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player ready...Connie Scovill Small, who helped her lighthouse keeper husband guide seafarers in Maine and New Hampshire and penned a folksy memoir popular with lighthouse lovers, died Jan. 25.
Mrs. Small, who was 103, died in a nursing home in Portsmouth, N.H.
Tim Harrison, president of the American Lighthouse Foundation, said Mrs. Small’s memoir, “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife,” is “a great history of lighthouse life in the early to mid-1900s, but it is also one of the greatest lighthouse love stories ever told.”
Mrs. Small and her husband, Elson, maintained lighthouses from the Canadian border to Portsmouth Harbor from 1920 to 1948. Seven days a week, Elson Small turned on the light at dusk and turned it off at dawn, no matter the weather conditions. If he wasn’t up to it, Mrs. Small did it.
The couple lived in remote locations, usually without electricity and communication with the mainland. It was lonely, tough and sometimes dangerous work, but Mrs. Small found it rewarding.
“I see the lighthouse as a spiritual symbol, because every time the light flashed it was like something coming from inside of me saying, `I’m saving lives and property,”‘ she said in a Boston Globe article in 1998.
Mrs. Small was born to a seafaring family in Lubec, Maine. Her grandfather was a sea captain, her uncle a lighthouse keeper. Her father was in charge of the Quoddy Head Life Station in Maine.
After the Smalls left the lighthouse service in 1948, Mrs. Small worked in a department store and got an administrative job at Farmington State College in Maine.
Mr. Small died in 1960.
At the urging of friends, Mrs. Small wrote “The Lighthouse Keeper’s Wife” when she was 85.
“It came at a time of renewed interest in lighthouses, and she got a lot of attention,” Harrison said. “I don’t think a month went by that a reporter didn’t come to her door.”
She made more than 500 personal appearances across the region. “She loved talking about lighthouses,” said Jeremy D’Entremont, president of the board of directors of Friends of Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse. “She was a guiding light to a lot of people.”