When Donald C. Freeman '26 was courting his wife-to-be, Isabelle Brown of Unity, he would take a train from Waterville to Burnham Junction, then walk eight miles to Brown's home. When the evening visit ended, Freeman would hike 17 miles back to Colby. "A good many a night," Freeman said.

Freeman, 98, recalled those long-ago treks last winter at his apartment in Haverhill, Mass. Mrs. Freeman, 92, listened and smiled. "If I hadn't met her I would have been a medical missionary," Freeman said with a grin. "She diverted me."

In a life marked by unswaying devotion to education, to his community, to the Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier and to Mrs. Freeman, those detours have been few and far between. Freeman grew up on a farm in Sidney, the oldest of eight children. He graduated from Oak Grove Seminary, a Friends school in Vassalboro, in 1919 and entered Colby the same year. Freeman graduated cum laude but not until 1926. "I took time off to teach," he said. "Appleton, Maine, for two years and Unity, Maine, for one. To save, get money."

It was at Unity High School—three teachers, 100 students—that he met Isabelle, then a senior. Freeman went on to teach in Pennsylvania but the school told him his bride could not live with him in the dormitory. He quit. A teaching job was available in Haverhill, in eastern Massachusetts, and the couple went to check it out. This was 1928, just before the Depression, and it was a job. It also was the home of Freeman's hero. "He saw that this is where Whittier was and he decided that he wanted to stay," Mrs. Freeman said.

And stay he did. For 44 years, Freeman was involved in education in Haverhill, as a teacher, principal and superintendent. He was active in dozens of civic and professional organizations, from the Massachusetts Teachers Association to drug-awareness and mental-health groups. Raised as a Quaker, he was on the board of the Whittier Club for 60 years, the last 20 years as president. He retired from that post last year at 97. "When he was walking down the street, anyone over 50 said, 'Hello, Mr. Freeman,'" said Betty Pike, a curator of the Whittier Family Homestead. "Not, 'Hello, Donald.'"

Freeman has written or edited many educational and historical pamphlets, including The Whittier Trail and Haverhill in World War II. He wrote the script for the pageant held for the city's 325th anniversary, and in 1993 wrote an addendum to the history of Sidney, Maine. Life in Sidney was‹shall I say‹ bland. It was a quiet town and we were in a super-quiet area. Only one neighbor within miles had children, two sons. One, Carlton Hammond, was my chum, at home, school, and at Oak Grove Seminary. (His brother, Elwood, married my youngest sister.). . . I worked on our farm and Howard Hammond's, read, roamed the woods, fished, went to school, played games like backgammon and checkers. Now the Freemans live in an apartment in an elderly-housing complex. The living room is lined with bookshelves; the bookshelves are packed with volumes by Whittier, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Kenneth Roberts and others. The couple is visited by their two sons, Donald Jr. and Harris, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sitting by the window in the sun, Donald Freeman summed up his career in a sentence: "I enjoyed meeting people and feeling I was doing some good in the world."

As he spoke of the long-ago past, Mrs. Freeman watched and listened, the object of his affections then and now.

—Gerry Boyle '78