SOUTH PARIS – Maurice Bion Toothaker, 97, died with the grace with which he lived his life, on Aug. 18, at the Maine Veteran’s Home in South Paris with two beloved cousins by his side. The carrots and cucumbers he had lovingly planted in late May had recently come to fruition and brought a smile to his face just the day before.

Maurice was born on June 21, 1909, weighing just four pounds, in his home by the Perham River in East Madrid, the son of Daisy and Fred Toothaker; his strong constitution kicked in and led him to a long life.

He attended the East Madrid School and was said to have filled his knickers with apples from wild red astrakans to take to his mother on many a September day. He graduated from Edward Little High School in Auburn, Maine.

In the 1940s Maurice served in the US Army for four years as an MP at Fort Devons. In his early twenties he worked in the family’s maple orchard, in the cranberry fields; he helped to build the road to Rangeley, and, in his own words, “was a house painter for the last sixty years of my life.” Some summers he worked as a boatwright in Florida or as a carpenter on Cape Cod. It is said he painted every building in Phillips at least once, still walking the ladder from two stories up at age ninety-two. In 1934, when the Sandy River railroad was dismantled, Maurice took it upon himself to remove the berm that blocked the view of his grandparents’ Toothaker Pond home in Phillips; this, with a shovel and wheelbarrow.

Though Maurice never married, having lost his two loves, a WAC in WW II and Priscilla Montgomery, a well-known artist who did paintings of many Phillips landscapes and homes; he was treasured by all who knew him, and he returned their love with a rare affection. Perhaps this is because he lived by a motto given him by his mother: “I shall pass through this world but once! Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now.” Apples were picked, stone walls built, posies and rhubarb and fresh peas and hand-picked cranberries left on porches, wood “junked up” and stacked, driveways shoveled by hand, all without notice that he was the giver.

Strong in body and spirit, he climbed Little Jackson every fall to pick cranberries until he was ninety-three; “except when I was in the service.” Maurice knew the woods and animal trails; in his younger years he was a hunter until he decided that life was too precious to take from any living creature. His swimming abilities were renowned; every day he swam around Toothaker Pond’s forty acres, a float tied to his feet for safety, doing the Australian crawl. It is claimed that he shoveled his driveway after a twenty inch storm, leaning against a walker, following an injury to his leg, just six years ago.

In recent winters, when he wasn’t visiting “down south” in South Paris, Massachusetts or Rhode Island, he could be found in a rocking chair, by the woodstove, a book in one hand, and his cat Tom asleep on his lap. If he looked up, he might have said, “I’m still learnin’.”

Maurice Toothaker will be sorely missed by all who knew him, but especially by his cousins Dorothy Bower, Leanne McKinney, and Helen Hawkes; his half brothers, Mackie and Monty Toothaker; his long time friend, Charles Fassett, who took him to Thailand, Australia and across the country to Alaska’s Mount Denali; Arthur and Clair Edmunds, who shared his morning coffee at five a.m. every single day; Doris and Linda Bonney, sister and niece to Priscilla Montgomery; his neighbor, Alan Morse, who helped his fix his water pipes and built him a perfect screened-in porch; his newest and youngest pal, Ting Morse; and Elizabeth Cooke, who learned the ways of the woods from him.

Maurice was pre-deceased by his parents, Fred and Daisy Toothaker.

A grave-site memorial for close family and friends will be held later in the week.

Any donations in Maurice’s name may be made to the Phillips Library.