Sara 'Sally' Townsend

I guess I’ve known Sally Townsend for 70 or more years.  She tried her best to teach me how to ski when I was six years old or so.  Picture trying to teach a little boy how to ski while he is wearing galoshes held in the skis’ metal toe plate by canning jar rubbers.  Sally did that on the slope across from Mill Cemetery.  She even let me try the little ski jump and cheered loudly when I didn’t fall.

She was instrumental in making ballroom dancing lessons available to the youth of Meriden.   Envision 10 and 11 year old kids trying their best to learn samba, rhumba, tango and waltz steps when what we really wanted to learn was rock and roll.  Sally was the epitome of patience with us, providing great help to the dance teacher, who drove those snowy New Hampshire highways to come to the White School one evening a week.

Sally worked hard at making the Congregational Church Christmas Pageant a success, once cajoling me into wearing the burlap robe and carrying a shepherd’s crook even when I was certain I should be upgraded from lowly shepherd to carrying myrrh as one of the wise men.

She served on the School Board with my father, so two of the shortest people in town made up two-thirds of that august body at a time when there was a growing awareness that the student population was outgrowing the two two-room schools in use.

She acted in plays put on by the Meriden Players, once playing a somewhat buxom maid in blackface, but it was her abilities with makeup that turned me from an 18 year old boy to a worldly solver of crimes at least for the two day run of our melodrama.

I was saddened to learn of her passing. New Hampshire, Sullivan County, Plainfield and especially Meriden village may never see the likes of Sara Townsend again, and that is a shame.