In His Own Words: Tribute to My Father

Preface

In His Own Words

Clevis Owen Laverty was born on April 18, 1917 in Westbrook, Maine, the elder child of Merton and Mable (Buzzell) Laverty. Through his parents, he could trace his lineage back to two of Maine’s oldest families. On the paternal side, he descended from the successful but colorful and litigious Merrills whose early history can be traced through court documents; on the maternal side from the Morrells, also successful but a quiet, highly respected Quaker family. In addition to the sense of adventure and the sensitivity that he inherited from these roots, he inherited a love of teaching and a gift for storytelling from his father’s family, the Laverty’s, who immigrated to Canada from Ireland in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Born during the First World War, Clevis grew up in the more stable, if not prosperous, twenties and came of age at the height of the Great Depression. The son of a teacher, he was supposed to go to college, etc. But the real world had other plans. He entered Colby College in Waterville, Maine after graduating from high school. When his father’s business went bankrupt, he had to leave college. After that, he worked at a series of odd jobs—dishwasher, waterfront reporter for the Portland (Maine) Press Herald—before entering the U.S. Army, serving in the last mounted unit of the U.S. Cavalry and riding guard duty along the Panama Canal. After he left the army, he married—on June 3, 1939—Marie Lucy Gravel, a vivacious young woman from the St. John Valley of Maine whom he had met before enlisting. He then entered the Massachusetts Radio School in Boston, Mass. and after finishing his studies there, he was hired as a navigator by Pan American World Airways in Florida.

His days at Pan American and his experiences during the Second World War were the truly great adventures of his life. Before the Second World War, Clevis flew regular flights to Latin American destinations. After the United States entered the War, Pan American was leased to the U.S. Armed Forces and he flew survey flights as well as transporting supplies and prisoners around North Africa, the Middle East and Pakistan. Health problems—he suffered from ulcers—grounded him, and although Pan American gave him a desk job, he was unhappy. He left Florida and joined the Merchant Marine, serving on the Boston-Murmansk run until the end of the war. After the war, he tried a radio job with a railroad in western Massachusetts and even returned briefly to Pan American. Neither job satisfied him. Again, there was a succession of jobs, this time in sales: a wholesale bread salesman for Bond Bread, a retail salesman for another bread company, a parts salesman for the Pontiac dealership in Greenfield, Massachusetts, and finally an insurance salesman for Metropolitan Life.

During this time, he came under the influence of Arthur Hopkinson, a Methodist minister serving the parish in Greenfield. Hopkinson came from Wales, and although his parishioners knew him as a proper English cleric, he told colorful stories of his days in the Welsh coal mines when he could “outcuss and outfight” virtually anyone. After Hopkinson’s death, Clevis decided to enter the ministry, and with the help of Norman Porter, the new minister at his church and a son of a District Superintendent in Maine, in 1957, he was appointed lay pastor to a small church in Cape Porpoise, Maine. At the same time, since he could not become a full-time minister without a college degree, he entered the University of New Hampshire as a freshman. He also completed ministerial training and classes at Boston University during the summers. In 1961, he graduated from UNH and was ordained a minister in the Methodist Church. In addition to Cape Porpoise, he served parishes in South Portland and West Scarborough, Maine.

After the tragic death of one of his Eagle Scouts, Clevis became disillusioned, left the ministry and became a teacher. His first appointment was as an English teacher at Peekskill (NY) Military Academy (PMA). When PMA closed in the ‘60s, he returned to Maine, teaching English at the high school in Norway, Maine until his retirement. He also returned to his love of radio communication, becoming very active in amateur radio activities such as the Pine Tree Net and editing The Yarn. A thirty-second degree Mason, he entered the Order of the Shrine, becoming very active in the Kora Temple of Lewiston, Maine.

From 1957 until 1977, Clevis wrote. He wrote essays, short stories, sermons, research papers, and curriculum proposals. None were ever published: he never sought to publish them. But they, more than any other thing, bear testimony to the strength, the temper, the interests, the sense of adventure, the courage, the understanding of people, the sense of humor, the passion, the vulnerability, the insecurities, and this man’s intellectual capacity. This collection of his writings is unedited—in his own words.

I want to thank my sister, Nancy Strubbe, for helping me collect these writings, my sister and her daughter, Christina, for helping put the genealogical information together, and my husband, Gene Wolfe, for patiently reading many of these articles for textual inconsistencies and typographical errors.