Dr Gale Potee, A Rich and Full Life, Well-Lived

Obituaries  hold a special interest to me. I read them every day in the Recorder, and I’m always fascinated by how people are remembered and what gets included.  These days, any long obituary that’s not written about a famous person or someone in public life is paid for. So then I think about how much the very long ones must have cost–I wanted to publish an obit for my friend Joe Obeng when he passed away in 2012, but the cost was more than $500, so instead, I wrote a tribute to him on this blog.

Today’s paper had an obit for Dr Gale Potee, and from what I read, he sounded like an extraordinary fellow. His daughter Ruth Potee followed her father’s footsteps and practices medicine in Greenfield. Here is some of what was written about this doctor, who lived a very long life, born to Christian missionaries in India in 1924.

“He had many passions including building stone walls, collecting over 20,000 Massachusetts vanity license plates, and traveling to 42 states as well as 24 countries. He returned to his beloved India three times. He prided himself as a bibliophile and surrounded himself with shelves holding more than 2000 books.

Summers he spent at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York, where he began writing sonnets in 2000. A poet at heart, he had written more than 15,000 sonnets!  Most important, Gale Potee was the most loving, understanding and supportive father imaginable. “