 In an unconscious nod to the opening paragraph of David Copperfield, my grandfather once wrote in a memoir, “I was born Dec. 14, 1918. There were no guns fired that day, either in salute or anger. The armistice between the Allies and Germany had been signed one month earlier on Nov. 11. However, I probably screamed loud enough to be heard at many places, akin to the whistling of the shells flying over the French in France.”
As a beginning, if it’s good enough for my grandfather and Dickens, it’s good enough for me. All that remains to be written is the end. Melville “Mel” Chapin died March 9 at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston at age 85. The cause was a brain hemorrhage that occurred while he was vacationing with his family on St. Barts in the Caribbean.
Mel was a man of great dignity and elegance, even in death. He was a man who liked his tools, who carried around salves and balms with which to cure his family’s cuts and scrapes, and who drank gin and tonic. He was a man who polished his wife’s shoes every Saturday, who liked to sit on a dock in Menemsha on Martha’s Vineyard and eat raw clams out of the shell, a man who hated Brussels sprouts and adored the color blue.
He was also a man who was the inspirational leader of both the then record-breaking $52 million Bicentennial Campaign for Phillips Academy and the $12 million drive to renovate George Washington Hall. At Andover, he wore many hats, among them those of president of the Board of Trustees, chairman of planned giving and trustee emeritus. No wonder, with love and affection, he was called “Mr. Andover.” Upon learning of Mel’s death, Head of School Barbara Landis Chase said, “There is hardly a single aspect of Abbot or Andover that Mel did not serve substantially and with distinction over the past 45 years. … He looked after the whole flock.”
He was a man who also served as chairman of the board of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary—he was on its board for 50 years, and in 1984 the infirmary named him the “$52 Million Man” for the money he raised for its building fund. He was also chairman of Yale University’s planned giving program and of its alumni board and president of the Yale Club of Boston. He helped raise funds for actor Paul Newman’s Connecticut camp for children with cancer. He was president of Cambridge Community Service, president of United Community Services and director of United Way of Massachusetts, just to name a few of the organizations to which he devoted time and treasure.
He was a recipient of the United Community Planning Corporation’s Charles M. Rogerson Award and several accolades from his alma mater: the Yale Medal, the Yale Bowl and Yale’s Nathan Hale Award. He also received the Andover Bowl, presented to him as a distinguished alumni leader and philanthropist by the Andover Development Board.
My grandfather, named for his distinguished great-grandfather, novelist Herman Melville, was a naturally humble man, both proud and flattered to wear the many mantles offered him. His house was full of paperweights and clocks from assorted groups thanking him for service he had performed, including ribbons from his Naval service in World War II. They rested on desks, windowsills, bureaus. He was pleased as punch each time he was recognized anew. Despite the sheer breadth of his trusteeships and other volunteer activities, Mel also had a full-time job as a lawyer. At the time of his death, he was “of counsel” to Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, formerly Boston’s Warner & Stackpole, where Mel had been a partner and chairman for 61 years.
An Andover native, he knew my grandmother, Elizabeth Ann Parker Chapin, since the age of 5. Their fathers went to Andover and Yale together. Mel and Lizanne married in September 1940. A picture on my desk shows my grandfather at 20 on a boat in Edgartown, Mass. He looks handsome as a movie star, grinning and holding my lovely grandmother’s smiling face in his hand. Despite their differences in temperament, or perhaps because of them, they were always laughing together.
After his death, I sat down and reread some of Grandfather’s writing. In his later years, he had typed several books of memoirs, and I discovered his voice, which was still there, captured in those pages. Aside from the keen loss of the physical self, the loss of someone’s voice is the most devastating aspect of death. Like mental images, the timbre of the voice, the exact phrasing of someone’s words, begins to fade before they are lost to you forever. But as long as I could read my grandfather describing his life, his voice was in my head and in me.
In one of my last conversations with my grandfather, he said, “You’ve got to understand, Liza, we’ve led a charmed life.”
Indeed he did. And like David Copperfield, at the end of the tale my grandfather was the hero of his own life.
Besides my grandmother, of Cambridge, Mass., Mel leaves a son, Allan ’59, of New York City; a daughter, Elizabeth M. of Mattapoisett, Mass., and seven grandchildren.
A memorial service was held in Cochran Chapel April 24. |
| Liza Klaussmann ’94 lives in Paris. This memorial was adapted and reprinted with her permission. |
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