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1. How long have you been in Rotary?
Noreen: joined September 1988
Frank: joined November 1982
2. Our favorite Rotary moments:
Noreen - digging in the Rotary garden and watching it grow, installing the Rotary Pavilion sign at the top of the building where it can be seen far and wide, painting the gundalow with Cate and other Rotarians, listening to Rotary stories around a burning barrel selling Christmas trees, ringing the bell at the first and last meetings of an amazing year as president, the Children’s Library project, reading to kids, shoveling mulch in the rain, stuffing backpacks, our 95th Anniversary event, giving Phil the mirrorball, receiving my Paul Harris Fellow, reading the scholarship appli-cations and being convinced the future is in good hands with the next generation.
Frank - freezing on the tarmac of parking lots loaded with trees for sale and stoking the burning barrel to keep Rotarians warm, being president of two clubs, inviting Durham Rotarians to assist with bingo, returning to the Dover Club and Thirsty Tuesdays.
3. Where we currently live and where we grew up:
We grew up in Niagara Falls, NY and met in a bar called the Club; it was a dark and hazy place with sticky floors and a no-name, loud band where college kids gath-ered on Friday nights - some had sideburns and an Elvis swoop, others wore pleat-ed mini skirts and seriously teased hair - some smoked, some drank - perhaps too much - drove home without seat belts to an oddly familiar house (another story for another time) and amazingly turned out to be respectable adults.
One year after we married, we left Niagara Falls to follow job offers and seek new adventures. It was 1968! We drove to Akron, Ohio in an almost new car, stayed a year or so, adopted a dog named Charlie, had a baby boy named Kevin and headed off to , to Des Moines, Iowa. After a year or so, we journeyed back to Niagara Falls, gave Charlie away due to an incident with the mailman and had a baby girl named Shannon. We moved to the Ramada Inn in Dover, NH, with two kids and 22 house plants for three months in the summer of ’76 before crossing state lines to a new home in South Berwick, Maine.
By happenstance, several years later, we drove by a “For Rent” sign at the end of a long driveway to a house on the Bellamy River - it needed a lot of work, the drive-way was dirt, gravel and mush but the view was priceless, so we moved back across state lines to NH. In 1999, the owners decided to build condos on the land and tear the house down. One day we said, “They move houses don’t they?” and we did. We cut it up into three sections, hired a house mover and hauled it, one section at a time, a half mile north onto a lot covered in Queen Anne’s Lace, scrappy trees and broken bricks from an old Dover brickyard. After 20 years of renovation it is still a work in progress but one we are blessed to enjoy.
4. Our Hobbies:
Noreen: I create things … sourdough bread before it was a 2020 pastime, ginger-bread houses gardens, pencil sketches, painting (walls), dresses, drapes, boat cushions, slipcovers, face masks with matching scrunches for nine year girls, and writing a novel that may never get published unless I stop revising it… someday soon.
Frank: I build things … re-assembled pieces of a house into a home with new plumbing, electric, bathrooms, kitchens, stairs, decks, docks and floats, an up and down closet in a stairwell and an elaborate and not always functional television an-tenna system that Noreen doesn’t fully appreciate. I also golf occasionally, have re-ceived enough Prime-swished packages to secure the viability of Amazon delivery systems well into the future and watch Fox News frequently which Noreen doesn’t fully appreciate either.
5. Our Business Professions or Current Working or Non-Working Environments
Noreen: I’m a graduate of UNH and Simmons College with degrees in non-fiction writing and communication management, worked as a reporter for Foster’s Daily Democrat followed by a 30-year career at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital retiring in 2016 as VP of Community Relations. I’ve also authored a history of WDH in addi-tion to my unpublished novel, The Spokesperson, and occasionally free lance as a writer for a variety of projects.
Frank: I’m a graduate of the University of Buffalo and Golden Gate University with business degrees, managed Human Resources for Firestone Tire & Rubber, Dun-lop Tire & Rubber and Davidson Rubber/Textron. Now retired, I plow snow in the winter and water grass that refuses to grow in the summer.
6. Something our fellow Rotarians don’t know about us:
We have an amazing family, a son Kevin and his children 24-year old Derek, and 28-year old Alisha, and a daughter Shannon and her daughter, 9-year old Saman-tha.
We love to travel and every five years on our wedding anniversary in August we travel someplace special. We’ve climbed the Grand Canyon, traveled via train from Toronto to Vancouver, motored around Alaska, toured Southern France, Italy’s Amalfi coast and Portugal’s Algarve. On our 50th we visited the Southwest, looked for aliens at Roswell, watched bats fly out of the Carlsbad Canyon and marveled at the beauty of the White Sands, the Painted Desert and Arches National Parks. Will we ever travel again?
7. Final words:
Eleanore Rosevelt once said, “Many people will walk in and out of your life, but only true friends will leave footprints in your heart.” Our Rotarian friends, past and pre-sent, have left so many footprints in our hearts - we are truly grateful.