Enfield
Born Evelyn Sanford in Randolph in 1924, Crate devoted much of her adult life in Enfield to raising her eight children, and to her husband of 67 years, Donald Crate. Between diaper changes and laundry loads, she also did bookwork for the businesses she and Donald ran together, and helped him man the siren and telephone during the 35 years he was fire chief, even when the phone rang in the middle of the night in a bedroom with two cribs in it, maybe even three.
“Mom never left Dad’s side,” said Dolores Struckhoff at an interview at the Crates’ old house on Sargent Street, a modest clapboard five-bedroom that remains filled with warm tones and beloved objects, and sits on a hill that offers glimpses of Mascoma Lake through the trees. Struckhoff is one of the six Crate kids who still live in Enfield, many of whom — in addition to their own children — have held positions in town including fire or police chiefs, Selectboard members and small business leaders.
“Yeah. We used to say the only time Mom ever left Dad’s side was to go to the hospital to have another kid,” joked Dianne Nelson, also of Enfield.
Prior to building the house on Sargent Street in 1963, the Crates lived in a second-floor apartment in the Mascoma Hotel, one of the businesses they ran along with the downstairs restaurant and bar, on Main Street. They also ran a grocery store called Don’s Cash Market, and later, Don Crate & Sons Trucking and Excavating. After her husband died in 2013, Crate continued to own and do administrative work for the trucking company right up until early June, three months before her death on Sept. 7.
“Our father got a lot of recognition for the things he did in his life, and it was deserved. But she was part of it, too,” Nelson said. “Everything he accomplished, it wouldn’t have happened without her.”
Crate had a keen business sense, her kids said, and she enjoyed putting it to use. Finding the time wasn’t always easy, but she never complained, and her determination was not to be underestimated.
Neither was her strength. She’d always been tiny — clocking in at 5 foot 2, and not much more than 100 lbs. at her heaviest, Struckhoff said — but she was anything but frail. Evelyn was on the basketball team in middle school, and the cheerleading squad in high school. She swam like a fish, having learned by splashing around in her favorite Randolph swimming hole with Muriel Carpenter, her best friend of more than 85 years.
“I remember her figure skating,” said Carpenter, who still lives in Randolph, over the phone. “She was an excellent, excellent figure skater,” despite never having taken a lesson.
A child of the Depression era who never lost her firm sense of frugality, she’d go to the free skating rink as a girl, and spend hours perfecting her turns and glides until she could do them with a dancer’s ease.
“She was like a bird,” daughter Donna Wheeler said, the way she flew across the ice. Her favorite skating spot in Enfield had been down by the train tracks, on a small body of water she called the “frog pond,” just off Mascoma Lake. It’s since shrunk into little more than a puddle, if it’s even there anymore, but in its prime it had teemed with life.
Never much of a city person — she worked in Boston for a few years after high school, but ached for home too much not to return — Crate paid close attention to the natural world around her. Struckhoff recalled in her eulogy how her mother would search for four-leaf clovers with deft and practiced fingers, holding them up triumphantly when she found them and keeping them around the house as mementos.
As years went on, and her hands weren’t quite so full with children, she enjoyed watching the birds out her window, especially hummingbirds and bluebirds. She’d put up feeders and houses on the trees, “even though those damn swallows would come and chase them away,” Wheeler said. Even wild turkeys, though few would call them beautiful, were a source of delight for her.
Her high energy carried over to motherhood — a good thing, too.
“She was always running up and down the stairs,” hauling loads of laundry in and out of the washing machine that seemed to always be running, and hanging wet clothes up on the basement setup she’d rigged for herself in the years they didn’t have a dryer, Nelson said. At night, she’d iron everyone’s clothes with such precision and care that come morning, they looked as if they’d come fresh from a professional laundry service.
But Crate liked to do these things herself.
Amid the chaos of business and family, her “quiet time,” Struckhoff said, was in the kitchen. The rhythms of chopping this and stirring that were a form of meditation for her mother — and if anyone tried to take over, they’d catch hell.
“When she was at her stove, oh boy,” Nelson laughed. “She just knew how to do things better than anyone, and she’d be sure to let you know it.”
Given how many responsibilities she shouldered, Crate would have been well within her rights to phone it in now and again, falling back on microwave dinners or sending someone to school with a wrinkled shirt. But that wasn’t her style. She whipped up three meals a day with a near-religious fervor, especially dinner.
Several of her children gushed about her tenderloin on toast, her homemade French fries, her pork roast — and, most of all, her salmon loaf.
“Oh my god, the way she made it, it was almost like banana bread,” recalled Donnie Crate, a former selectman in Enfield who still works the family trucking company. She’d be sure to save leftovers for the kids who were coming home late from after-school activities, and would sit and talk with them at the table while they ate, so they wouldn’t have to feel alone.
It was an unusual day if she didn’t bake some kind of dessert, and she knew which ones to make and for whom: Her nephew, Maurice Langley, loved her chocolate chip cookies, Wheeler loved her green jello salad, Donnie loved her icebox cookies, Nelson loved her apple pies whose homemade crusts “were so thin and flaky, they were more like pastry,” she said. “Heaven.”
Beth Downing, Nelson’s daughter who now teaches nursing in North Carolina, said that in all the countless hours she spent with her grandmother in the kitchen as a child, she can’t remember Crate ever looking at a recipe, or buying anything she could make from scratch.
“Making pie shells and all that, it was just something she knew how to do,” Downing said. “It was really important to her to put her own touch on things, put her love into it.”
Downing thinks her career path might reflect her grandmother’s influence.
In addition to Crate’s role as a nurturer — hand-making clothes for Downing’s dolls and humming her to sleep in a rocking chair — Crate patched up so many bumps and scrapes over the years that “she was essentially a nurse without the title,” Downing said. “And a teacher. She taught us all how to swim and bake.”
And, Wheeler said, “how to care for one another.”
Nelson remembers Crate telling her, years ago, that “part of her was sorry she never had a career” in the traditional sense. She’d had a few jobs here and there, including at phone companies in Hartford and Fairlee, but a bigger part of her was proud “that her children were her career,” she said. Still, Nelson said part of her wishes her mom had at least had had the chance to go to college.
“She had a sharp mind,” she added. This was evidenced not only by her ability to juggle administrative work with motherhood, but also by her intellectual curiosity, which she sated when she could.
In her 80s and 90s she ventured wholeheartedly into iPad territory, delighted at the way apps like photo-sharing and FaceTime seemed to close the distance between herself and those she missed.
A news buff, she closely followed the goings-on in the world, even when people’s cruelty distressed her.
And she was a voracious reader. Carpenter remembers that when they were children, Crate’s nose was always buried in Nancy Drew books — the mystery series about an adventurous, independent young woman who solves crimes and takes no nonsense — but for much of her adult life, Crate had little time to herself.
When she did jump back into reading, after her children were grown, she found herself drawn to romance novels and stories of far-off places, books that were a world away from the routine of payrolls and laundry loads.
Not that she gave up any of those duties without a fight. She did as much as she could for the trucking company, “right up until the point where she just couldn’t,” Downing said. “She was stubborn like that. It didn’t matter if her hand hurt from arthritis. She was going to write those checks and do that paperwork.”
One of Downing’s favorite photos of her grandmother, in all her stubbornness and glory, was taken around her 90th birthday. She was standing outside her house with a hedge trimmer, pruning her own shrubbery with a look of determination on her face.
And why not? Why would she have anyone else trim her hedges, or make her pie shells, or iron her family’s clothes? Why wouldn’t she pick up her grandkids at the bus stop when it was easy enough to zip down the hill on her golf cart? Why would she use Quickbooks when she’d never minded doing the bookwork by hand for some 60-odd years?
“She always took care of herself the least,” said Wheeler. “I think that’s why she lived to 93. She was so used to always pushing herself. She just persevered.”
After she died, when her children were cleaning out some of her things, they found eight handwritten letters from their mother, one for each of them. She’d personalized all the letters, of course, but in all of them she urged her kids to treasure family, to spend time together when they could, and to care for each other.
“That was her legacy: Take care of each other,” Wheeler said. “It’s what she did with her life. And we loved her for it.”
And Evelyn Crate, who was small and smart and stubborn and kind and who made her own pie shells and was strong, loved them too.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at ejholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.