Your editor and wife get honored

 Sam Smith – I’m not heavy into self promotion but since the last significant honor I’ve received was back in 1988 for my role in getting a humanities council going, it may not be too objectionable to report that my wife and I were celebrated today for  having received the 2024 award  as citizens of the year in Freeport, Maine – population about 8,000 – and took part in a July 4 parade just behind the lead car driven by the town’s police chief, Nate Goodman.  

Spencer Johnson, Sam & Kathy Smith, and Freeport Police Chief Goodman

I was especially pleased that the driver of our car was Spencer Johnson, great grandson of Clyde Johnson with whom I worked on my parent’s farm decades ago. As I wrote about that time:

I would mount the big green John Deere tractor and pull whatever was behind it ingreat loops around hundreds of acres of fields. One day my tow was a manure spreader, another day a hay rake, another a wagon.

As the day warmed up, I would take off my shirt and adjust my baseball cap and try to be as cool and imperturbable as Clyde Johnson, my usual partner in the fields, who wore the same T-shirt and hat every day and drove his tractor standing up with a pipe that never left his mouth, which didn't matter because he never said much.

Sometimes something would break and we would head back to the barn, talk about it, weld it or replace it and get it going again so we could continue circling those fields with their constant views of the bay, with every foot we moved leaving unmistakable evidence -- mown hay, manure dropping, lime or windrows -- that we had at that moment of our lives actually done something good.

I was not the only admirer of Clyde. Another farm staffer, Walter Stowe, summed him up this way: "He's the only man who can shingle a barn, tell a dirty story and smoke a pipe all at the same time."