Norman Abelson left behind a busy house. Disney figurines crowded every inch of three tables and two shelves in his living room. Piles of vintage cigarette and match boxes filled more shelves in the corner of the same room. A neon beer sign — a gift from his life partner, Magdalene Came — perched on an end table next to his bright-red couch. Full-to-bursting bookshelves lined the walls.
When David Abelson arrived at the house in Moody, Maine, to start going through his father’s possessions, he found everything neatly labeled and organized. In the back room, David discovered a scarf that belonged to his grandmother, sealed in a bag with a note explaining where it had come from. Norman had also kept his mother’s Jordan Marsh membership card, as well as a Christmas card he received from the governor of New Hampshire in 1954. There was an old photograph of him shaking hands with Bill Clinton. He left behind a notebook that said “My Life” on it, and another that said “My Wife.”
“Anything that has anything to do with my life, I can’t throw away,” Norman Abelson told The Monitor in 2024.
Abelson died Feb. 1 at the age of 94 at his home in Moody. He spent much of his adult life in Concord, where he was known as a writer, leader and advocate. His funeral took place Saturday at 11 a.m. at Temple Beth Jacob in Concord, where Abelson served a term as president.
Collecting, or “picking,” as he called it, was one of the many interests that colored Abelson’s long life — he also sang jazz music and painted, though these were more hobbies than talents. Abelson started picking Disney figurines in outdoor flea markets and became obsessed with his collection; then he did the same with elephant figurines, vintage cigarette boxes and toy cars.
“There’s something of the child in me,” he said at 93.
Abelson was born and raised in Malden, Mass., in a six-room apartment that his family shared with a “conglomeration of interesting people,” as he put it. His father worked at an ice plant in their town, just a few miles outside of Boston. Abelson had plenty of friends, but said his mind was lonely when he was a kid, so he used to ride his bike to the top of Waitt’s Mountain and stare at the clouds. Sometimes he’d climb to the top of the chestnut tree in his friend Charlie’s backyard and “hide from the world.”
As an adult, Abelson faced the world head-on, even when it angered him, which was often. He spent his adult life taking charge of causes he deemed important, from racial and religious justice to environmental activism. During his many years in Concord, Abelson was the second-ever chairman of New Hampshire Humanities, vice president for the New Hampshire Council on Aging, co-founder of Uniting Against Hatred and the director of New Hampshire Tomorrow, an environmentalist group that helped establish the first Earth Day in 1970.
“Isn’t it nuts? My life is really nuts,” he said.
One morning during his tenure as the president of Temple Beth Jacob, Abelson awoke to the news that someone had graffitied the synagogue’s roof with antisemitic slogans. The next day, a Christian council in Concord marched down to the temple with paint cans and brushes and painted back over the roof. Abelson walked into the council’s next meeting to thank them for their help; when he walked out, he was a founding member of the Greater Concord Interfaith Council. He became its chairman shortly thereafter.
In 1982, Abelson spearheaded a joint effort between the Interfaith Council and the Salvation Army to open the McKenna House in Concord. He served as chairman of the McKenna House board for 18 years. It opened with eight beds to house the homeless population; now, it has 42.
“He was a firm believer in if you see something that’s wrong, or you see an injustice, you don’t let it go by,” David said.
Abelson wrote frequent letters to newspaper editors, constantly trying to broadcast what he believed to be right. His pen bent unrelentingly in the direction of his convictions. On the first day of Abelson’s freshman-year English course at Northeastern, his professor asked the class to write about how they had spent their summer vacation. In his essay, Abelson wrote how disappointed he was by the topic. He was hoping to be pushed harder than this in college. He thought to himself, “I’m gonna get a double A … I’ve got this guy right where I want him.”
The professor gave him a “double F.” Abelson decided college was not for him.
A man of words
Abelson held fast to his moral beliefs, but he was also an attentive listener, and he remained humble enough to admit when he was wrong. Once, after he half-heartedly smacked his sons, he wrote them both long letters apologizing for his anger.
Abelson spent much of his life typing vigorously with two fingers; he wrote all sorts of things (for several years, he wrote a haiku every morning) but much of his work was dedicated to keeping alive the memory of his late wife, Dina, an Auschwitz survivor. Abelson wrote prolifically about Dina’s family, including the collection “Marrying Into Memory,” about his experiences as an American Jew embedded in a community of Holocaust survivors. Elie Wiesel wrote to Abelson in 2003, “They are moving stories — I am glad you wrote them.”
Abelson had always been a man of words. When he first learned to write his name, his mother took him straight to the public library so he could sign his library card. Diane Lipson Schilit, Abelson’s niece, remembers visiting her uncle’s house and being surrounded by “books and books and books.”
His career as a writer took off after he dropped out of Northeastern. He was living in his parents’ house in Malden and writing bad poetry when his father found him a job. Harry Abelson had met an editor for the Associated Press at a bar in Boston and told him his son liked to write. The editor offered Abelson his first journalism job. He started in Boston before moving to cover government and politics in Concord, where he met Dina.
Later, Abelson moved his family to Washington, D.C., where he was the press secretary for U.S. Senator Thomas McIntyre before moving on to hold various government policy positions. In the Office of Economic Opportunity and at the U.S. Small Business Administration, he worked for causes in which he believed, particularly economic equality and the war on poverty. Away from journalism, Abelson found ways to keep his writing alive, even if it looked different before.
The one time he was removed from writing, Abelson fell into a depression. It lasted between two and three years, while he worked as a small business consultant.
“I was like a beached whale,” he said.
David recalled how his father would barely take phone calls — a total anomaly for Abelson, who was always on the phone. He couldn’t even do his daily crossword.
One day, he woke up, and the slump was gone. “Bang, just like that,” he said. He flushed his pills down the toilet and decided to get back to writing.
A legacy of hope
When David was in seventh grade, he feigned feeling sick one day because he didn’t want to go to school. He realized later that same day, however, that Concord’s semi-pro hockey team had a huge game that night that he desperately wanted to attend. His father came home and found him lying on the couch, looking dejected. David told him about the game.
“Are you feeling better?” Abelson asked.
“Yeah,” David said.
“Do you think you can go to school tomorrow?” Abelson asked.
“Oh, definitely,” David said.
“Why don’t I just drive you down to the arena?” Abelson said.
Abelson knew his son was playing hooky from school, “but he knew when to let me off the hook,” David said.
When David went to the funeral home in Concord to make arrangements for his father’s burial, he found that his dad had already arranged everything. Years before his death, Abelson had selected his casket and written his own obituary. There was nothing for his son to do.
This was Abelson — determined to get things done while he could, to say the things he had to say while he had the chance. Years ago, he wrote an ethical will for his children, which David opened this week. It contains Abelson’s guidelines for how to live a moral life. He had already bestowed to his son one of his most ardent beliefs — “that tomorrow was going to be better,” David said.
Dina died in 2001 after many years living with Parkinson’s disease. Abelson also outlived his daughter, Laurie Beth, who died as an infant, and his son, Michael, who died in his early forties.
Familiar with the loss of loved ones, Abelson dwelt deeply on life and death. He believed that the human spirit could not die. He subscribed to the Jewish idea of the Neshamah, an indestructible soul which leaves the body after death.
He was allergic to dogs in life, but always wanted one and believed he would have a yellow Labrador after it. He would name it “At Last,” he joked in his thick Boston accent.
“The whole idea that the soul lives on is so enlivening for me,” he said. “It’s taken a lot of the fear out of it.”
The only thing that worried Abelson about dying, he said, was missing out.
“The thing that kills me about dying — I would be happy if everyone else died at the same moment I did,” he said. “But the idea that everyone’s gonna be around the next day hanging out having a drink going to parties and I ain’t around anymore — that kills me.”
Old age did little to slow Abelson down. Physically, sure, his body grew weaker; sometimes he dealt with short-term memory loss. But into his mid-nineties, Abelson spoke and wrote rapidly, with the same clever wit that characterized his words all his life. It was as if he were determined to tell all the stories of his life before he ran out of time.
