LES RICARD, WORKING-CLASS HERO
I stayed away from the obituary pages when I was a young man, because I had things to do that I had to do while I had all my strength, and reading who died wasted time. Very, very rarely did the notices concern anyone I knew.
There’s a key moment in the classic film “The Last Picture Show” when a middle-aged woman turns away her former young lover, saying “I’ve turned that corner.” Well, I’ve turned that corner with regard to the obituaries. Now that so many people die who are younger than I am, and now that I would feel terrible about missing a notice about someone I cared about, I make sure to go through them every day.
So it was that I learned Les Ricard had died. Leslie A. Ricard, born in Rutland in 1943, graduated from Brandon High School—that means he almost certainly had one or both of my parents as teachers. Cut marble in Proctor, built things as a general carpenter, finished as a locksmith for the State before he had to retire in 1992 because of a disability. Lived in the Forest Dale part of Brandon.
I wasn’t surprised that Les had passed on because he came to one of the last Brandon Select Board meetings I reported on accompanied by someone to help him with his oxygen unit. But the important thing was, he came, and when his time came on the agenda, he spoke, just as he always did.
Les wouldn’t have made a good model for Norman Rockwell’s picture, in the Four Freedoms series, of the young workingman standing up to speak at Town Meeting, but only because he looked too much like a workingman. That was his spirit. He had none of the abashed, ashamed attitude that too many people have who didn’t go through college. He had the right to make his views known, and in that respect he was as good as anyone else, and that being the case his views should be known.
Probably there are people like that in most Vermont towns, and bless them all. Brandon has always had more than one, and I won’t embarrass them by naming more of them, and I don’t need to, because Brandonites know who they are anyway. When Les came to a meeting, I had the feeling that I was looking at the Russian partisans and the French Resistance and South Pacific coastwatchers of World War II—if things had ever gotten that bad, Les and his fellow outspoken believers in local democracy could have been trusted.
I’ll miss Les, but I’ll always have the expression on his face. And he had one view on a major decision that I shared, and told him so--and let the future decide whether the two of us were right.
Both of us thought it was shortsighted, to use the least offensive word for the Planning Commission neglecting to put a bypass route in the Town Plan, to tear up and reconfabulate Route 7 through the middle of town without building a bypass first—especially because there was (or had been, stuff is in the way now) a nearly straight shot bypass route. Through a corn field and some woods between The Adams (now Maple Grove) and the storage units on Country Club Road, along the old golf course fields southward of Park Street Extension, across it (taking one and only one house) and over the Neshobe River, up and over Mt. Pleasant, and coming out somewhere near Lover’s Lane. In a couple of decades, Les said, the new Route 7 through town would be all clogged up, because nothing was being done to deal with the traffic, and then people would wish they had gone for a bypass first.
Les, if you’re paying any attention to something as trivial as mortal life on this planet, I’m putting that into print as a kind of memorial or monument to you. And if it turns out we come back, try to make it somewhere in Vermont.
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