Notes

Note N6471 Index

Kenneth had a trucking business, as well as being involved with landscape gardening, in Portland. He and Edith divorced in 1946 (DIVORCE RECORDS, Maine State Archives Microfilm, Vol. 28, Page 111).
Edith's third husband is Archie E. Bowden of South Portland, whom she married 3 April 1946.

Kenneth and Ethel are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Westbrook (Ketover, WESTBROOK, MAINE CEMETERIES [op. cit.], 222).

Notes

Note N6472 Index

Leater was a schoolteacher. She was a cousin to Addie Flora Nile, wife of Guy Bernard Scribner.

Notes

Note N6476 Index

Ralph was a mechanic for the American Can Company in Portland, Maine. His death was caused by a cerebral hemorrhage.

Notes

Note N6477 Index

Hollis and Helen were married while he was in the Army, stationed at Ft. Preble, South Portland, Maine.

Notes

Note N6480 Index

William was a farmer. He died from pneumonia, following a case of measles.

Notes

Note N6485 Index

Albert was a compressor operator.

Notes

Note N6495 Index

William was a well-known radiologist and surgeon in Portland, Maine. According to his son, Will, he was "known as 'Doctor Bill' to half the population of the State of Maine."
Other information provided by son Will (in an e-mail to Ray Scribner, dated 11 April 2005):
"My father was an orphan, sent to Maine as a chore boy at four, taken in by a Mrs. Rice in North Waterford, Maine, who saw to it he got an education. When she died, my father got on his bike and pedaled from North Waterford to North Bridgton, the site of Bridgton Academy where he knocked on doors until he found the Kimball family who let him board with them so he could attend Bridgton Academy - where he met my maternal grandmother and my mother (both accomplished pianists). He worked his way through Bowdoin College and the Medical School, became an MD specializing in radiology as well as surgery and died of a heart attack in Hays Drugstore in Portland while he was reading my first big review in the show business weekly Variety."
On 12 July 1990, William's daughter, Joan Holt Hotchkiss, spoke to the Waterford, Maine, Historical Society about his remarkable life. Here are some excerpts from her speech:
"His early life started out inauspicially as could be; he was from infancy an orphan, a ward of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and he remembered the grey and grimey basement of a house near Boston, where he and other babies and toddlers were boarded." She told of how, at the age of 3, William had been sent by train and overland stage to North Waterford where he was to live with a family for whom he could later work free of charge. "I don't know whether the family he was assigned to never showed up or whether he decided to take matters into his own hands. [He] walked up to Mrs. Rebecca Rice, who happened to be standing there and asked her, 'Will you be my mother?' Mrs. Rice was 58 at the time; she and her husband Cliff Rice were childless and had no intention of having a child to bring up, but she responded to this little boy and his need....my father went home to the little white house by the church. He had a home and a mother at last."
After Mr. and Mrs. Rice died, when William was about 13, he decided to try to attend the local high school. He knew that an education was most important for success in life. Because he was still classified as a ward of Massachusetts, he was unable to attend high school in Waterford. So, "he left North Waterford for North Bridgton, bicycling over with whatever belongings he possessed in the hope of going to Bridgton Academy there." That hope was realized when he was allowed to live with the George Kimball family from 1903-1907 as a boarder helping with the farm chores while attending Bridgton Academy. It certainly didn't hurt that Mr. Kimball happened to be a trustee of the Academy.
William then went on to Bowdoin College and, later, Bowdoin Medical School.
After their marriage in 1920, followed by two years assignment at Providence College and Rhode Island General Hospitals, William and Marjorie and Joan moved to Exter, New Hampshire, where he was medical director for one year at Phillips Academy there, then on to Portland, Maine, where he had a successful medical, surgical and later cancer-specialty practice.
William's "main object seemed to be, ever since college, to keep faith -- faith with himself and then with those others for whose lives and welfare he was responsible.... He touched many lives with this attitude, I think, and at his funeral with the flag flying at half-staff on City Hall, the minister said to a packed State Street Church, 'This man was above all, a man of faith, going through this city helping and healing thousands of people and keeping their secrets safely. He was truly a faithful man, a man of responsibility.'"
His wife, Marjorie, pronounced the most appropriate epitaph for William when she said "Bill liked people, and people liked him right back."
One of William's schoolmates, Charlotte Morse Fillebrown, wrote a weekly column, "Waterford Echoes," for the Norway, Maine, newspaper, "Advertiser-Democrat." In her 3 June 1955 column, she paid tribute to William by saying "How many of us there are who owe our lives to him, and who now feel a deep loss. I could not begin to tell you of how much he has meant to this family... He was not only our Dr. Bill, but our friend.... One morninmg as I thought of him, his kindness, his friendliness, and above all his skill as a surgeon, I wrote these few lines:

       MY SURGEON

       It was a hot morning in August
       When they took me up to the room
       I wondered if I'll ever return
       And my heart was filled with gloom.

       My surgeon was ready and waiting
       And when he stood by me there,
       I thought he had the kindest face
       That I'd seen anywhere.

       He was so calm, so serene
       That he made me feel so, too,
       And I knew that God and he together
       Would make my body new.

       Today I am home and happy
       And I thank God every day
       For men like my beloved surgeon
       May God bless and keep him always.

Marjorie was a schoolteacher at Portland High School, teaching English and German. She was also an accomplished pianist and singer. She had graduated from Colby College, and later became a trustee of Colby College as well as serving on the boards of many Maine organizations. She and William had met while he was a student at Bridgton Academy and she was still in pig-tails. Her mother, Sarah, was the director of the school orchestra and William played the cornet.