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Gile Kendall, A Man of Strafford, and His Own Time (Jodie Tillman, 6/20/05, Valley News)

Strafford -- Morning came, and his wife woke up alone. He was not in the kitchen. Not in the barn. Not in the fields.

Gile Kendall had not come home from his night of raccoon hunting.

Being that he was nearly 85 at the time, his wife, Margaret, panicked. She called her son. He knew where his father liked to go on his hunts, and so he drove up the nearby Taylor Valley Road.

“Sure enough,” recalled their son, Babe Kendall, “there he was.”

Sitting in his pick-up truck with his hunting dog, a dead raccoon and a battery that was just as dead. He had left the lights on while he trailed the dog in the dark, got his raccoon a good time later and then come back to a truck that would not go. So he settled in for a night in the woods.

“He was just as unconcerned as anything,” his son said, “like it was an everyday event.”

It was classic Gile Kendall, a lifelong Strafford resident who died in March at age 91: sticking to his way of doing things, unhurried by the world.

He was a constable who'd rather talk than ticket. He was a farmer who'd spend entire afternoons on his FarmAll tractor even into his 90s, chewing on a White Owl cigar and taking naps under shade trees when he felt like it. He was the quintessential old-timer who recognized the changes around his hometown but also remembered what most people either forgot or never knew: where you could find hidden springs and old property lines, when the raccoons were in the beech and when they were in the apple trees, who caught the big fish seen only in faded photographs.

“He had a tremendous amount of wisdom,” Babe Kendall said. “He'd be out in the field, and I'd wonder how he got anything done because there were always people out there talking to him.” [...]

On especially hot summer days, Kendall would get off his tractor and lie under a tree and nap. Because he was pushing 90 years old by then, the sight caused many passersby to stop and worry.

Grandson Gary Kendall said someone came rushing up to his house one time with terrible news that the old man had apparently collapsed and died while haying the field. Gary Kendall jumped in his car and drove out to see.

“I tooted the horn, and he lifted his head up,” Gary Kendall said. “He said … ‘I can't even take a nap?' ”

Kendall was deeply involved in public affairs, and he served as constable for decades, right up until his death.

“Young people used to get up and raise the devil and would run (their cars) into the fence,” said Babe Kendall. “Dad would pay for it, and they had to come up and work it off at the farm.”

Longtime resident Earl Silloway recalled being a teenager and driving around with some pals on Halloween night, dragging an old kitchen stove behind them “just to make some noise.”

All of a sudden, Kendall drove up behind them and put on his lights. He got out, a cigar in his mouth.

We're in trouble, aren't we? Silloway recalled asking.

“I don't know,” Kendall said. “If you don't hitch that thing closer so as you won't hit my truck with it, you will be.” And that was that.

“He seemed to understand that young people were going to sow their oats,” said Campbell. “People trusted Gile, and he trusted them.”