The late Arthur Colby never knew if he’d spot something around town that needed his attention.
He’d see a particular piece of Loudon, beaten down after years of New Hampshire weather, or neglected for too long, and he’d spruce it up when no one was looking.
“A lot of time he wouldn’t tell anyone he did it,” said Dave Colby, Arthur’s 60-year-old son. “You would drive by and see it had been done. He might stop at a stop sign and notice a bush was obstructing something, and a few days later that part of the bush would be gone.
“Guess he was just a good citizen.”
In 1993, in fact, Arthur Colby was named Loudon’s best citizen, winning the first-ever Citizen of the Year Award. The award has been handed out every year since.
Colby passed away on Jan. 16 at the age of 92 while living at the Havenwood retirement community, and it’s a good bet he was a fine citizen there as well. He grew up in Concord on a farm, the son of a railroad worker.
He fit nicely into that old-school New England mold, the one about saving your words until they were absolutely necessary. The one about work ethic.
The one about the importance of community, once you broke through the stoic force field that this region is so famous for.
“He never spoke unless he had something to say that people would remember,” Dave Colby told me. “He thought about stuff. He put thought into it.”
And, it seemed, Arthur wanted everything that came into his life, into his town, to look good. If he noticed a crack in that piece of wooden furniture he was building, he’d start over. It didn’t matter if he was almost done.
When the town was added to the state’s 911 emergency system, Arthur built the street signs himself and pounded the posts into the ground. How else could the cops and firefighters know where to go?
When the lawn near the intersection of Routes 129 and 106 grew too tall, Arthur mowed it. All 10 acres. But first, of course, he made sure to register his lawn tractor. You needed to do that to cross Route 106 legally.
And when the fire station’s red paint began to lose its fight against time, peeling and cracking and simply not representing Loudon well, Arthur grabbed his ladder and his scraper and his paintbrush and his paint, and he brought the place back to life.
He couldn’t always remain anonymous. He would have preferred that. Sometimes, though, simply because of circumstances, the town would spot him. They got used to it.
“It was pretty obvious when he painted the fire station,” Dave Colby said. “You’d go by and see this guy with a ladder there every day. And then he always had the next thing to do.”
He worked at the Department of Transportation, traffic division, for 40 years. He raised two boys and a girl, all now living within three miles of their parents’ home. He worked part-time for the police department and served for more than 50 years with the fire department.
Oh yes, the police and fire departments. Those staffs are housed in a facility called the Arthur W. Colby Safety Complex. Where else?
“Oh my God, a great guy,” said Ashley Simonds, the administrative assistant at the firehouse. “It’s darker here in Loudon without him.”
Simonds told me her boss, Chief Rick Wright, was tied up in a meeting. But she was available to talk and couldn’t hold back. She wanted to talk about Arthur. She had to talk about Arthur.
She said he’d always drive his tractor to the annual Remembrance Day at the Historical Society, and the town loved it. And he collected old newspaper clips and other odds and ends connected to Loudon, and the town loved it.
Then the chief, who worked with Arthur through the 1980s and ’90s, was free from his meeting and called back, fast.
“Loved by all,” Wright said. “Hard worker, generous person, supportive of the fire department. He was a kind man who cared about people and cared about the town.”
His daughter, Pat Bigwood, mentioned the safety complex and said, “It was the honor of his life, really, the naming of that building.”
His wife of 68 years, Lucille Colby, recalled the kid from North Carolina, hired by Arthur for summer work at the DOT during the 1960s. The kid finished his summer duties and was never heard from again.
Until last month. After Arthur died.
“He wrote a letter to my mother and said how influential he was,” Pat said. “After all these years, he took the time to write how my father affected his life. A beautiful letter.”
Dave Colby called me back to say that if his father knew I was writing a column, “he would have asked you to print the name of every person who has won that Citizen of the Year Award. From his perspective, everyone was equal.”
Letty Barton won it in 2018, Stanley Prescott II the year before that and Jim Timmins in 2016. Thanks to Loudon Historical Society President Roger Maxfield, the rest of the names are packaged with this column, because that’s the way Arthur would have wanted it.
He wanted residents who made Loudon better to get their due. He wanted to show them respect.
So he walked across the street from his house and painted the 100-year-old fence surrounding the 100-year-old cemetery. The initial idea was to tear down the wood fence, replace it with vinyl fencing.
Replace chestnut wood? A part of the town’s history?
“He told me, ‘Don’t you dare; just scrape it and paint it,’” Maxfield said.
Arthur never served in the military, but they felt his loyalty to town and country as well. He and Lucille combined to find and add the 54 names of Vietnam veterans from town who were not listed on the wooden memorial.
Of course, Arthur then took the landmark home and shined it up with varnish.
“He died having accomplished as much as he would have wanted to,” Dave Colby said.
As honored as he was to be named Citizen of the Year, he never did things for reward or recognition.
“He never wanted anything like that,” Dave said. “A thank you and a handshake, at the most, would have been fine.”
(The original column inadvertently omitted James Timmins from the list of Citizen of the Year Award winners).
Past Loudon Citizens of the Year
■1993 – Arthur Colby
■1994-Gene Flagg Hardy
■1995-Francis Tewksbury
■1996-Robert Ordway
■1997-Raymond Cummings
■1998-Wilfred Ives
■1999-Beatrice Jenkins
■2000-Shirly Lampron
■2001-Melvin and Dorothy Mulkhey
■2002-Henry and Betty Frost
■2003-Robert and Pauline Haines
■2004-Charlene Morin
■2005-Karon Maxfield
■2006-Barbara Cameron
■2007-Roger and Irene Dow
■2008-Vasilios Lazos
■2009-Beatrice Moore
■2010-Richard Malfait
■2011-Jim Dyment
■2012-Kim Bean
■2013-mike Labonte
■2014-David Rice
■2015-Dena Leonard
■2016-James Timmins
■2017-Stanley Prescott II
■2018-Letty Barton