Hannes and Herbert Schneider photographed on Mt. Cranmore in 1948. (Photo courtesy of Herbert Schneider)

Herbert Schneider was a teen living in Nazi-occupied Austria when his mother woke him and his sister Herta one cold winter night and told them they would be going on a long journey.

Weeks later, Schneider disembarked a train called the Eastern Slope Express with his family in North Conway, the snow-capped vista of Mt. Cranmore ahead of them as they breathed in the cold, crisp air, and walked under a canopy of ski poles held aloft by local schoolchildren.

For Schneider, whose father Hannes was the world’s then greatest skier, the image was more than a fanciful welcome. It was freedom.

For North Conway, it was the dawn of a new era both in its history and in modern American skiing.

February marks the 70th anniversary of the Schneider family’s arrival in North Conway – a sort of skiing version of the singing Von Trapp family – and in turn, this small village’s rise from quaint White Mountains getaway to one of the nation’s premier winter sports epicenters.

It is a rise as much about geography as it is about old-fashioned American ingenuity, entrepreneurship and risk-taking. It is also a story of heroism and triumph over genuine evil at a time when so much of the world was at darkness’s doorstep; a story largely written by two of North Conway’s most prominent citizens and benefactors of the early 20th century – Carroll Reed and Harvey Gibson.

“In North Conway, you had that rare instance where a handful of extraordinary people all happened to live in the same place at the same time and worked together to do something great,” says longtime resident and historian Carl Lindblade.

Reed, of course, would make his name as one of the nation’s mail-order catalog and ski shop pioneers. But in 1934, he was a young entrepreneur recovering in the hospital from a painful ski accident on Mt. Washington, when he realized the area’s potential as a ski resort and its great need for a ski school as a means of bringing new visitors.

The Eastern Slope Ski Club (so named for the eastern slope of Mt. Washington) in 1935 raised $200 to send four members over to the Alpine region of Austria. There, in the tiny storybook village of St. Anton, a new brand of recreational skiing invented by an instructor named Hannes Schneider was gaining worldwide attention for dramatically reducing downhill times.

The ski club members returned months later with a fellow instructor of Schneider’s, Benno Rybizka, whom Reed would hire to head up his newly opened school in Jackson, just up the road from North Conway. The school was an early success, drawing both visitors and visibility to Jackson as a skiing destination.

When the Swiss refused to share their chairlift technology, Harvey Gibson contracted local mechanic George Morton to devise his own method for transporting skiers to the top of Mt. Cranmore. Morton invented the modern-day skimobile, pictured here in 1946. (Photo courtesy of Herbert Schneider)

It also drew the attention of North Conway native Harvey Gibson, then a prominent New York banker and U.S. diplomat, who was none too pleased to see his young stepdaughter leaving North Conway for Jackson when she wanted to go skiing – such is the friendly rivalry in these parts. While Gibson’s work as president of Manufacturer’s Trust Bank largely kept him away from the Granite State, he remained heavily involved and invested in his hometown’s cultural and economic future, from traveling to Canada to bring in manufacturing jobs, to building homes in town for the Swiss orchestra he’d hosted one year in the World’s Fair down in New York.

Gibson had big dreams for North Conway. In the mid- to late 1930s, Gibson began purchasing land on Mt. Cranmore (opposite Mt. Washington) and developing it for skiing, and approached Reed about buying his school and bringing it to North Conway. Reed would accept, and also agree to open his own Saks Fifth Avenue subsidiary ski shop in the hotel Gibson had just bought on Main Street and renamed the Eastern Slope Inn. It wouldn’t end there. Gibson brought in future Commerce Secretary, Presidential candidate and diplomat Averill Harriman, who’d founded the Sun Valley resort in Utah, to consult. And, when the Swiss government refused to share its chairlift technology, Gibson contracted a local mechanic, George Morton, and sent him cross-country to other ski areas to devise his own system for transporting skiers to the top of Cranmore. He returned to North Conway with the blueprints for the first modern-day skimobile.

Of all the resources at Gibson’s disposal at that time, however, perhaps the most priceless was the one that came and left every day – a resource neighboring Jackson and most other towns in the region did not have.

The Schneiders, in February 1939, arrived in North Conway with Harvey Gibson to an elaborate welcome ceremony. Sadly, Herbert’s mother passed away from a long illness only a few months later. (Photo from Harvey Dow Gibson’s autobiography.

“Harvey Gibson understood the significance of the railroad and its importance to White Mountains tourism,” says North Conway native Richard Mori.

He also understood the importance of the iconic yellow-domed North Conway train station’s position directly facing Mt. Cranmore and its proximity, less than a mile from the slopes. So began the Eastern Slope Express, the so-called Snow Trains, which would soon deliver thousands of skiers and fresh-air seekers each day directly from Boston and New York.

Now, with the resort, slopes, and infrastructure in place, Gibson and Reed needed one last thing to help market North Conway to the rest of the world: a salesman with a big name.

Gibson had first heard about Hannes Schneider during the skier’s 1936 tour of the U.S., when he demonstrated his newly Arlberg Method of skiing (named for the region of Austria) before sold-out exhibitions at Madison Square Garden and the Boston Garden.  Schneider had established himself as the world’s greatest skier, with a string of national championships and records, and his renowned school at St. Anton.

“It is not a stretch to say that Hannes Schneider was the Tiger Woods of his day,” says Lindblade. “He was the best in the world at what he did, and singlehandedly helped bring skiing to the consciousness of millions. Imagine Costa Rica taking in Tiger Woods as a star to revolutionize golf down there. It’s the kind of thing that can only happen in America.”

Gibson wanted to bring Schneider to the United States to head up his resort at Cranmore. But while Schneider, who’d helped train the Austro-Hungarian military for mountain combat in WWI, had acquired a world following, he had also acquired some powerful enemies.

As the winds of war swept across Western Europe and Adolph Hitler’s government annexed Austria and began the practice of restricting entry to only those with money, Schneider saw his business directly affected. While not a vocal critic of Hitler’s regime, Schneider’s refusal to openly praise the Third Reich and his firing of a Nazi staff member for incompetence soon landed him in a local newspaper and led to his arrest in 1938.

Schneider served more than a year in captivity, narrowly escaping a concentration camp thanks to the outrage of western media and the intervention of a German doctor and ski enthusiast with ties to the Reich who’d offered to keep him under house arrest. Still, he was forbidden from re-entering Austria either to teach, ski or to be with his wife and children. The Nazi government wanted him to remain in Germany and to teach there.

Now in his late 80s, Herbert Schneider still holds his father’s passion for skiing and deep connection to Mt. Cranmore’s slopes (Photo: David Lazar)

How exactly Gibson secured Schneider’s freedom to this day remains a mystery. Gibson is deliberately vague in his autobiography about the exchange, only speaking of “an arrangement” with his friend Dr. Jhalmar Schacht, then-president of the Reichsbank. Some suggest that Gibson’s bank, Manufacturers Trust, held German gold in its basement vaults and had threatened to freeze it if the Reich did not release Schneider. Others, meantime, say that Gibson used his powerful post-WWI post as Chairman of the American Committee for the Short Term Creditors of Germany to extend the grace period on loans to the cash-strapped country.

If one thing is certain, it is that Herbert Schneider still holds Gibson in a reverence reserved for popes and presidents, referring to him even posthumously as “Mr. Gibson.”

After that middle-of-the-night wake-up call from his mother, Herbert and his family left Austria under cover of darkness before reuniting with his father and boarding the Queen Mary for New York. Herbert, now in his late 80s, vividly remembers Gibson welcoming them on the docks – this man they’d never before met and who’d taken a chance on them – and bringing his family to a hotel room in a luxury high-rise. None of them at that point spoke English.

“We came from a place where there were no buildings taller than four stories, and no more than four or five cars in any given place, and now all this,” he recalls, his eyes twinkling.

A couple of days later, the Schneiders and Gibson boarded the Eastern Slope Express for North Conway. The journey would bring them to the foot of Mt. Cranmore and the archway of raised ski poles as all of Conway had come to the town square to greet their newest neighbors.

“Father turned to me as we looked out and said, ‘It isn’t St. Anton, but we’re going to love it here,’” Schneider says. They then walked the roughly quarter-mile to the tree-shaded, green-shuttered white colonial Gibson had bought them on Grove Street – the house they’ve lived in ever since.

“We were going to put our best foot forward,” he says.

They did. For the next two decades, North Conway was a national leader in winter sports, hosting international competitions, welcoming Presidents and foreign leaders, and serving as one of the Northeast’s premier resort centers. Hannes Schneider, for his part, brought over protégés from St. Anton, world-class skiers like Toni Matt and Otto Tschol. They learned English through tutors and by watching Hollywood films at the town’s movie theater. The resort and school were at one point so popular that Herbert recalls giving as many as 800 lessons in a single day.

Statues of Hannes Schneider now stand at the foot of Mt. Cranmore, in his native village of St. Anton in Austria, and in Japan, where he is celebrated for introducing skiing to millions. (Photo: David Lazar)

“In St. Anton, Hannes Schneider had collected what was essentially a bunch of peasants, friends of his, and helped give them professions. Those men, in turn, went around the world and created ski areas of their own,” says Jeff Leich, president of the New England Ski Museum in Franconia. “So you had these two constellations – small groups of exceptional people who came together in North Conway.”

While Hannes, Gibson and Reed helped develop Cranmore into a world-class destination, Herbert went on to serve his new homeland in WWII, traveling to Colorado to help train the U.S. Army’s elite 10th Mountain Division, and later fighting as a soldier on skis in the European theater. This division and its trainers – many from Austria – are to this day credited with helping establish Colorado as the nation’s winter sports capital.

After 16 years as North Conway’s ski ambassador, Hannes Schneider passed away in April 1955, never having left his hometown for a more lucrative opportunity or forsaking his loyalty to Harvey Gibson. His son would run the family business for decades after, and today, statues of Hannes stand at the foot of Mt. Cranmore, in St. Anton, and in Japan, where he is revered as the man who introduced skiing to millions.

Skiing has, of course, long since given way to shopping as North Conway’s leading pastime and revenue generator, with hundreds of tax-free outlets and billboards lining both sides of Route 16. As one local puts it, “Packages arrive via UPS and leave by SUV.” Still, the town retains its unique character, its history (the train station now hosts the Conway Scenic Railroad) and its ski heritage, with hundreds still tackling Mt. Cranmore’s snowy slopes on a given winter day, and schoolchildren learning to ski as part of standard physical education.

For Herbert Schneider, it is home. It is freedom.

“It is a special place,” he says, flipping through photos of his father gliding, as if winged, above Cranmore’s fresh powder.

Seventy years after taking in that first cold breath, the air is no less free for him. And North Conway is no less of a miracle.

Special thanks to Herbert Schneider, Carl Lindblade, Mark Butterfield, Evelyn Woodbury, Jeff Leich, and Richard Mori for their generosity and assistance with this story.

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Gov. Hugh Gallen rose from a Civilian Conservation Corps worker in the 1940s to the state’s highest job.. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

Hugh Gallen was a teen struggling to land his first paycheck when he arrived in the North Country in the early 1940s to take a Civilian Conservation Corps job building roads and campsites around Mount Kearsarge.

Three decades later, Gallen had built one of New Hampshire’s top auto dealerships and arrived in Concord, first as a state representative from Littleton and then as governor.

While Gallen’s rags-to-riches rise is one of state politics’ more improbable success stories, it is also a fitting reminder of how the Granite State governorship is among the nation’s most attainable – and among its most unique.

With this month’s inauguration of Governor Lynch to a third consecutive two-year term, Concord’s corner office will have hosted 90 occupants over its 232-year history – the most of any state.

Much of this is owed to the shortness of the term. New Hampshire and Vermont are the only two states with two-year tenures for their executives, versus the usual four years. Prior to 1879, New Hampshire governors served just one-year terms, a quirk which often made serving more a sacrifice than a career, but also kept politicians in greater touch – and check – with their constituents. Mandatory campaign finance limits, enforced to prevent the “time-honored” 19th century tradition of vote-buying, had a similar effect.

“Elections are supposed to be an educational process for both the voters and the candidates,” says NH Secretary of State William Gardner. “You have to open yourself up much more here than in any other place in the country.”

Dr. Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was NH’s last ‘President’ and its first Governor. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

The result has been a list of top executives like few others in the nation. NH governors have included doctors (Josiah Barlett, founder of the NH Medical Society and signer of the Declaration of Independence; David Morrill, Noah Martin, and Robert Blood, who continued to deliver babies while in office), judges (Bartlett, Jeremiah Smith, Levi Woodbury and John King), farmers, businessmen, and a former major league baseball player (Boston Braves catcher Fred Brown).

John Langdon went on to be the first presiding officer of the U.S. Senate and hold the bible upon which George Washington was sworn into office as the nation’s first President. He also oversaw the building of the U.S. Navy’s first ship, the Raleigh, in Portsmouth harbor in 1776 – the ship featured on the state flag. John Winant, meanwhile, went on to become U.S. Ambassador to Britain and the nation’s first Social Security administrator, which is the reason folks born in NH still have the lowest Social Security numbers (beginning in 001, 002, or 003).

Frank Rollins established “Old Home Day” in 1899 as a means of bringing former NH residents who’d fled south for better job prospects back to their old communities, while Francis Murphy established the state’s first broadcast television station, WMUR. Benjamin Pierce’s son, Franklin, meanwhile, went on to become New Hampshire’s only U.S. President.

Gov. John Winant went on to become Ambassador to Britain and the nation’s first Social Security Administrator. (Photo from the book, “NH Notables”)

So much of the history and character of the NH governor’s office can be defined by the Granite State’s fierce sense of independence. Call it libertarianism or healthy skepticism, there is an almost ingrained distrust of power built into New Hampshire’s institutions and populace.

New Hampshire, after all, was the first colony to formally declare its independence from the Crown in 1776, and its three delegates in Philadelphia (Bartlett, Matthew Thornton and William Whipple) the first to sign the Declaration of Independence. This, after the state decided to oust its ‘Royal Governor’ (King George’s veto of this act can be found in the state archives) and eventually elect its own ‘President’ – a title formally changed to governor in 1791 out of deference to Washington’s election.

More than 200 years later, New Hampshire’s independent streak still keeps politicians guessing. It is a place where political fortunes, both local and national, can rise and fall within the span of one long month; where voters from Pelham to Pittsburg demand face time like no other with their leaders, and there is no such thing as fly-over country; and where, because of the government’s limited purse strings, public service trumps patronage.

While NH governors are not term-limited, and most have been elected to multiple one- or two-year terms, it is among the nation’s weakest top offices, constitutionally speaking. With no state income or sales tax, much of the governor’s and the legislature’s financial power is ceded to towns and municipalities across the state and their property taxes. New Hampshire is one of just a few states where the governor must pay for his or her own portrait in the State House.

While most states, meanwhile, have a legislature to keep the governor’s power in check, New Hampshire’s governor faces two sizable checks in both the 424-member NH General Court – the fourth largest legislature in the English-speaking world – and the NH Executive Council.

New Hampshire is one of a handful of states that have an Executive Council, but the only state where the Council not only advises the Governor but can veto almost all of his or her decisions. A mainstay from Colonial times, the five-member Executive Council was initially installed in the 17th century to ensure that then-Royal Governors not veer far from the dictates of the Crown and to report any irregularities back to the King. The institution was upheld in the state’s 1784 constitution, and in the centuries since has served as both a validation and a burr in the saddle of chief executives.

Gov. Hugh Gregg in the 1950s established the “Whopper” awards for folks who brought positive attention to NH. (Photo courtesy of the NH Political Library).

The result has been a system of government at once criticized for its perceived obstacles and celebrated as the most accountable and democratically-elected in the country. It has also remained incredibly popular with voters. Only once in 13 Constitutional conventions since 1784 have delegates questioned the Council’s value, and put it up to a public vote – a motion introduced by Franklin Pierce in 1850 that failed 27,910 to 11,299.

Checks and balances aside, the New Hampshire governor remains the state’s top executive, its chief diplomat and agenda-setter, and its cultural figurehead, from Rollins’ introduction of Old Home Day in 1899 to Hugh Gregg’s “Whooper” awards in the 1950s for folks who called “the attention of outsiders to the joy of living, working and playing in this, the best of all states.”

The governor alone also still holds perhaps the most sacred and important authority a chief executive can wield – as commander in chief of the state’s National Guard, having sent men and women into conflict from the time of the French and Indian War to the War on Terror.

As for Hugh Gallen, whose rags-to-riches rise would take him from building roads up in Mt. Kearsarge to signing legislation building roads statewide, his governorship would have its ups and downs, having come during the time of the oil and economic crises of the late 1970s.

Weeks after losing a reelection battle to John Sununu in 1982, Gallen contracted a rare blood disease and passed away suddenly.   He was succeeded in that final month before Sununu’s inauguration by State Senate President Vesta Roy, who became New Hampshire’s first (unelected) female governor.

Gov. John Sununu was the first to have his state portrait include a computer. (Portrait from the NH State House.)

Just as Gallen’s story is laced with tragedy, it also remains an example of what is possible in New Hampshire, and how its governorship is neither a right of blood nor birth, but of hard work, personality and the peerless scrutiny of Granite State voters.

“New Hampshire has always had an independent streak,” Gardner says. “The unique political culture that exists here is reflected in the structure and culture of our state government. A lot of people have tried to change it, but it continues to this day.”

If voters have any say about it, it is a tradition likely to remain for a long time to come.

Special thanks to NH Secretary of State William Gardner, NH State Librarian Michael York, and NH State Archivist Frank Mevers for their assistance and generosity with this story.

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GREENFIELD – Elizabeth Orton Jones had recently published one of America’s most lasting children’s works when a Nashua industrialist approached her with a very special assignment.

Up on a mountaintop beneath the cover of trees and amidst the chatter of children, the man asked the Mason-based author/illustrator to paint a fairy tale of sorts for a unique audience.

The year was 1952, and the industrialist, Harry Gregg, had just built a center atop Crotched Mountain for severely disabled children to learn how to function in the outside world. The dorms, he said, needed something to make them seem less like a hospital and more like a home for the children living there.

So Jones, whose American retelling of the Brothers Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood” would land on countless bookshelves over the coming decades, packed up her paints, her brushes and a healthy dose of imagination and headed up the mountain with friend and fellow author/illustrator Nora Unwin.

Over the coming year, the two would paint a series of elaborate murals for boys and girls, and in the process, make a connection that would last a lifetime.

Crotched Mountain

Jones’ seasonal murals still hang prominently in the halls of Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center. (Photo: David Lazar)

Albert Ouelette arrived at Crotched Mt. at age 6 in a wheelchair. He left 6 months later able to walk on crutches. (Photo: David Lazar)

E.O. Jones painting murals. Jones began painting fairy tale murals for the girls’ dorm at Crotched Mt. in 1952 at the request of founder Harry Gregg. (Photo courtesy of Albert Ouelette).

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” includes images ahead of its time, including this merry chain of patients acting in the Christmas pageant.

To listen to friends and followers, life and work for Jones, even into her 90s, was seldom about more than creating a world for children of all backgrounds and abilities to be precisely what they were: children.

“As they were working, I remember they would chat with us,” says Albert Ouellette of Concord. Ouellette was 6 when he checked into Crotched Mountain in 1953 with cerebral palsy that confined him to a wheelchair. He left six months later, able to walk with crutches and braces. “They were like aunts to us. They were very warm and nice. They had an audience of kids, who were fascinated in what they were doing. We would watch the development of the fairy tales they painted by seeing the outlines going up on the wall, and then the colors.”

Today those colors and seasonal images of children at play seem to leap off the wall just as they did a half-century ago, lining a well-traveled corridor at Crotched Mountain and never failing to elicit smiles from students passing by.

Less colorful but perhaps equally poignant, however, is a tiny brown book Jones authored about her experience at Crotched Mountain and staging its first ever Christmas pageant in 1953.

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” never earned Jones the recognition or royalties that “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Prayer for a Child,” or even “Twig” (which later became her nickname) would receive. But, it remains one of her most cherished works – a portrait of how the wonder of the season is able to touch children, regardless of their physical state, and how they, in turn, are able to touch us.

“Sometimes, in real life,” she wrote, “we find this dimension, feel the miracle, and kneel in the place. Sometimes the very ‘least of these my brethren’ can give us the sign, point out to us the Star above.”

In simple, but striking brown-and-white images, Jones gave readers a pageant of snow and angels and mangers and miracles. She offered wheelchairs and braces and crutches and nurses carrying the youngest and most vulnerable.

It was a set of images that few if any children’s authors of that time were willing to portray. In an age when handicapped children were seen as something to be tucked away from society’s view, Jones was adamant that they be brought out in the open – that there was a beauty and innocence and joy just as with any other child. Throughout the book, portraits abound of wheelchairs in the snow against a mountain backdrop, of glittered tin foil stars and the typical nervousness and unexpected laughter that accompany any grammar school production.

Ouellette attended that first Christmas pageant in 1953, an experience he still describes as ‘larger than life,’ not only for its dramatic scenery but for the center’s and its ability to help create a normalized existence for children with disabilities. Once an Easter Seals poster child, Ouellette went on to become a dorm counselor at Crotched Mountain before receiving a master’s degree from Northeastern University and launching a career to help people with disabilities enter and adjust to the workplace.

“It was part of our growth as a society, and how society was willing to provide opportunities for people with disabilities,” says Ouellette, now 62 and semi-retired.

It was also part and parcel of Jones’ seeming fearlessness to push boundaries and ruffle feathers to make every child she encountered feel special.

“She was sort of a kid herself,” says Michelle Scott, a longtime friend and fellow churchgoer. “She valued her own childhood, and really enjoyed being a part of children’s lives. She went with the initial idea of decorating those walls, because they were kind of plain…but I think once she was there, her heart just went out to (the kids).”

“How Far Is It to Bethlehem?” may have been ahead of its time when published, but it was hardly the first time Jones had courted controversy. Jones’ illustrations of children of all races and nationalities playing together in Rachel Field’s 1944 book “Prayer for a Child” required her fierce advocacy to survive the editor’s knife at a time when the world was at war. Jones ultimately won the Caldecott Medal that year, the award given to the children’s book illustrator with the most striking images. Images of black children and white children together in subsequent books and even the image of a bottle of wine in Little Red Riding Hood’s basket barely escaped censorship – though the latter was changed in future editions to grape juice.

“She had a connection with all children,” says Mason resident Charles Moser, who met Jones as a teen actor in the 1970s at Andy’s Summer Playhouse, where she often wrote scripts and designed costumes.  “She just loved working with children and children loved working with her. She could let things touch her in ways that others may have been too fenced off to do.”

Friends say Jones never lost that touch, performing regular children’s readings at public libraries almost up until her passing in 2005 at the age of 95. Today, her touch can still be felt throughout the area, from the mothers and daughters that line up each day for one-of-a-kind lunches at Pickity Place (the rustic and hidden crimson cottage in Mason that inspired her retelling of  “Little Red Riding Hood”), to the kaleidoscopically-colored children’s furniture she hand-painted that lines the ‘Twig’ room at the Mason Public Library.

Crotched Mountain, meantime, has grown from the small hospital for neurological disorders that greeted Albert Ouellette in 1953 to one of the nation’s largest rehabilitation facilities. Today, the center where Jones brought her paints and palette assists more than 2,000 children and adults each year with all disabilities, and provides housing, education, and medical care.

“Every child in the world has a hill, with a top to it,” Jones said as she closed her 1945 Caldecott Award acceptance speech. “Every child – black, white, rich, poor, handicapped, unhandicapped. And singing is what the top of each hill is for. Singing, drawing, thinking, dreaming, sitting in silence…saying a prayer. I should like every child in the world to know that he has a hill, that that hill is his no matter what happens, his and his only, forever.”

Up on a mountaintop, beneath the cover of trees and the softness of snowfall, hundreds of children have found their hill. This month, they will stage their own pageant with singing and drawing and dreaming and laughing, and they may even know how far it is to Bethlehem.

Special thanks to the Crotched Mountain Foundation and Richard Mori of Mori Books in Milford (www.moribooks.com) for their generosity and assistance with this story.

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HOLLIS – In 1948, Harry Truman was President, the number one single was Dinah Shore’s “Buttons and Bows,” and Ken Towne was a teen working the fields with his dad on their Hollis dairy farm when duty came rushing like a rocket from their rural homestead.

“Mother would come roaring out in the fields and shout, ‘There’s a barn on fire and they need you to go!’” he remembers. So Towne and his dad Warren, Hollis’ longtime volunteer fire chief, would jump in the family truck and head for the station to suit up with their neighbors and fellow farmers.

Sixty years and thousands of middle-of-the-night calls, interrupted meals, and cut-short Christmases and school plays later, Towne has never looked back.

“The dedication kind of grows on you,” says Towne. “If dad left, he took me to the fire with him… My work over the years kept me in town, so I was able to help. It just sort of gets in the blood. If you enjoy doing it, you stay with it. If not, you leave.”

Towne, a local truck and backhoe operator, hasn’t. At 79, he remains part of a statewide tradition of volunteer fire service that spans two centuries and today still makes up more than 80 percent of New Hampshire’s 245 departments. Of the estimated 8,000 firefighters statewide, some 6,800 either donate their time entirely or are paid nominally by the hour for each call they answer. They are CEOs and custodians, plumbers, farmers, pastors and doctors. They are college students and senior citizens. They are neighbors.

They are folks like Pembroke’s Hank Munroe, a former president of the state’s college consortium who helped start New Hampshire’s fire training academy in the 1990s, and served as his town’s volunteer chief; like Peterborough’s George Brown, 82, a retired meter reader and pole climber for the power company, who has served his department since 1952 and whose childhood home now serves as the town’s fire museum.

“It just came kind of naturally, I guess,” says Brown, whose father battled blazes for Peterborough in the early 1900s. “It was a way of giving back.”

In New Hampshire, as with the rest of the nation, neighbors have been giving back since the early 1800s, when the first fire chief was a famous Philadelphian named Ben Franklin. Back then, the machines were unwieldy and the technology rudimentary.  Each home would have a leather fire bucket that, in times of emergency, was filled and placed outside the house for the local volunteer force to pick up and pass to one another in a line. A hand-tub would come along a few years later that allowed those with brawn to rope-pull a heavy tank to a fire and manually pump a stream of water about 75 feet. One of those scarlet-red pumpers now sits on display in the old Hollis fire museum.

Towne, of course, isn’t old enough to remember those days. But he is old enough to remember when his department’s ‘state-of-the-art’ machinery consisted of an old 1931 Ford Model A open-air truck and a 1929 Buick; when an air-raid siren took the place of cell phones and pagers, on-call firemen averaged $1.50 an hour, more residents mooed than spoke, and uniforms weren’t made of Kevlar, but cotton and rubber.

“You just put on your rain coat and hat and went out,” Towne says. “In a town of 1,000, when you did have a fire, if you got everybody there and a truck out of the station within 15 minutes, that was good.”

Today, Hollis is a town of about 8,000, and things are dramatically different. The days of an all-volunteer force have given way to the need of having a handful of full-timers in place to always be there when calls come in. The town’s ambulance service, once the domain of an undertaker who’d slap a red light on top of his hearse before running out, now dominates about two-thirds of the department’s calls – a figure almost identical to numbers statewide. Where Hollis averaged about 40 calls per year when Towne started, today it averages more than 1,000.

Education and equipment are light years beyond what they were when Towne started – when Merrimack Deputy Chief Martin Carrier says training often consisted of “arriving at a scene and someone saying, ‘Do what that guy tells you to do,’” and the firefighting philosophy, according to former Hollis chief Don McCoy was to “ride up and put the wet stuff on the red stuff.”

Today’s volunteer firefighter must often meet the same training standards as his or her full-time counterparts – a regimen that means 220 hours of taking in everything from ladders and self-contained breathing apparatus to heightened focuses on safety and science. To become a basic emergency medical worker adds another 125 hours.

The result has been the evolution of a volunteer firefighter unlike anything the state has seen – one trained to respond at a moment’s notice and to handle almost any eventuality or hazard imaginable. It has also meant a dip in recruitment across the state. As the time demands of training and responding have soared and many towns continue to serve as bedroom communities for Massachusetts-based jobs, a lot of folks are taking a pass on the added responsibility.

“It’s a huge number of calls now compared to the past, the time demands are horrendous, and the calls don’t come when you want them to,” says Peterborough’s Jim Grant, who’s volunteered the last 43 years. “You have to be hyper-alert, prepared at the drop of a hat to race to the station and get in a truck – my wife will tell you, I’ve abandoned her at many meals. It is strenuous work, and the burden falls on a handful of dedicated people.”

Volunteer advocates like Merrimack’s Carrier – the state’s representative on the National Volunteer Fire Council – are recognizing this, and working with town and state officials to offer everything from tax incentives to small retirement plans and increased life insurance provisions for all state safety personnel – including volunteers. Since 1981, New Hampshire has lost 16 firefighters in the line of duty, according to the U.S. Fire Safety Administration, most of them volunteers.

“I’ll stick with it as long as I feel I can contribute,” says Towne, who even nearing 80, still jumps into his truck with the same sense of purpose each time the tone goes off. It has become a family tradition, with his son Richard now Hollis’ chief and his granddaughter Hilary a firefighter and emergency medical worker.

“Even at the volunteer level, you make it your life,” says Hilary, 29, who works days as an EMT down in Lawrence, Mass. “You create friendships that you’d never have in any other circumstance. I would do anything for anyone here, and I know that they would do the same. These people become your family… and when the tone goes off, you all come together.”

Special thanks to Jim Grant of Peterborough, Hank Munroe of Pembroke and Martin Carrier of Merrimack for their help with this story.

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Open since 1789, The Madison Church remains the focal point of this small mountain community. (Photo courtesy of The Madison Church)

The poet E.E. Cummings and his wife Marion had finished supper at the Conway Café and were driving back to their Silver Lake summer farm when something stopped them in their tracks.

On the side of Rural Route 113 in Madison, a crowd swelled outside a small, non-descript white church – an old, green-shuttered, clapboard structure no different from any other house of worship in the region. On this evening, however, the tiny church was lit up like Christmas, its tiny bell echoing in the outsize shadow of Mt. Chocorua.

It was VE Day, May 1945, and word was out that World War II had come to an end. A pastor led an ongoing convocation, as residents from Madison and surrounding communities milled in and out to pray and offer thanks.

The image so struck Cummings that he stopped his car and got out. Friends say Cummings had never been the churchgoing type – or much of a fan of organized religion. His writing, however, often showed a reverence for spirituality. Cummings famously discarded capital letters from his poetry, some say out of humility. A rare exception was in reference to God.

Amid the hum of crickets and the idling engine, Cummings stood in the shade of the tree-lined road that evening and observed. In The Madison Church, he’d seen something special – something that couldn’t be seen by just driving past; something that transcended wood and paint and glass. He returned with Marion to Joy Farm. There, in the artist’s loft his father had long ago built for him, Cummings wrote one of his favorite, and perhaps least known poems: i am a little church (no great cathedral).

i am a little church (no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection;
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope, and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church (far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature
-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever;
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

For Cummings, or ‘Estlin’ as locals called him (for Edward Estlin), “i am a little church” symbolized how something so outwardly ordinary could hold such importance for a community.

Cummings waited until 1958 to publish “i am a little church.” It would not earn him the renown or schoolbook celebrity that other iconic works like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” or “i thank you God for this most amazing” would. But when Cummings appeared before more than 10,000 at the Boston Arts Festival in 1957 – the largest public reading of his career – it was his snapshot of life in Madison he chose to recite.

“He really does capture the finite and the infinite with this poem… how a church can be the central part of this kind of rural rhythm of life,” says The Madison Church’s pastor, Sean Dunker-Bendigo.

Five decades after Cummings published his poem, The Madison Church stands just as it did – unadorned, but undoubtedly the heart of this tiny mountain community of less than 2,000 people; its only house of worship, open since 1789.

Despite its Baptist beginnings, it is the place where neighbors of all faiths and political stripes gather to contemplate and offer thanks, to celebrate beginnings and mourn endings.

Each Sunday, 70 or so residents young and old, many of them farmers, pack The Madison Church’s cozy pews; folks like Donna Nichols, the church’s treasurer and a deacon, who’s been on church missions to Haiti and Mississippi and greets parishioners with a big, enveloping hug; folks like 80-year-old Ruth Shackford, a former caretaker for Cummings’ farm, who’s been going since she was a little girl, and each year whips up crowd-pleasing cakes for the church’s annual Oyster Stew, Corn Chowder and Fancy Cake auction for charity. (This year’s is set for Nov. 1.)

“It’s truly a special place,” says Shackford. “It’s not something you’d necessarily see just by driving past, but it really is the focal point of the town.”

At its heart, parishioners say, is a faith that extends beyond psalms and sermons – a coming together of ordinary people to help their neighbors. The Madison Church houses the town’s only independent, non-religious pre-school. It’s where Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are held on Friday nights. An average day for Dunker-Bendigo may be split between chopping wood for parishioners in the morning, helping to run the church’s call-in and shuttle services for seniors, and responding to a five-alarm blaze as a volunteer firefighter.

As for Nichols, the deacon, it is a place that summons emotion each time she thinks about it.

Nichols had just moved to Madison with her daughter and boyfriend, when the home they built burned to the ground one awful night three decades ago. Left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, she would awaken the following morning to find an Angel of Mercy from The Madison Church bearing pots and pans, clothing, and gift certificates to grocery and department stores.

“I was not a churchgoer; I wasn’t even a member,” Nichols says, her voice breaking. “They didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. They just knew I needed help.”

The deliveries continued every day for another three or four weeks – food, furniture, breadboards, things Nichols says even she wouldn’t have thought of. She eventually rebuilt her family’s house in Madison, and began attending the church off and on. Today, Nichols is among The Madison Church’s most active members, leading efforts to help others in times of need.

“It’s a community church, plain and simple,” Nichols says. “It is for the community. That’s who it serves, and that is why it’s endured for more than 200 years.”

And that, no doubt, is the snapshot Cummings took with him as he closed the door of his car and drove away from the little white building on Rural Route 113. It is a snapshot that hasn’t faded in the years since and likely won’t for decades to come.

Special thanks to Ruth Shackford and Carol Batchelder of Silver Lake for their help with this story.

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Flying Yankee Restoration Group President Brian McCarthy says the refitted streamliner will serve as a rolling classroom and museum (Photo: David Lazar)

LINCOLN – Charlie Downing was 17 and fresh from a day at the circus when he handed the Boston station agent his $2.50 and boarded a bullet headed for Portsmouth.

More than 70 years later, it is a ride and a memory that never fades.

“From the moment it first came down the tracks, I fell in love with it,” he says. “I’d never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anything like it since. You just marveled at the quietness. It was so streamlined, and so comfortable. It really had the power to fascinate you. I hated to get off in Portsmouth! They’ve got some great trains today that have come along… But they’re not the Flying Yankee.”

That was 1936. Fast forward nearly three quarters of a century and the bullet that sparked Downing’s imagination and that of thousands of travelers and sketchpad-wielding schoolchildren is being recalibrated and readied for a re-launch.

Indeed, there is an air of World’s Fair anticipation as you approach the mysterious shrouded figure that today towers over the Hobo railyard in this mountain community.

For eleven years, a team of dedicated residents and enthusiasts has toiled away in partnership with the state to bring back to life one of 20th century America’s most striking forms and technological expressions. After thousands of hours – including one local quilter’s hand-restoration of all 132 plush purple seats – the Flying Yankee Restoration Group is finally seeing light at the end of the tunnel.

“We know the Flying Yankee had the power to inspire us a generation ago,” says Carl Lindblade, a North Conway resident and restoration group board member. “We believe it has the capacity to inspire generations ahead.”

To unzip the massive silver vinyl flap and cross the shadowed threshold is to set foot in a different era and view a masterpiece in every sense.

It has been 51 years since the Flying Yankee chugged its final ‘flight’ as the train of its age and more than a dozen since Storyland founder and Granite State icon Bob Morrell rescued it from a muddy demise in a Massachusetts railyard. Morrell would plug $1 million of his own money to bring the Yankee back to New Hampshire and donate it to the state for restoration as a rolling classroom.

Introduced in 1935, in the depths of the Great Depression, the Flying Yankee arrived at a time when trains were in decline. The Philadelphia-based Budd Company, the leading manufacturer of stainless steel streamliners, would produce three ultra-lightweight trains that for the first time in history used a ‘hybrid’ diesel-electric engine. The result was a train that took on the form of a bullet, both in appearance and velocity; a train capable of traveling at 112 miles per hour, or 35-plus mph faster than its steam-powered counterparts, all the while offering unprecedented comfort. It was the first ever to offer air conditioning and electric heat and to serve hot meals to travelers on trays at their seats. Operated by the Boston-and-Maine line, the Flying Yankee was capable of making its Portland-to-Boston run 51 minutes faster than the modern day Downeaster.

“Seeing this train roaring through your town was like driving a Model T and then, all of a sudden, seeing a ’Vette coming through,” says Brian McCarthy, the restoration group’s president. “It was bold. It was fast. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen. Like something out of a sci-fi movie. It was more than just a train. It helped give people a sense of hope that the country was moving forward.”

More than 10,000 packed the streets of Nashua (and 20,000 down in Boston) to witness the Yankee’s launch in 1935 as it embarked on a show tour around the region. For the next 22 years, and more than 2.75 million track miles, the Flying Yankee wowed riders, transitioning from a commuter workhorse to an excursion train – the Mountaineer, traveling through Conway and Crawford Notch – when its 132-seat capacity proved too small to meet daily demand. The Yankee would perform its final service shuttling travelers between Boston and New York as the Minuteman. President Eisenhower’s National Defense Highway Act, which jumpstarted construction of the Federal Interstate Highway System, accelerated its retirement in 1957.

“We have oral histories of kids who remembered taking the train to Boston with their fathers to go to the Boston Garden or to Fenway Park,” Lindblade says. “They couldn’t remember what happened at the game, but they could tell you everything about that ride on the Flying Yankee – where they sat, what they ate, how sleek and quiet and modern it was for its time. What we remember are the exceptions in our lives and that is precisely what this train created.”

More than 10,000 spectators lined the streets of Nashua in 1935 to witness the launch of the Flying Yankee. (Photo courtesy of the Flying Yankee Restoration Group).

It was those exceptions Bob Morrell understood when he spied the Yankee, up to its haunches in mud and neglect in a Carver, Mass., railyard. Left for dead, its once stately interior had become a rusted-out nest for squirrels and mice, its generator and engine inoperable.

“Bob Morrell had a vision, he wanted to see it done, and he had the means to do it,” says Dick Hamilton, chairman of the restoration group. “He knew its history and dreamed of it being an icon for the state of New Hampshire, both as a tourist attraction and a classroom. We are maintaining that dream.”

As with any project of this magnitude and devotion, the restoration remains a work in progress.

A train that cost $285,000 to build in 1935 is costing an estimated $3.5 million to restore. With its shiny exterior almost back to original specs, wheel trucks ready for installation, and its middle passenger car fully returned to plush-seated, green-carpeted opulence, McCarthy estimates another $2.5 million will be needed to get the train out of the station by 2010.

The group is raising the money by, among other things, selling naming rights to seats, and is soliciting donations or assistance as it attempts to track down a replacement – potentially biodiesel – engine. Once completed, the Yankee is expected to run excursions on the state-owned line between Lincoln and Ashland, and to serve as a school field trip destination during the off-season in Concord.

Planners see the Flying Yankee as both a rolling tribute to a bygone era and a bullet-like beacon for reviving rail transit and inspiring so-called ‘green’ technology.

“It is an example of transportation from our past, of course, but it could also apply to what we are seeing today,” says Lou Barker, Railroad Planner for the state’s Bureau of Rail Transit. “Given the congestion and surging fuel prices, we are increasingly looking at rail transport as a serious and viable option for the future. … I think this would be huge as an educational opportunity.  The secret to getting people interested in trains and in this technology is to get them to see them in person; to board them; to ride on them and see the engine.”

For folks like Charlie Downing, now 90 and living in York Beach, Maine, the infatuation began the moment he sat in that plush purple chair – third window seat from the rear on the right side – and looked up to suddenly see a light pole moving out of sight.

“When this train comes rolling down the track in 2010, it is going to be such a spectacle,” Downing says. “People will line up to see it, and as it’s zipping by, they’ll say, ‘This train is how old? Wow!’”

For Lindblade, meanwhile, it will forever serve as a monument to American grit and ingenuity.

“Americans have the capacity to turn to technology in times of adversity,” Lindblade says. “With the economy and rail transportation in the weeds, the Boston-and-Maine Railroad turned to this new, new technology; this shiny, sleek ray of hope. It created a level of excitement you couldn’t imagine. It was about the ability of technology to restore not only the economy but the soul.”

In the shadows of the Hobo railyard, this restoration is happening once again. A time machine capable of kindling the soul is being reborn.

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