PARIS —  Duncan Slade, a prominent local artist and teacher, will be remembered  by family and friends during a community memorial service Saturday at McLaughlin Garden on Route 26.

Slade was 95 when he passed away June 10 in South Paris.

The memorial, which starts at 11 a.m., will be open to the public. Hosted by close friends and family, the informal ceremony will give people a chance to remember, trade stories and celebrate a remarkable life. 

Slade’s son, Duncan Slade, an artist who lives in Ellsworth, said the memorial is for those in Oxford Hills who knew and were inspired by his father. 

“We’re doing this for the community,” Slade said. “This community really cared about him and it’s part of community life to have this kind of memorial.”

Slade the elder taught art at Oxford Hills Middle School in Paris from 1974 to 1983 and was a well-known painter and regular fixture in the area. For the past few years, he welcomed visitors and students to his studio at 227 Main St. in Norway.

Art was, however, only one iteration of Slade’s life, his son said. Over the decades, Slade was a war hero, a plastics designer, a teacher and even a prison chaplain. 

“He always looked to the future; he never stayed in the past,” said Scott Berk, a friend and owner of Cafe Nomad, next to Slade’s studio. 

Slade was always eager to learn new things, Berk said. “After his 92nd birthday, he said, ’92, more to do.'”

Sarah Shepley, a friend and interfaith minister who will be officiating on Saturday, said Slade was “like a cat” because he had so many lives. 

Born in Atlanta, Ga., in 1918, Slade moved with his family to Kansas and then to the South Side of Chicago, where his father, a Congregational minister, helped serve the poor during the Great Depression. 

During World War II, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps and served in the Pacific as a pilot, eventually rising to the rank of major. Slade was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for transporting supplies in and flying wounded out at Guadalcanal and Bougainville. 

After the war, Slade worked for 25 years at Uniroyal tire company in Naugatuck, Conn., eventually becoming a product and design manager with nine patents to his name, his son said. 

Slade moved to the Oxford Hills area in the mid-1970s and taught at Oxford Hills Middle School for nearly a decade.

As a painter, Slade developed an extensive body of work, focusing on the places he lived in Maine, including Lewiston, South Paris, Portland and Norway. 

“He didn’t paint the tourist picture of Maine,” his son said. “He painted the real Maine. It’s not the coast, it’s going home after a hard day of work knowing you’re going to have to stoke the stove.”

Shepley said the first line she will read at the service is a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that ably describes Slade’s approach to life: “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

McLaughlin Garden is at 97 Main St. in South Paris.