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“You know all my life I’ve hated funerals. The fuss and bother never brings anybody back. It just spoils remembering them as they really are.” -Julies Furthman screenwriter 1888-1960 Mutiny on the Bounty

I am sure that “remembering them as they really are” was the motivation for Sara and I to visit the boyhood home of one our dearest friends. It was not to pry into the lives of another’s family or morbid curiosity that drew us to Waterville, Maine.

We truly loved Sam Karter. Sam and his wife Lou were friends for over 30 years. We watched our children grow up together in Madison, WI. Every few months we would get together, four couples in all, for fun, food and family. We each would bring a favorite dish. It met at a different couple’s house each time but some things never changed. The food was always good, the beer and wine always flowed with ease and where was always an argument over politics or religion. The dinner club somehow stayed together through it all. It still meets, but now less often, with fewer couples. We, of course, are on the road traveling around this country. It was Sam Karter that started it all. Sam was taken from us over five years ago. Lou, his wife, still attends on occasion, busy at first raising their sons, Justin and Gabe alone. She is now eager to finish her teaching career in Madison, Wisconsin. Lou is an avid sportswoman, a cyclist and cross country skier.

It was cancer that took Sam and we all miss him. Certainly not like his immediate family, but the pain is still there. We miss his intellect, his compassion, but most of all, his sense of humor. Sam had a way of getting you to laugh at yourself. Usually after a heated debate where he mysteriously argued both sides of an issue and generally won both, leaving you in confusion, Sam would get you to laugh to ease the pain of your defeats.

Sam was Lebanese and grew up in Waterville, Maine. With Lou’s approval we decided to visit his boyhood home, a place where his sister Nancy and brother Tony still reside. Another brother Michael was visiting from Boston so it was quite a reunion. Both of Sam’s parents are deceased but testimony to them is still all around the home.

You might find it strange that a Lebanese family would locate in the woods of Northern Maine, but it was work in the woolen mills that brought the Lebanese to Waterville in the 1920’s. Actually the first Lebanese came in 1916 to form the Lebanon Youth Society. Sam’s father provided the land for St Joseph Maronite Church built in 1927 less than a block from their home. Later a school was built on the site and along with Sam, his two sisters and three brothers attended it. The church and school became the center of a very close knit Lebanese community in Waterville,, that at its height, boasted over 250 families. The church is still active today but with less attendance as are most.

Sam’s sister Nancy, brother Tony and brother Michael acted as our hosts and tour guides into Sam’s childhood world. We had a quick lunch of hummus, stuffed cabbage leaves and trout pate with Lebanese bread in the kitchen of the family home. Sam would have been proud and that is exactly what he would have served. The hummus was just as smooth as if Sam had made it himself. Tony is a florist in Waterville and showed us the many plantings around the house of which he had every right to be proud.

Then it was on with the tour. As a young man, Sam worked in the woolen mills on the banks of the Kennebec River at the end of the street. The mills are long gone but the famous Ticonic or Tupenny (two cent) suspension bridge connecting Waterville to Winslow, 400 feet to the East, still remains. So does the bar used by Author Richard Russo for inspiration in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Empire Falls. Russo was a writing instructor at the famous liberal arts college, Colby also located in Waterville. We toured the bar as the Karters proudly described how it was used as a central location for filming the movie, Empire Falls starring Paul Newman and Helen Hunt in 2004.

We toured downtown Waterville past the long deceased Hathaway Shirt Company, home of the “The Man in the Hathaway Shirt”, once a proud symbol of America’s textile industry. Tony lamented what has happened to Waterville under the guise of “urban renewal” and how it has “ripped the guts and character” out of this once fine city. Waterville still boasts an Opera House and one of the first Carnegie sponsored libraries in the state.

We saw the high school, now for sale, where Sam was junior and senior class president, debate team captain and as Tony jokingly announced, “both valedictorian and salutatorian” of his graduating class.” He said that Sam would not acknowledge his presence in the hall his senior year, an observation that somehow might not have been totally out of character for Sam.

A quick trip through the picturesque campus of Colby College was next , where Sam’s sister Nancy sings in the choir and attends many plays and cultural events. Nancy is a retired executive secretary who worked in Boston but returned to Waterville as brother Michael plans to do in a few years. Mike remarked that it now costs over $35,000 a year to attend Colby. Sam’s father, who was an accountant, graduated from Colby, but as Mike put it, “we were never allowed to attend as dad thought that part of your education, was to get away from home.”

We visited one of Tony’s clients, a local independent theatre, where his outdoor plantings were beautiful. A quick visit to the flora shop, Flo’s Flower Cart, where he works was fun. The day was concluded with a trip down river to a local 4th of July celebration in Winslow on the banks of the Kennebec River.The band played French Canadian music with a Cajun beat and a clogging display that had everyone’s toes tapping.

We said our good byes in the shadow of Sam’s boyhood home, and if Sam’s funeral had in the words of Julies Furthman, “just spoiled remembering them as they really are,” we felt that our visit to Waterville had given us a better grasp of remembering Sam as he really was.