[T]he century-old black-and-white charcoal drawing at the local home of Charles Cummings — a portrait of his grandfather, a onetime mayor of Fall River, Massachusetts, sketched by the esteemed American artist John Singer Sargent — holds a family secret.
It’s not supposed to be there.
When the longtime attorney known as Chuck graduated from Boston University’s School of Law six decades ago, he was set to join a long and storied line of counsel in his family’s Bay State practice. But the man who grew up sailing the Atlantic Ocean also loved to ski, and visiting Vermont in 1956, he found himself offered an associate’s job.
“I said, ‘No way was I going to come to this small town,’” Cummings recounted in a 2011 interview. Yet he settled into and savored Windham County right up to his death June 12 at age 87.
“I’ve had a lot of fun in Brattleboro,” Cummings told the Brattleboro Reformer newspaper in a 1985 profile. “There are certain things that are very important to me.”
Take the fluorescent shirt and pants, bow tie and straw boater he’d wear to help marshal the town’s annual Fourth of July parade.
“I think you should be colorful,” he said. “The world is full of problems.”
Back upon initial publication 32 years ago, that quote hid on page 13. But upon inclusion in Cummings’ recent front-page obituary, the old line has sprung into new life, townspeople here will explain.
Cummings, born Jan. 17, 1930, didn’t grow up dreaming of adding to the palette of the Green Mountain State. But visiting Vermont after completing law school, he met John Kristensen, with whom he’d become law partners in 1959; speech therapist Ann Hedges, whom he’d marry in 1960; and locals such as the late businessman Steve Baker, whom he’d befriend for a lifetime.
To do all that, Cummings first had to tell his Massachusetts family he was moving.
“My uncle, a lawyer, God bless him, I thought he would be very upset,” Cummings recalled in 2012. “But not at all. He said, ‘You’ve got to do what you want to do.’”
Cummings won election to the boards of the Vermont and New England bar associations in 1975 and the American Bar Association in 1985, and was named Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce Person of the Year for 1990. But he didn’t consider any of those honors to be the highlights of his life.
“You’ll think it’s corny,” he told one reporter of what he’d most remember, “but it is my wife and kids.”
And his colorful style, his three children, Chip, Robert and Peter, recently discovered as they sorted through bundle upon bundle of their father’s striped, paisley, spotted and psychedelic ties.
(Cummings’ wife died in 2006 at age 72 after a life as devoted to public service as her husband’s.)
That led the weekly Commons newspaper to top its Page 1 story on Cummings’ death with the multihued headline “I think you should be colorful. The world is full of problems.”
And the priest officiating the funeral Mass at St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church to repeat the quote for the standing-room-only crowd.
And thousands of spectators at Tuesday’s town Fourth of July parade to see the Thompson House bus emblazoned with the words on full-length banners, punctuating the fact that a local feeling once published on now-forgotten newsprint had entered the viral era.
Family and friends say Cummings would have appreciated that. The longtime partner of the Kristensen Cummings Murtha & Stewart law office that closed in 2008 stayed active right up to the day he died.
“I said when I retired I wouldn’t do any more board work,” he recalled in a recent interview.
Then Cummings volunteered to help the local New England Youth Theatre. Such service inspired the Brattleboro Memorial Hospital to honor him at its 2012 Giving from the Heart Gala.
“For a town to be successful, it has to have people participating,” he said in response. “Like a painter, he can be artistic or he can be a house painter, but he sees what he just did and that makes him proud. And I guess I could see differences being made because I, along with others, worked to get there.”