A Mellor Family Narrative

BY DON MELLOR '71

Before the 1980 Olympics, the 1932 Rink, the only rink, was just called the Arena. It was a simple place, with high windows letting afternoon sunlight streak the ice. In fact, as a goalie I used to make sure we had local advantage by choosing the darker end for two periods.

Between those periods the cultural center of the North Country was Ed Heim’s snack bar at the Main Street end of the rink. Today it’s just a sterile white hallway. The regulars would escape the rink’s chill and talk, hockey mostly, likely the same conversations that are happening today in ice rinks across America.

Probably the most regular of the regulars in the 1960s was my dad, Don Mellor. (I’ve more recently asked my friends not to call me Don Jr.). His visits started even before my brother Tom was a freshman, Class of 1968. Dad’s friend Rolf “Swede” Ericson used to bring him along to watch his son David play. This is how the Mellor family came to know Northwood School.

Dad turned 102 in February. He lives independently at home but doesn’t get to hockey games any more. Still, my brother Tom and my other siblings continue to help keep his life busy and meaningful. Tom and Dad regularly visit high school assemblies and other youth groups, where Tom holds up big placards of WWII Navy photos and Dad tells stories about life on the ship, about combat and loss, but mostly about the lessons one needs in this life — teamwork, subordination to authority, loyalty. In a way, he’s an old-time Bill Belichick: we all win when each of us simply does his job.

The students are usually awed by his presence, and while Tom has a pretty impressive record of his own — an Olympic Silver Medal won in 1972 at Sapporo, Japan

— the assembly prefers directing their questions to the real hero (who sometimes jokes that both he and Tom competed in Japan, the difference being that Tom’s team came in second).

A couple of years ago we realized two things: first, that Dad was opening up more and more about the hard times and their good lessons and, second, that he wouldn’t be here forever to tell them. Thus began “Tuesdays with Mookie.” Tom’s son Michael, AKA Mookie, was pretty good at techy things. Our own Boomer generation was pretty good at yacking. So every Tuesday for almost a year Mookie would set up a recorded hour-long conference call, inviting family and friends to chat with Dad and ask each other questions. It’s remarkable how such a setting, steeped in both time and love, frees one of inhibitions. Nothing was off limits. Truths emerged. We got to know our dad in ways we never imagined possible. The chats were poignant and funny.

In one call I remember finally convincing Dad that we had actually found those cigarettes and Playboy Magazine he caught us with when I was twelve, puffing away and looking wide-eyed at the pictures. He’d always insisted that we must have stolen them. When we all finally stopped laughing, he confessed that he too had been sneaking a smoke all those years in the belief that his kids would never know. “Are you kidding, Dad??? That bathroom always reeked!”

The Greatest Generation wasn’t born great. They had to grow up in the poverty of the Depression and then walk from the stage of high school graduation directly into World War II. They had to sacrifice, to subvert their own desires for the benefit of their kids. Dad had to forgo a 1948 Olympic hockey chance and potential professional career so that many years later his own kids could play college and even professional hockey. The War generation gave us everything, but I often fear that they took from us the opportunity to suffer, and I see that manifested all too often today.

Tuesdays with Mookie became a book we called Committed: Lessons from a 101-Year Old Tin Can Sailor, by The Mellor Children. We worked as a team writing, organizing, and printing a couple thousand copies, which amazingly were delivered to our Rhode Island home only a couple of days before Mom died right there in the living room. She wasn’t very coherent, but she did grasp a copy and mutter something.

In my forty-three years teaching at Northwood School, my guiding principle was that kids had to do it on their own, that they had to earn and enjoy their own wins and that they had to face the real consequences of their own choices. I tried hard never to give advice.

But I’m going to give some now: Cherish and record the lives of your old people. Create a record so that their stories will stay fresh. Otherwise, they fade and blur like those old black and white portraits that have hung too long in the sun in the family stairwell.