With the passing of Bob Coolidge on December 20, our community lost one of its finest citizens. It was an honor to be asked by Bob’s daughters to give the eulogy at his funeral on Saturday, and I promised to share it here. So here it is:
A lot of you probably know me. I’m Amy Wight Chapman, and I was lucky enough to work at Bob’s Corner Store for more than 11 years. I’ve had a lot of jobs since then, but I’ve never had one that was more interesting, more fulfilling, or just more darn fun than that one. From behind that counter, I was able to go from being just a “summer person” (some people called us “summer complaint”) to being woven into the rich and varied fabric that is the community of Greenwood. It’s been almost 50 years since I first went to work for Bob, and I’m still here in town, with no plans to ever leave. I fell in love with Greenwood’s quirks and characters, and, most of all, with its identity as a place where people knew their neighbors and looked out for one another, and kindness and compassion were more important than money and status.
No one better represented those qualities than Bob, and it was a privilege to know him not only as an employer, but as a mentor, a father-figure, and a friend.
In the spring of 1978, near the end of my sophomore year in college, many of my classmates and I were filling out job applications and crossing our fingers, hoping to land the summer experiences of our dreams.
For some of my friends, that meant internships in their fields of study, or exotic volunteer opportunities that would give them valuable experience and impressive resumes.
My roommate, who had her own lobster boat, was returning to her regular fishing gig out of Cundy’s Harbor, and a free-spirited friend down the hall was heading for a summer of cooking and whitewater rafting at an outdoor recreation center in North Carolina.
As for me, there was nothing I wanted more that summer than to be hired to run the cash register, stock the beer cooler, and pump gas at Bob’s Corner Store in Locke’s Mills.
Previously known as Lee’s Variety, the store had been a mainstay of my summers for as long as I could remember, the place where we traveled by boat from our camp on North Pond to buy bread and milk and penny candy.
Bob Coolidge, too, had been at the store for as long as I could remember. I think he was just out of high school when he started working as a mechanic for the previous owner, Lee Mills, and although he was still a young man when he bought the place 17 years later, he had already been there for nearly half his life.
One summer evening at camp when I was five or six years old, for reasons I can’t remember, my older sister took a red felt-tipped pen to my face, adding a sprinkling of bright-red freckles to my cheeks and nose, and I refused to wash them off. When Bob spotted them on our trip to the store the next morning, he began calling me “Chickenpox,” and he never really stopped.
Although I already knew that Maine was the only place for me, and that one day I’d come home and never leave, at the time, I was just a “summer person.” I always wondered if Bob would forget me during the long ten months of the year when I was exiled in Connecticut, but on my first trip to the store each summer, he’d call out, “Hi there, Chickenpox!” and I’d know I was back where I belonged.
After I graduated from high school and started college in Maine, I spent two summers doing odd jobs for my brother Steve, who owned a small ski lodge, closed in the summer, that always had a deck that needed painting or a yard that needed mowing. Most of what he paid me went into the gas tank of the dump truck he let me drive all over the state.
It was a pretty great job, but I wasn’t saving any money. Since I had recently decided to ditch my liberal arts college to study culinary arts at a technical school instead, and since my mother was less than thrilled with my choices, I figured it might be time for me to start supporting myself.
Bob wasn’t sure he needed any extra summer help, but when I told him I’d take any hours he could give me, he agreed to let me run the cash register on weekends and a few evenings during the week. I would also be part of the all-hands-on-deck crew that took care of the weekly grocery order on Thursday mornings.
Unless I needed a day off for some particular reason, I usually worked some part of each day, seven days a week. On weekdays, except for Thursdays, I would come in at 5 p.m. and work until the store closed at 9, or at 10 on Fridays.
On Saturdays, I worked from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and every third Saturday I worked straight through until the store closed at 10 p.m. I came back in at noon on Sundays and worked until we closed at 6 p.m.
Saturday mornings were special, because Bob always went to Jordan’s Restaurant, at the top of the hill, and brought back coffee and inch-thick slabs of toast, made from Ma Jordan’s homemade bread, slathered with butter and jam and wrapped in waxed paper, for our weekly coffee break.
The cases of beer—and we sold a lot of beer—were kept in the dusty basement and carried, one or two or three at a time, up a set of narrow wooden stairs to fill the coolers. Because Bob never wanted “the girls” to be left alone at the store, he arranged the work schedule so that there was always one of “the guys” on duty to lug the beer upstairs and pump the gas.
Evenings were my favorite times at the store. Business was usually brisk, and there was always a steady stream of banter with our regular customers.
I got to know the rhythm of year-round life in a small town, and learned that the four seasons I knew were just the beginning. There was also mud season, when the loggers—and I confess that I had a bit of a thing for loggers, having, early on, declared my intention to marry one someday—spent less time in the woods and more time hanging around the store. There was “the smelts are running!” season, which I’d never even heard of before I worked at Bob’s, but which turned out to be one of the annual social high points of small-town life. In January and February, there was jump-start season, when the weather was, according to my part-time coworker Bob Hinkley, “colder than a witch’s tit” and Bob was kept on a dead run every morning, working his way through the list of people who had awoken to dead car batteries.
Maine’s minimum wage in 1978 was $2.30 per hour, and I think Bob paid me $2.40, which I thought was very generous of him. Except for the weeks when I worked a few hours of overtime, my take-home pay rarely amounted to more than $75, but the truth was that I was having so much fun that I probably would have done the job for free.
I continued to work for Bob, either full-time or part-time, for the next 11 years. During that time, I watched Lee-ann and Beth grow up, and I think he came to think of me as a third daughter—one who needed frequent rescuing.
When I lived on Bird Hill, I was constantly sliding off my icy driveway in the winter, and Bob soon realized that if he wanted me to report for my shift, he was probably going to have to drive up and pull my car out of the ditch first—one memorably icy winter, it was 17 times.
He fixed up my 1970 Mercury Montego enough to pass inspection with body putty and steel wool, installed a replacement horn on the steering column when the original horn quit working, and kept track of its maintenance needs far better than I did—on an evening when we weren’t too busy, he’d drive it into the garage without a word and change the oil.
He rescued me from bad decisions, and his gentle advice kept me from making even more of them.
It wasn’t just me, of course; from watching him interact with his customers, I came to understand and appreciate the importance of the central role he played in the community.
As Chris Dunham wrote on the “Greenwood As It Was” Facebook page, “Bob spent his adult life helping his community thrive through quiet acts of service and generosity. So many of life’s problems—automotive and otherwise—were solved by a visit to his store.”
In 2023, Greenwood’s annual Town Report was dedicated to Bob, an honor he richly deserved. I wrote the dedication that appeared at the front of the report, which read:
Although he worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, often seven days a week, at the store and garage, and was in constant motion, waiting on customers behind the counter, pumping their gas and washing their windshields, or performing car-repair magic in the garage, Bob was never too busy to stop what he was doing and chat for a few minutes.
Bob never made a distinction between “locals” and “summer people”—he greeted everyone with the same warmth and treated them all with the same kindness and generosity. If he knew someone was going through a hard time, he offered what was needed, whether it was a listening ear, reassurance that he’d get their car back on the road, or a few groceries on credit until payday. More often than not, people who came into the store carrying the weight of the world left with a lighter step and a smile.
He made the most of his precious little free time, becoming active in the Kora Shrine Funsters and appearing in costume as Pluto at countless parades and functions. In the winter, for as long as anyone can remember, he plowed the church parking lot and the driveway of the Greenwood Historical Society after every storm, never asking to be paid.
Service to his community has always been important to Bob, and because he has always gone about providing it in his typical quiet way, it’s likely that most of us have no idea of the full extent of his contributions to our town and its inhabitants. But if you ask around, you’ll find that nearly everyone who knows him has a story about a time that Bob made a difference in their lives.
One of Bob’s favorite sayings, to reassure people that things will turn out all right, has always been “A hundred years from now, nobody’ll know the difference.”
But, even a hundred years from now, our community will still be a better place because of the difference that Bob made.
In my own life, and the life of this town, there will never be another Bob Coolidge.
Godspeed, Bob, and thank you.
