An early family photo of Nancy and Bertram Smith
“It’s a wooden bird,” the TSA man said with a surprised smile, once he made out the X-ray image of the carefully wrapped handcraft in my duffel bag at the airport. “Is it a crane?”
It was indeed – a memento created by my uncle, one of scores of woodcrafts depicting water birds, Santa Clauses, “gardening angels” and other subjects both whimsical and sublime, all displayed by his family at his calling hours earlier in the week.
On Tuesday morning, we memorialized the Rev. Bertram Otis Smith in Winslow, Maine, in a small historic woodframe Congregational church, much like the little churches he served around rural New England decades ago.
I knew him as Uncle Bert, my father’s brother, and his first name is my middle name. Bert died June 25 at age 92 in central Maine, where he spent his final years near his son, daughter and grandchildren, continuing to garden, paint, listen to classical music and converse with visitors even as his heart and lungs gradually wore out.
Bert certainly earned his place in the Greatest Generation — a U.S. Marine who fought in desperate battle on Guadalcanal and other Pacific islands. But he harbored no nostalgia for the war and the haunted memories it left him with.
He completed the portrait of the Greatest Generation by what he did after the war – building the society he had fought to preserve. Minister, farmer and father of four, he and his wife, Nancy, took in 38 foster children over many years at a small Connecticut farm where they kept horses and goats and had plenty of room for kids to roam and play.
I was young when they started this venture; all I knew was that I had more cousins to play with when we visited. It took me years to recognize the vastness of the patience and generosity that Uncle Bert and Aunt Nancy devoted to this calling. They embodied what novelist George Eliot wrote of the vast impact that people “who lived faithfully a hidden life” can have with “unhistoric acts.”
And all the more remarkable given the griefs that accompanied that life.
My uncle and father lost their mother when they were children, raised by their minister father and later their stepmother as well. Growing up in the Depression, Bert rose early to help a neighboring farmer milk his cows, then rode with the farmer into town where they delivered the milk to the dairy and Bert picked up the Boston newspapers he would deliver.
After high school, while working for a Connecticut defense contractor, Bert met and fell in love with Nancy, his boss’s daughter.
The couple heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor while returning from a classical-music concert. Bert soon went to a Navy recruiting office, which turned him down because he was wearing eyeglasses. So he put them away, went to the Marine office next door and was signed up on the spot.
By late 1942 he took part in the prolonged battle of Guadalcanal, where he experienced hunger and privation and enduring memories of burying slain colleagues. His letters home to Nancy, which he decorated with amusing caricatures of soldiers’ downtime, were upbeat but never sugarcoated. “Lately things have been hot enough to suit anybody,” he wrote. “You could say that about the weather, too.”
In a flawlessly handwritten memoir done at the behest of a granddaughter a few years ago, Bert said the experience severely tested a young man taught in Sunday School to love one’s enemies. But he also remembered an island native, tortured by the Japanese for collaborating with the Allies, who told Bert he forgave his captors because he was a Christian.
After the war Bert and Nancy married and began a family. My early memories from the 1960s include exploring the nooks and crannies of old parsonages where they lived. During one such visit on a summer day, their oldest son, Wayne, by then in college, shuttled us younger kids in his roadster convertible back and forth to a nearby lemonade stand; I still remember the headwinds and the drone of that little motor.
Not long afterward came the phone call that Wayne had been killed in an auto accident. For Bert, it brought war-like trauma into the sacred space of his own family.
Soon after, he and Nancy purchased a farm they named for Wayne. Bert painted a watercolor of the farm years later with its riding trail, barn and other buildings. Behind the frame was a piece of lined paper on which he had written the names of all the children who had shared the farm, bringing various physical, mental or emotional challenges.
One of the boys — in an unwitting testament to the farm’s healing capacity — once described his hope of arriving in heaven as a favorite horse came riding up to him.
Bert and Nancy eventually retired to a smaller home. In recent years he mourned her loss after 58 years of marriage, as well as the losses to cancer of another son and a daughter-in-law.
Bert enjoyed making whimsical woodcarvings, whether of waterbirds, Thanksgiving turkeys wearing ties that proclaimed, “Eat beef,” or reindeer riding in a sleigh with Santa in the traces.
He graciously received visitors, conversing in his strong Maine accent about topics ranging from smog in China to the progress of his infant great-granddaughter. He could be just as comfortable sitting quietly with visitors to the backdrop of classical radio.
In a video recorded by a hospice volunteer, Bert quoted by memory from the New England poet Robert Frost:
“We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn’t overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.”
A couple examples of Bertram Smith’s woodcraft from decades apart. A “shutterbug” memorializes his late son, David, whose favorite photo subjects included lighthouses. A chess set (below), was carved in the Pacific during World War II on behalf of a fellow Marine who described the pieces for him; my uncle had never seen the game before. A handkerchief served for a hand-drawn chessboard.
