This Friday marks the first anniversary of Jane Holt deFrees’ death. How I miss my friend, as do a myriad of others. “Ah,” Wanda Orino said, remembering their conversations, “I really miss Jane.”

For Burt, her husband of 45 years, their children, Evie, Beth and Ethan, and their families, the loss is immeasurable. But I want to talk about Jane in a different context. I want to talk about the legacy she left us; a legacy of leadership, constancy to the public good and unflagging interest in her community.

“I wish you could have known her,” Karl Aromaa wrote Rumford’s new town manager, Steve Eldridge. “She would have been an invaluable complement to the efforts you are undertaking….”

Jolan Ippolito remembered that it was Jane who encouraged her to volunteer to serve on the selectmen’s town manager search committee. Helping that process go forward was exemplary of Jane’s way. “She was not concerned,” Jolan wrote, “about positioning herself for personal credit or press notoriety.”

Community service

The number of community-service positions Jane held at the time of her death is stunning: She was serving on four nonprofit boards, on the town’s finance committee, on the Rumford Library’s Growth Committee and on the Library Friends group.

Oxford County ARC director Joe Sirois observed, “If something good was going on in Rumford, Jane deFrees was there.”

He might have added that Jane was often the reason something good was going on; the Northern Oxford County Coalition, Western Mountains Alliance, River Park Restoration Committee and Western Mountains Senior College are a few of the many organizations she helped to found and foster.

Jane’s passion for improving education extended beyond Rumford and the River Valley to the New England Board of Schools and Colleges, the Maine Title IV Advisory and the executive committee of the Maine State School Board Association. “Jane’s service to this community, Western Maine and indeed the entire state is legendary,” wrote Rumford Hospital Director John Welsh.

Jane and I were close friends. We loved to talk, on her porch or mine, on the phone, or in the pool (water aerobics: little short kicks, two minutes on each quarter turn – an eternity with no one to talk to). We talked books and politics, grandchildren and religion, anything and everything.

A mentor to many

One favorite topic: how to nurture young (under 55) leaders. This was not idle chatter. I wonder how many of the nearly 500 people who attended her memorial service last fall could share a Jane-my-mentor story?

“I cannot imagine where I personally would be if it were not for Jane’s confidence in my abilities and her guidance,” wrote Patty Duguay.

Many lives “have been forever changed and deeply enriched,” said Kim Sequoia. “Our community was privileged to have such a remarkable human being in its midst.”

Donations to the Jane Holt deFrees Scholarship Fund, a project of the Rumford Historical Society, should be sent to Joe McDonald, 522 Somerset St., Rumford, ME 04276.

Donations in Jane’s memory to the Friends of the Rumford Library should be mailed to the library, Rumford Avenue, Rumford, ME 04276.

Linda Farr Macgregor lives in Rumford with her husband, Jim. She is a longtime community volunteer and the author of “Rumford Stories,” a book based upon oral history interviews conducted for the Rumford Bicentennial. Contact her at [email protected].