A Life: Edith Mildred Lupien, 1924 — 2015, ‘Always Very Gracious, Calm, Unruffled’

Becoming a mom to three young girls who lost their own mother to cancer was sometimes difficult, but it was a role for which Lupien’s upbringing in Springfield, Vt., where she grew up the youngest of nine children and the daughter of a foundry worker, prepared her.
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A Life: Edith Mildred Lupien, 1924 — 2015, ‘Always Very Gracious, Calm, Unruffled’ Millie Lupien when she was about 18, living in Springfield, Vt. (Family photograph) Millie Lupien when she was about 18, living in Springfield, Vt. (Family photograph) Millie Lupien in her early 30s. (Family photograph) Millie Lupien when she was about 18, living in Springfield, Vt. (Family photograph) By John Lippman Valley News Staff Writer Monday, April 6, 2015 (Published in print: Monday, April 6, 2015) Norwich — Somewhere in New Hampshire — its location secret — there is a bog where Millie Lupien would go every September with her friend Connie Kousman to harvest wild cranberries. Lupien, who was well into her 70s by this time, would don rubber boots and wade into the murky water. Clearing away the brush and low bushes, Lupien would fill her container with cranberries, which she would then bake into scones to sell at the Norwich and Cornish farmers markets. For a reason nature did not reveal, Kousman recalled, the spot in the water where Lupien always gathered her cranberries was special. “The berries ripened much more quickly there than any other place,” Kousman said. So they named the area Millie’s Patch. Kousman vividly remembers picking cranberries one year when the trees started to rustle. She glanced toward Lupien, who was standing knee-deep in the bog, and heard her friend exclaim, “I love the wind! It’s the wind speaking to us!” That, Kousman said, was quintessential Lupien: relishing the moment and unencumbered about speaking aloud exactly what crossed her mind, no matter how it may have looked to other people. Lupien, who died Feb. 26 at Valley Terrace in Wilder, lived in Norwich for five decades and was renowned for her baking skills — “phenomenal” scones, “out of this world” pies (raspberry especially), “terrific” strawberry shortcake, biscuits and anadama bread. She also loved Vermont traditions such as putting up hundreds of quarts of pickled beets and beans from her garden each summer, possessed a gifted eye for floral design (she ran her own flower shop for 10 years), cultivated an award-worthy flower garden, became an ardent watercolorist, passionately embraced her Celtic heritage, loved to read historical novels and rose to the demanding challenge of being the wife of Tony Lupien, a legendary Dartmouth College baseball coach, with cheer, poise and grace, family and friends said. Lupien — whom everyone knew as Millie — is remembered, too, as a mother of five daughters, three of whom arrived all at once in 1954 when she married Tony, a young widower, and two more who were born in quick succession thereafter. Becoming a mom to three young girls who lost their own mother to cancer was sometimes difficult, family members said, but it was a role for which Lupien’s upbringing in Springfield, Vt., where she grew up the youngest of nine children and the daughter of a foundry worker, prepared her. Lupien, too, knew what it was like to lose a parent early in life. Born Edith Mildred Robinson, Millie was 18 and a senior at Springfield High School when her 80-year-old father died in 1942. Eighteen was the same age Millie’s mother was when she married her husband, who was 48 at the time. Millie briefly attended the former Providence Bible Institute in Providence, R.I., but returned to Springfield and went to work as a secretary at Parks and Woolson Machine Co., a manufacturer of woolen cloth finishing machinery. The Robinsons were a close-knit clan and most of the family didn’t stray far from Springfield, according to Suzanne Lupien, Lupien’s youngest daughter, who lives in Norwich and is a former member of the Selectboard. And Millie might have remained there, too, if it weren’t for a handsome athlete named Ulysses J. “Tony” Lupien who had been coaxed to Springfield by his Harvard College roommate to help run a laundry business. It was business that one day brought Tony Lupien, whose first wife died in 1953, to Parks and Woolson, where he met Millie Robinson, said Liz Lupien, Suzanne’s older sister, a piano teacher in St. Paul, Minn. The courtship was brief: Tony and Millie were married on May 12, 1954. With that, she became a mom to Diana, 12, Judith, 9, and Carol, 6. Liz arrived soon afterward and Suzanne, born a month premature, 10 months later. For the first few years of marriage, Tony’s work as head basketball coach at Middlebury College kept him on the road a good deal and Millie at home in Springfield to raise the family. Although Tony Lupien was hired at Dartmouth in 1956, it wasn’t until 1963 that the Lupiens moved to Norwich so he could be closer to work. By this time, Diana had gone on to college, and Judith would soon follow, leaving Millie and three daughters to move into an old farmhouse on Union Village Road only a couple of miles from the Norwich green with an easterly view over rolling farmland that afforded sunrise vistas. Norwich was a world away from Springfield, which at the time was a busy factory town. Norwich was a farming community, although one that attracted academics, European intellectuals and artists because of its proximity to Dartmouth. “Going from Springfield to Norwich was a huge change,” said Suzanne Lupien, who was 6-years-old and entering second grade when the family relocated. “The hard part for (Millie) was going away from her family, but she just jumped into Norwich life with all her energy and had a lot to offer.” Liz Lupien said her mother was “aghast” when she first laid eyes on the family’s new home: Tony had bought the 144-acre farmstead on Meetinghouse Hill sight unseen from a broker. When Millie walked through the door for the first time, she discovered the floors and walls painted in a strange melange of colors, half-eaten food on the table and laundry hanging in the kitchen. “It was in abominable condition,” Liz said. But it was the beginning of a long renovation process that Millie and Tony “lovingly and very slowly” pursued, which grew into a “real celebration” of the roots they were putting down in Norwich, Liz said. “Once we became residents, we never wanted to move again,” Millie Lupien wrote in a letter to the Valley News in 2010. There was plenty to do. At the time the library of the school was staffed by volunteers. Lupien would do her monthly rotation behind the library desk where she was a favorite among students. She kept a bowl of candy on hand, giving out pieces to the children and then hiding it when she heard the “heavy footsteps” of teachers approaching, Suzanne said. And Lupien would throw herself into helping to organize the town’s annual rummage sale and volunteer for the annual fair by preparing “pounds and pounds” of baked beans for the “taco tent.” The Lupiens’ Norwich home became a second home for many of Tony Lupien’s charges, whom he would bring over for dinner and barbecues — not always with advance warning but typically with athletes’ appetites — that culminated every year at graduation with a party for two or three dozen players, their girlfriends, parents, friends and neighbors. One year, Liz recalled, when her parents decided to host a breakfast for a winning team she saw her mother’s shopping list for the ingredients to make blueberry pancakes. First item: “88 eggs.” Lupien was “always very gracious, calm, unruffled, absolutely devoted to Tony. She held an open house for him,” Nancy Dean, a longtime Norwich friend, said. “Anybody could drop in and he expected them to be fed.” While Lupien embraced the role, it also “means you don’t do much outside the house because you have to be ready for the onslaught,” Dean noted. More than 40 years later, former students and baseball players have never forgotten the hospitality the Lupiens extended, and some became lifelong and close friends of the Lupien family. Oz Griebel, who played baseball at Dartmouth and became a banker who now heads the MetroHartford Alliance in Connecticut, regularly visited Millie in the decades after his college days. He remembers how she took an active part in her husband’s career. “Millie was very much part and parcel with everything Tony did,” Griebel said. She was “on road trips once or twice a year and at every home game regardless of the weather. She understood the game and always was very gracious to the players.” It wasn’t until Lupien was in her 50s that she could finally find opportunity to branch out, her daughters recalled. After working for a couple years at a White River Junction flower shop, Lupien decided to open her own, believing “she could do it better,” Liz said. The Norwich Flower Shop, located across from the town green, became a thriving business. It was a natural extension of her love of gardening. “After all the years of the girls and raising a family, she wanted something of her own to do,” said Griebel, who noted that despite Lupien’s late start, she proved to be an “astute businesswoman” with a steady run of loyal customers. Tony Lupien, in declining health for several years, died in 2005. A few years later, Millie Lupien moved to Valley Terrace, just a few miles from her Meetinghouse Hill home. There, as always, she presented a stylish bearing, continued to dress beautifully and where at mealtime “perfected the way to ring her glass whenever she wanted coffee,” fellow resident Kit Griggs recalled to laughter during a remembrance and hymnal sing held for Lupien at Valley Terrace a week after her death. During a memorial service at Norwich Congregational Church where the pews were full with friends and family, longtime friend Betty Edson recalled a Lupien moment that stood out. Once during a visit with Lupien and a circle of “Norwich old-timers” at Valley Terrace, the conversation among the longtime friends that day reflected “the reality that life enfolds both joy and sadness,” Edson recalled. As the visit drew to a close and Edson noted she should be getting home, Lupien put up her hand and said, “No!” Everyone looked at Millie. “No,” Millie continued. “This is very special. This is one of so many things for which we should be thankful. We need to say a prayer, before we leave.” Edson said she sees now “it was a beautiful heartfelt thank you” from Lupien . “It was a thank you for her deep appreciation of the network of profound friendship that had given such meaning to her life,” Edson said, “all the parts that make up family and community coming together in love.”