LOVELL — The Rev. Jack Mendelsohn, who died Oct. 11 at the age of 94, is being remembered as a “good neighbor” who considered Lovell his home.

“It was a very, very special place for him,” his widow, Judith Frediani, said in a telephone interview from her Maynard, Mass., home.

Mendelsohn was a summer resident of Lovell for more than 50 years. He golfed at Lake Kezar Country Club, attended community suppers at the local fire station, supported the Greater Lovell Land Trust, the Historical Society and Charlotte Hobbs library. 

Outside the idyllic community life in Lovell, he lived a life committed to civil rights and gender equality through his public and sometimes controversial liberal ministry in the Unitarian Universalist religion.

He marched in Selma with Rev. Martin Luther King, was a confidant of Robert Kennedy, Adlai Stevenson and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whom he accompanied on diplomatic missions to meet Fidel Castro, Yasser Arafat and dictator Hafez al-Assad in Syria.

More recently, Mendelsohn was CEO of the Civil Rights Project that produced the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize.”

During his life of national prominence Mendelsohn called Lovell his home, Frediani said. One of his last wishes was to be taken back to his home.

Mendelsohn purchased his Civil War-era farmhouse on Slab City Road in Lovell in 1959 after a friend suggested it as a summer home. He went there not only every summer but every weekend he could in the fall and spring. It was the only home he ever owned, his wife said.

On Columbus Day weekend, Frediani and her son made a bed in the back of her van for her ailing husband and they drove him to Maine for his last visit.

“He was always thrilled to go there,” said Frediani, who serves as a religious educator in Massachusetts and plans to retire to their home in Lovell.

He died, she said, peacefully in her arms several days later in their Massachusetts home.

It was at his home in Lovell that he wrote five of his seven books over a period of decades.

“It was definitely a retreat,” Frediani said. “He’d write on an antique desk with an old-fashioned typewriter.”

Those in Lovell who knew him said he was part of the town.

“He was described by his community as a good neighbor,” Lovell Historical Society President Cathy Stone said after hearing of Mendelsohn’s death.

Mendelsohn immersed himself in town affairs, rarely missing a Lovell Volunteer Fire Department community supper.

“We were always there for supper,” Frediani said of the summer meals at the Fire Station on Route 5.

Besides the 75-acre property on Slab City Road, Mendelsohn also purchased a nearby lot on Heald Pond, whose western shore is largely protected by the Greater Lovell Land Trust.

He was concerned with water quality issues and preserving the forests, Trust Executive Director Tom Henderson said. “(Mendelsohn) loved the work of the Land Trust. He was helpful and supportive to the mission.”

“We tried to be a part of the community in every way. We so appreciated the community,” Frediani said.

Public Works Commissioner Larry Fox remembered Mendelsohn’s love of golfing and how he always took the time to talk to Fox’s father whenever he was to Lovell.

“It’s a wonderful way of life,” Frediani said of the town. “Real neighbor to neighbor. His heart was very much there much of the time.”

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