David R. Getchell ’51 died on November 10, 2018, in Appleton, Maine.
(The following was published in The Village Soup, November 13, 2018):
David R. Getchell Sr., 89, author, editor and outdoorsman, died as he wished, at home and surrounded by family, Nov. 10, 2018.
Over the course of twenty-two years, he was managing editor and editor of the Maine Coast Fisherman, National Fisherman, and founding editor of the Small Boat Journal and the Mariner’s Catalog in Camden. Later, he co-founded the Maine Island Trail and created the Georges Highland Path, a forty-mile hiking trail system in the Midcoast, for Georges River Land Trust. In 1994, he edited and was lead author of The Outboard Boater’s Handbook.
Active in the founding or operation of several nonprofit environmental organizations, he always made time for his favorite sport of surf fishing. He also partnered in 1980 with mountaineer Geof Heath of Hammondsport, N.Y., in a month-long two-man climbing expedition of 400 miles along the Labrador coast in an eighteen-foot open boat.
In the early 1980s, he and his wife, Dorrie, made a number of long bicycle trips, the most ambitious being a five-month, 8,000-mile cross-country tour to the West Coast and back to Maine. Both considered this a high point in a happy marriage of sixty-seven years.
Mr. Getchell was born in Bangor, the son of George V. and Nettie R. Getchell. He graduated from Bangor High School, attended Bowdoin College and graduated from the University of Maine in Orono with a degree in journalism. He served in the Army as an infantry training officer.
He is survived by his wife, Dorrie; his son, David Jr., of Camden; his daughter, Heidi, and her husband, David Perkins, of Lincolnville; a sister, Virginia E. Naugler, of Hartford, Conn., two granddaughters, Ali and Holly Perkins, of Lincolnville; two nephews, Robert Verrier III of Cumberland and James S. Naugler of LaCrosse, Wis.; a niece, Michelle Verrier, of Cody, Wyo.; a sister-in-law, Barbara Hall, of Westbrook; and two cousins, Betty Heald of Lincolnville and Marjorie Lucas of Florida. A niece, Martha Kaul, of Lincoln, Neb., predeceased him.