Clinton Delano (right) is seen with his son, Andy (left) and Lance. The Post Cane is on the table, along with a cake for the occasion.

PERU — Clinton Delano was presented with the Boston Post Cane in a ceremony held at the Peru Town Office on Aug. 24.

Delano, 98, is the town’s oldest citizen, born on Feb. 3, 1926. There was also a moment of silence at the beginning of the ceremony for Marlin Thurston, Peru’s oldest citizen before he died at age 101 in June 2024.

Select Board member Gail Belyea said she talked with Clinton about his involvement in the town’s cemetery committee. He said he organized it in 1998 and hand-picked the group of eight or nine who did prodigious amounts of work cleaning town cemeteries, installing fences, resetting fallen stones, cutting overgrowth, etc. By 2007, they were most all in their 80s, and drifted away one by one, and the cemetery committee was no more. Mr. Delano is still proud of that accomplishment.
Belyea added that her dad was one of those hard workers with Mr. Delano.

Mr. Delano was a charter member of American Legion Chenery-Dyment Post #199 in Peru, organized in 1952 and receiving its charter on May 19, 1953. Belyea’s dad was a member of that post with Mr. Delano. This info comes from my copy of “A History of the Town of Peru, Maine,” by Mary Searles Vaughn (1971).

Presenting the cane to Mr. Delano was Town Clerk Debra Coudrain, who tracks the ages of the town’s oldsters to keep the Boston Post cane tradition upheld.

Besides Delano and Thurston, past Post Cane recipients from Peru has been Edwin Gerry (96) in 2018, Harriet Sicotte in 2014, Elizabeth Child (98) in 2011, Ruth Tibbetts (98) in 2007, Joseph Paradis in 1996, Lucina Oldham (92) in 1992, James ‘J.B.’ Emery at age 88, Charles N. Child (91) in 1955, and the first was Josiah Hall (85) in 1909.