FARMINGTON – Richard Mallett had a passion for history that touched three centuries.
He quenched his insatiable curiosity by finding answers to his questions and then shared his knowledge about his hometown of Farmington and other topics through his writing, said friends and family Thursday.
Mallett, who would have turned 97 in less than a month, died Wednesday, said his son Dick Mallett of California.
Up until a month ago, Richard Mallett, a retired University of Maine at Farmington professor and retired Central Intelligence Agency worker, wrote a column for The Franklin Journal in which he reminisced about Farmington and the region’s history.
A graduate of Bowdoin College and Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Mallet taught two different times in his career at the Farmington college, his son said, first in the 1930s.
Then, after serving 20 years as an analyst and editor of intelligence reports for the CIA and studying history at Yale University, he returned in 1968 to teach a couple of courses, including Russian history.
He finished his teaching career at UMF in 1973, his son said.
Mallett wrote “The History of the University of Maine at Farmington” as well as a 100-year history of Farmington, among other books.
Mallett was the foremost historian of the last 100 years of the local and region’s history, town and community, said Farmington attorney and historian Paul Mills.
Mills, who collaborated with Mallett frequently, said that what made Mallett’s writing somewhat distinguishable from other historians was that he wrote about cultural and social history.
“He was serious, dignified, purposeful and highly academic” yet also accessible, approachable and far from a stuffed shirt, Mills said.
“He was probably the only tri-century historian,” he said. “He had a foot in three different centuries,” beginning with the 1800s.
Other people may attempt to fulfill his role as historian, Mills said, but they will compare unfavorably to him, “counting myself.”
Mallett had a sense of content, a sense of detail and a sense of decorum about what should be written, Mills said.
The two men wrote a piece for Farmington’s 2000 town report, Mills said, in which Mallett wrote the history until 1950 and Mills took it from there.
He’ll be missed, Mills said.
“There’s nobody to take his place,” he said. “I’m not prepared to take his place … I don’t see anybody prepared to take his place.”
Jack Quinn, a retired UMF professor of political science who shared an office with Mallett, said the two had been good friends for 30 years.
He was an incredibly bright fellow, an excellent musician who studied with the Boston Symphony, and he had a phenomenal sense of humor – an intellectual sense of humor, Quinn, of East Wilton, said Thursday.
“History was his passion and his hometown was his passion,” Quinn said. “He had insatiable curiosity that intellectuals have and he was just interested about his community, how it was settled and how it evolved.”
Comments are no longer available on this story