtleff chairs the Winant project committee, but he is quick to say Van McLeod was its guiding force.

A bronze monument of Winant, slightly bowed, extending his right hand to offer a seat on a bench, is complete. More than $200,000 has been raised for the privately funded project, but another $40,000 is still needed to ready the site.

A dedication ceremony is scheduled for June 2017. Now, on that day, Shurtleff told his committee members this week, New Hampshire will honor two of its favorite sons – Gov. John Winant and Commissioner Van McLeod, an uplifting spirit, always there, even in difficult times.

“If you have to have one life, live it to the fullest,” Van McLeod would remind his daughter, Chelsea. And he did.