BETHEL — Arlene (Remington) Harrington was always full of moxie. It was that brazen attitude that is the reason she lost part of her left thumb, when she was only 4.

“My brother was mowing the lawn and I wanted to help, and they wouldn’t let me,” she says. “When that blade come around, it cut my thumb off.”

She said at the time, “‘Just look what you did to my thumb.’ Oh I was ugly,” she says. “I wanted to help them, and they wouldn’t let me. I showed them that I could do it.”

Harrington, of Bethel, has held the Boston Post Cane for the past three years. She will turn 100 on May 3. She credits hard work as the reason for her longevity.

Without assistance, she pops up from her chair, puts on her sweater and goes out for a walk, as she does each day.

“Sometimes if I can’t put in a [puzzle] piece, I just get up and go back outdoors. I go for a walk. Some days I go over the road or down across the fields. Or up back into the woods. I’m most everywhere. I don’t like sitting around. I like to get out and get moving,” she says. She even went cross-country skiing until last year.

She spent her childhood in Andover, where her mother cleaned homes and her father worked at the mill. She remembers her childhood home on East B Hill was lit with kerosene lamps and they washed their clothes by hand.

One of her early memories, besides losing her thumb, is of going into the woods, “hiding behind a big tree up there, so the rest of the family (10 in all) couldn’t find me,” she says.

She remembers coming to Bethel to barn dances. It was either there or when working at the Andover mill that she met her husband, Chester Harrington.

“We snuck off and got married,” Arlene says matter-of-factly. “Didn’t tell anybody until it was all over with, then they couldn’t do nothing about it.” She was 17 and they were married for 51 years until his death in 1991.

Life in Bethel

After they married, she moved to Bethel and has lived on the same street her entire married life. She would sometimes visit her parents who moved to York Beach, but she has never left the state of Maine.

Before her husband left for the Philippines to fight in World War II, they had two daughters Judy (Smith) of Bucksport, now deceased, and Gloria (Crockett) of Bethel.

When he returned home, they took over the family dairy farm of about 20 cows. Every winter Chester logged with his brother-in-law and a team of horses. They had three more daughters: Esther (Fuller) of Greenwood, Wilma (Bean) of Bethel and Dorie (Thurston) of Durham.

Arlene was a hard worker, haying the fields all day, then going to work at night at Echo Wood Products in Locke Mills, said her daughter, Wilma Bean.

Harrington’s crafts are all around her cozy home: hooked rugs, knitted blankets and embroidered doilies.

“I could sew anything,” she says of the quilts and clothes she made. Framed photographs of her five daughters, 12 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren and nine great-great-grandchildren are on the living room walls.

Outside, Bean points to a pile of yard debris about 100 yards into the field. “That’s how far she goes, makes four or five trips a day with the sled.” An old plastic sled is Harrington’s wheelbarrow.

“Do you shovel, too?” she is asked.

“Just snow,” she responds wryly.

She looks down the road remembering that her children would walk down that way to go sledding on Kimball Hill.

“Did you go sledding with them?” she is asked.

“Of course I did. I certainly like to have fun,” said the birthday girl.

 

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