ALUMNI PROFILE Sam Rowse ’65
Checking out Elmwood station on the rail trail in Hancock, N.H.
Nothing But the Finest by Joe Sheppard
Coming to Lawrence Academy from tiny Mason, N.H., was “a pretty big deal” for Sam Rowse ’65, P’92, ’94; GP ’24. “I got a chance to do sports,” he recalled, “and really be involved with multiple teachers and things.” Having more than one teacher was new to Sam, as he had only one teacher through the eighth grade in Mason — he was one of “seven or eight” in his graduating class — as was the chance to play football for Bob Shepherd and hockey “on that old rink on the lower fields.” “We had good times,” Sam acknowledged in a recent conversation. “Sports really taught me a lot about getting along with people and that sort of thing” — lessons that would serve him well in his long career with the family business and beyond.
3 0 LAWRENCE ACADEMY FALL 2021
For over a century, the family business was Veryfine Juice, a company started in 1900 by Sam’s grandfather, Arthur Rowse, when he bought the Standard Vinegar Company in Somerville, Mass. The elder Rowse eventually moved the business to Littleton to be “nearer the fruit,” and Sam’s dad ran the company from the 1930s through the early ‘70s, when Sam — then a recent graduate of Nasson College — took over the company with his late brother David. They weren’t making any money Sam explained, “So David and I got together and tried to figure out what we were doing wrong. We just couldn’t make a dollar. When we looked around a little bit and saw that all the other beverage guys were into single-serve, we decided we’d try that.”
