Bert Whittemore and Patricia Crafts were giants in the Pembroke region.
They volunteered around the same time to make their town better. They died about the same time, leaving the town sad and feeling a bit empty. And now, after a ceremony this week at the Pembroke Library – an institution with their fingerprints all over it – they’re together again, and this time it’s forever.
Whittemore died in December of 2017 at the age 83, Crafts nine months later at 88, and sprinkles of their personality are on display on a mural, dedicated recently in front of about 40 family and friends.
The idea surfaced in July, as officials sought the best way to honor these two selfless souls. Local artist Katy Rhodebeck finished the mural last week.
The train and hiker represent Whittemore. The quilt and white lilacs belong to Crafts.
“She loved them, the white lilac,” said Crafts’s daughter, Cindy Wilkinson of Concord. “She thought they were the most fragrant of all lilac types.”
Despite her love for this delicate flower and unassuming nature, Crafts was no wallflower. In fact, she showed an edge once you got to know her. She had polished comedic skills – timing, sarcasm – and would flash them now and then.
“She had a very dry sense of humor,” Wilkinson called it.
“Yes, a very dry sense of humor,” agreed Heather Tiddes, the assistant director at the Pembroke Library for 17 years. “And she had a really good delivery when making an observation or when making one of her comments in a comical way. She always could deliver it really well, and it was unexpected coming from her, and that added to it as well, the fact that it came from someone so unassuming.”
When it came to her hometown, her action spoke louder than her words, and residents noticed.
They noticed her loyalty to the region. She was raised on her family farm in Epsom and was a resident of Pembroke for 68 years. She graduated from Pembroke Academy in 1948, and she went on to secure her place in the town’s unofficial hall of fame.
Crafts was a businesswoman, the owner of Crafts Gas and Electric, and the co-founder of the Den of Antiquity, which is where she created all those great quilts.
She was the supervisor of the town’s checklist, a founding member of Plausawa Valley Country Club, an early visionary for the Pembroke Old Home Day celebrations.
She painted, quilted, golfed, traveled, gardened, and her yearly yard sales gained a special place in Pembroke lore. And she was a trustee for the new-and-improved library, which opened in 2004 and seemed to be the role that residents appreciated most.
“She was very knowledgeable about what goes on in the library,” Tiddes said. “Not all trustees are like that. She’d pop in here, work in the book-sale room, just be an instrumental part of this library.”
And speaking of the library, Whittemore, who ran a commercial real estate business on Park Street, played a part in that, too, organizing, promoting, planning.
The library was vital to Whittemore, and one reason, explained his daughter, Ayn Whytemare, was the cost of books there were quite reasonable.
“My father loved libraries and he was one of the most frugal people, and that’s putting it kindly,” Ayn said. “If you had a question, you could get an answer at the library and it would not cost you a thing.”
Whittemore’s frugality became legendary, but he wasn’t cheap when it came to the basic needs of the community. He voted for a bond to help build the library, which, to his surprise, passed. Ayn remembers that important vote well, since she was in the hospital giving birth at the time.
“He also voted for schools,” Ayn said. “He said we should spend money on things that were worthwhile. Dad was cheap and generous, which sounds contradictory. He was enthusiastic and he was deeply caring about the town and the people of the town.”
No one represented this region better than Ayn’s father, whose own father had tried to build a library in town around the time of World War II. He could trace his ancestors in the area back to the 18th century, when Aaron Whittemore surfaced as the town’s first minister.
“And my son Aaron Whittemore Donovan is the 10th Aaron Whittemore in the family,” Ayn said proudly.
Whittemore attended Pembroke Academy and Dartmouth College, and he served in the Navy. He supported the Suncook Boys and Girls Club and was a leader at the Pembroke Congregational Church, where his funeral was held and where his historic relative, Pembroke’s first minister, preached. He fundraised, sat on committees and helped the state and town’s historical societies.
Later in life, Whittemore left his comfort zone, taking up mountain climbing and reaching the summit of all the state’s 4,000 footers. He hiked, snow-shoed and rowed, and in fact the Concord High crew team’s base of operations, behind Everett Arena, lining the Merrimack River, is called the Whittemore Boathouse.
“He reveled in being the center of attention and yet he was a humble man,” Ayn said. “In his lifetime he shied away from having things named after himself just because he might have given the funds to acquire something.”
Then she added, “However, if someone else wanted to name something after him, he thought that was just fine. Case in point, the Concord crew boathouse.”
Now he’s back at the library, along with his friend, Crafts. For all time. The ceremony lasted about an hour, at which time some of the attendees went back to Ayn’s house for pizza.
That would have been fine with Whittemore. As long as the night in his honor moved quickly.
“He was a bit impatient,” Ayn said. “He would try to make a 1½-hour meeting into 30 minutes. Then he’d just move on to something else.”