Remembering Sully

WEST FARMINGTON – Like clockwork, Sully Greenwood would come into the little Post Office built in a former train station six days a week at 9 a.m. to greet the customers and tell his stories.

Then, on many afternoons, the thoughtful man who always wore a ball cap and loved people, would return from his home across the street with more greetings and stories.

“He would often bring me an apple and say ‘I thought you’d be hungry.’ And, he’d always joke that he’d found it in the parking lot rolling around or at the bottom of a dumpster,” said Donice Whitney, the postmistress for six years here.

“He was a huge part of my day,” she said with tears in her eyes. Nearby, a framed picture of Sully Greenwood sits. It was brought in by a customer for her.

On Saturday morning Whitney was surprised Sully hadn’t come over. When it was time to close up and leave for the day, she looked out across the street to the empty porch chair he liked to sit in and keep an eye on things and noticed the shades on his home’s windows were still down.

“I knew something wasn’t right. He wouldn’t leave the shades down because he could see better in natural light,” Whitney said. She called a family member to the 91-year-old’s home only to discover he had died sometime Friday night.

“I’m going to miss him terribly,” she said as she helped a constant flow of customers who all joined in the conversation to say they knew him. Picking up her mail, a neighbor said she’d sat out on the porch with him to hear his stories, often war stories, and remembered him for “his amazing memory.” He had served in World War II and Whitney discovered from someone else Sully Greenwood had been a machine gunner on a tank who was wounded and awarded the Purple Heart. 

Another customer, a young mother with two children in tow, said and her family now lives in one of the many houses he built in town. Another, whose mother went to school with him added, “everybody knew him.”

As the oldest living member of the Greenwood clan, famous for having produced Farmington native Chester Greenwood of earmuff fame, Sully Greenwood was the last living member of the family to have lived with his grandfather during his formative teenage years until he graduated from Farmington High School in 1936.

“He never really talked a lot about Chester Greenwood,” Whitney said. “He was very humble,” even though he had accomplished so many things in his long life, she noted.

Across town at Ron’s Market, the store’s clerk for nine years, Debbie Haines, pointed to a booth near the front window by the door and said for years Sully Greenwood came in often for a cup of coffee and to talk to people.

“He’d always start with ‘let me tell you,'” Haines said. “He did so many things. He made snowshoes for LL Bean, he built a third of the houses in Farmington then, he was probably the youngest bellhop ever when he and his brother worked at a Boston hotel. They were probably 8 and 9 years old,” Haines said smiling and then added, “there was so much about Sully.”

He mentioned his famous grandfather only in passing, Haines said. “He’d say, ‘He was known for a lot more things than the earmuffs.'”

“He was a very social person who remembered everybody: what they did, what their parents did. There wasn’t anything he didn’t do or know about,” Haines said.

The public is invited to a graveside memorial service 2 p.m. Friday at Fairview Cemetery in Farmington and a gathering to be held following the service at Joel and Karen Greenwood Smith’s home. To read his obituary, click here.