“Men who have lost heart never yet won a trophy.” – Greek Proverb
Focus on Forebears: Weymouth Harris Cole (1879-1973) Part 2.
1890s: Three Cole brothers played winning football together at Thornton Academy in the late 1890s. Pictured left to right: Harris, with older brother Winfield Lee Cole (1872-1944), and younger brother Wendell Phillips Cole (1881-1952).
Apparently Lee the oldest brother continued to play high school football well into his early 20s. Either the rules regarding playing age were different then, or there were no rules.
2. Mid-1910s: Harris caught in a candid moment by sister-in-law Gertrude Sherman Cole, sitting on the back steps of the old House of Seven Gables donning his socks in preparation for another day of hard physical labor.
3. Early-1950s: Harris and neighbor Henry Cotton on the back of a horse-drawn farm wagon smiling for an unknown photographer.
The last four images of Harris were taken by Wally Cole in the mid-50s.
4. Harris in his late 70s still hard at work, twitching logs out of the woods with son Robert Weymouth Cole Sr., hired-hands Earl Boothby and Stanley Stearns.
5. Harris taking a brief break from shoveling snow after a hard blizzard in the driveway of the house where I grew up. The little familiar in the center foreground eyeing the photographer was Tuffy, our beloved wire-haired fox-terrier.
6. Harris working on the renovation of the basement in the church the family attended regularly in Goodwins Mills, Maine.
7. Harris observing the progress on the building of the garage behind the big barn at Cole Farm. Ever involved with improvement projects developed by his son Robert to expand the family business and promote efficiency, Harris actively contributed his energies to the cause until his early 90s when he caught pneumonia (the old person’s friend) but was saved from departing this world swiftly and relatively easily by the wonders of modern medicine, and thereby condemned to live his last three years wavering in and out of present tense – mostly out – a victim of dementia that turned his usual vibrant self into a stranger.
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