Larry Boyce by all accounts was a rather ordinary man.

Quiet and steady, he didn’t stand out. Before and during World War II, he left his home in Temple for several days a week to drive a Franklin-County bakery route out of Augusta for Cushman Bakery (“Best Filling Ever Put In Jelly Donuts”).

Ordinary.

But he had one passion: baseball. A passion that – by the account of his nephew John Hodgkins – transformed a town.

Hodgkins’ nomination led to his uncle’s induction last summer into the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame. The recognition was for Boyce’s work with the Temple Townies, which he created, nurtured and managed for 23 years.

Hodgkins, author of a well-received memoir called “A Soldier’s Son” (about his ne’er-do-well father, the break-up of his parents’ marriage, and what it was like to grow up in a rural backwater in the war years) is now writing a book about the Townies and Larry Boyce.

“I grew up on his team. He taught me baseball,” Hodgkins says, as if “baseball” were the key to life’s most important lessons.

When Hodgkin’s mother divorced his father and left Temple for good, she left her son in the custody of his childless aunt and uncle, Marion and Larry Boyce.

“When I was living with him everyday, it didn’t occur to me he was doing something to remember,” John told me recently. “You resurrect it from 50 years past and it takes on a new aura.”

As John remembers his uncle, he was always working. “The only time he entertained himself was with baseball. A lot of his off-time was spent earning money for the baseball team.”

Boyce organized bingo games, and Sunday public suppers, and took a collection at games.

Temple is an isolated town. As I often tell people, you never go through Temple on the way to anywhere else. You have to turn around and go back. In those days, the old back roads were still open, but Temple was small and perhaps even more isolated, inhabited only by woodcutters, a few farmers, and their families. The only business was the general store owned by another Hodgkins’ uncle. Cars were rare (and nearly useless in the winter), telephones were a new gadget, and there were no TVs or video games. Baseball was a way to bring people together. It provided a social connection.

Boyce, who played catcher and batted .401 most of the years he managed the team, started the Temple Town Team in 1931. But it was after a hiatus for WW II, when the team resumed playing in 1946, that Boyce brought together raw local talent and fashioned a community.

Everyone was playing baseball then. “It was a phenomenon after the war,” Hodgkins recalls.

Arthur Mitchell and his older brother Albert played on the team as young teens the same years their father Howard was a team regular. Arthur remembers that Boyce’s team created an opportunity for returning vets, some haunted by their war experiences, to get reintegrated into the community.

The boys, and men sometimes more than twice their age, gathered faithfully twice a week for practices, and played every Sunday. They often traveled to games, and families made an event of it.

Mitchell, the same age as John Hodgkins, corroborates Hodgkins’ memories of his uncle: He was a role model, consistent and fair, who never showed temper to the team.

Boyce led this small town to a 59-32 win-loss record in the six years after the war, often playing teams from much larger towns, including Farmington, Madison and South China.

Boyce, a diabetic with numerous health issues, continued managing the Townies for years after he could no longer play with them. But the team died with him when some kind of seizure or stroke ended his life in the spring of 1957 at the age of 52.

“This is largely a forgotten man,” Hodgkins says of his decision to write about Boyce and the Townies. “There should be a memory of him in other people’s memories.”

And that, after all, is what we can do for each other. Most of us are ordinary people, like Larry Boyce. We’re not Abraham Lincoln or Mother Theresa, destined for immortality in the history books. If we have a passion, and something to give to the community we live in, and are lucky enough to have an articulate nephew like John Hodgkins, we can hope to create a lasting memory in other people’s memories when we’re gone.<.500>