Mim Hart was just a hair over 5 feet tall. But most people considered her to be at least Paul Bunyan size. Or larger.
But you’d never see Mim in red-plaid flannel. Her colors were strictly in the territory of purple (usually magenta) and green (usually chartreuse) and sometimes pink (fuchsia). As accents, she wore matching hats (usually ones she made) and brooches (not “pins”). This style was applied to her personal appearance and her Hampden home, which she created — the only appropriate word — in the 1970s and where she cooked for, took in and entertained many, many people, all of whom were required to sign a guest book, whether it was their first visit or their 15th.
Mim spotted the land on which her house sits in the 1960s. It was not for sale, but she wanted it and harangued the owner for years until he relented and sold it to her. Then, much to the annoyance of the builder, she meticulously designed every inch of her dream house, a towering geometric split-level perched in the airy woods with an impressive alpine view of the Penobscot River. She called it Tree Tops. And except for extensive travels around the world, she wanted to live there the rest of her life.
As with most plans Mim laid out for herself and others, she got her way. She lived at Tree Tops for nearly 50 years, until she passed away on April 11 in the aftermath of a stroke. She was 97.
I have to pause here. Mim, who was well-known in civic, political and cultural circles in Greater Bangor, would be furious about her age being announced so publicly. Until her family celebrated her 90th birthday, very few of us knew how old she was. We guessed, based on sepia-toned photos depicting immigrant family members. But Mim, who dyed her hair until the very end, never wanted to be judged by her age, and she could elude the topic like a master.
Even fewer people knew her parents were Jewish. Her mother, Elizabeth Shtiff, came from Poland; her father, Bernard Olshansky, came from Russia by way of Ellis Island. They met in Connecticut, became Unitarians, became the Olivers and started their family with Mim — officially Miriam — who was born in Hartford in 1917. Four boys followed, and they all moved to the suburbs of Chicago, where Mim learned to knit Continental-style from women on public transportation. At age 11, she took over raising the boys after her mother died from pneumonia.
Eventually, the family moved back to Connecticut, and her father, who worked in finance, remarried.
But childhood was over for Mim. Her father insisted she go to secretarial school. She defied him and went to the University of Connecticut, arguing she needed a well-rounded education and had a calling as an interior designer.
What she gained at UConn instead was a husband. She married classmate Arthur Clifford Hart, a forester, in 1939. Soon after, Mim graduated from a secretarial school, and the couple moved to New Hampshire to follow Arthur’s work and to start a family. In 1944, the war moved them to Maryland, with two toddling sons and a daughter on the way, while Arthur served in Costa Rica. When the daughter came, Mim made a name for herself at the military hospital by insisting she breastfeed during an era when modesty and male medical authority ruled.
She changed the world again in her own small way when she contracted pneumonia and became incapacitated to the point of panic. She surely was recalling her own mother’s death. When the doctors asked if she were open to trying a new wonder drug, Mim — ever the adventurer and desperate to save her kids from the fate she had known — agreed. (My guess is she demanded.) The test drug was penicillin, and it saved her life. It has saved hundreds of millions of lives, and you can thank Mim and the other pioneering risk-takers of her day for that.
When Arthur returned from the war, they moved to a little gray Cape on Western Avenue in Hampden and settled into family life: evening meals around the table, playtime in the backyard and Mim’s determination to support her children in all their pursuits. Son Arthur Jr. wanted to collect antique cars? Great! Son Forest wanted to have mice and snakes in his room? Fabulous! Daughter Nancy needed a new outfit for her 13th birthday? They headed right to Freese’s Department Store on Bangor’s Main Street and dropped $50. No one would tell her children they had to go to secretarial school.
“I started doing taxidermy at age 10,” said Forest Hart, who goes by Toby and is an internationally known sculptor based in Monroe. “I liked to have animals in my room. A lot of mothers wouldn’t allow their sons to do that. But if I hadn’t done that, I would not be able to do what I do now. I’m forever grateful to her for that.”
When it came to gumption, however, Mim didn’t stop with her kids — though before Toby was an artist, she managed his taxidermy business. She led many community efforts including the charge to improve school lunches locally. For eight years, she ran her own gift shop in Bangor: Hart’s Delight. For nearly 20 years, she worked as assistant to two directors at Eastern Maine Medical Center. Among her professional skills on her resume, she listed the following: travel, antiques, gourmet cooking, decorating and design, and fashion modeling.
“She was very ambitious and very independent,” said her daughter Nancy Pfrommer, who lives in Dallas and was at Mim’s side when she died last week. “She did what she wanted. She decided to take life by the horns and live it to the full extent. I remember as a teenager telling her that I would not go out if she was going to wear one of her hats — and she never went out without a hat. None of my friends’ mothers dressed that way. But Mom was feisty. We grew up with that.”
Mim also was a leader in the arts and culture communities as an audience member and as a board member of the YWCA, Opera New England, the Toastmistress Club, the Community Arts Council and likely others I don’t know. She founded senior groups in several counties and developed the Meals for Me Program in Maine. She was tireless, even after she stopped working formally, even after Arthur Sr. died in 1969. She fought for every idea, person, political issue and place she believed in whether it was Leonard’s Mills, the logging museum she and her husband supported; the library, where she borrowed countless books over the years; or a person in need of a pep talk or a homemade cookie, of which she seemed to have endless supplies. Her five grandchildren and their children, the grandnieces and grandnephews, her one remaining brother, Richard, and many others know about those cookies and all they represent.
In my own time with Mim, Mark Torres was someone who benefited from Mim’s fighting spirit. He applied for the position of artistic director at Penobscot Theatre in the 1990s. At the time, Mim was a board member and costume shop volunteer, and Torres was her first choice for the job. He didn’t get it, but he stayed at Mim’s house during the interview process and the two remained in touch. A couple of years later, when the position opened again, Mim contacted Torres. This time, he got the job. Mim wasn’t taking “no” for an answer the second time around.
“She affected me so profoundly on that first visit,” Torres, who’s an actor in Norwalk, Connecticut, said. “She was my personal tour guide and introducer to that part of the world. That lodged in me in a way that made the community mean a great deal to me. She was an ambassador to the community. The job of artistic director can be either a steppingstone or part of something special, something of consequence for a community. I wanted the latter, and Mim played a role in that. She had endless energy, extraordinary intellect and a breadth of experience. She got the larger vision. She was an adviser. I still know Mim’s phone number a decade later because I called her daily from my office at the theater.”
It was at Penobscot Theatre in 1990 when I met Mim. I was arts reporter for the Bangor Daily News at the time, and we instantly connected on our mutual passion for theater and storytelling. In fact, of all Mim’s artistic skills — she sewed, knitted, took painting lessons from the legendary Vincent Hartgen, cooked, hooked rugs and, yes, designed interiors — her greatest love was theater. Mine, too. We became opening-night seat buddies. I would pick her up, and she’d ring her arm through mine as we walked, arguing the whole time about whether she actually needed to be carrying the purse that seemed more of a hindrance than anything else. I lost that battle.
We ate Indian, Japanese and Thai food together. We sipped wine on her deck at Tree Tops, where Toby’s sculpture of a mountain lion felt exotic among the birds Mim was feeding and the squirrels she was battling. She told me about traveling to Greece, Poland, Russia, China, England, Paris — and Bar Harbor. She often traveled with Nancy. Often with Elderhostel. But she’d go alone, too. The stories were magnificent and entertaining. And some were sad. In 2010, Arthur Jr. died, and it was a dark time for Mim and the family. He spent his entire life restoring cars. She told me all about that, too. And she wanted to hear about my love life, about my work, about books I was reading, about my travels and trials. She always said, “Do it!” “Find it! “Make it!” Her gusto for life rose higher than those treetops.
Last year, I called Mim, as I did from time to time once I left the state. She had been in the hospital several times during the last seven years, and every time it seemed like the last. But Mim bested even cats: She had more than nine lives.
“I read a lot,” she told me in a breathless voice. “Lately I’ve been doing a little cooking. I made some leek soup.” She paused, and I could tell she was smiling. “It was yummy.” She paused again. “I wonder why I’m still around. I take a lot of naps. It’s boring.”
Boring would never do. And I guess in the end, she realized she was never going home again, and that was the ultimate in boring. So she went somewhere else.
When Nancy was at the house in Hampden earlier this week, she picked up the guest book and wrote: “This is the last entry. A silent Tree Tops.”
Alicia Anstead was arts reporter at the Bangor Daily News from 1990 until 2008. She is editor-in-chief of The Writer magazine and co-founding editor of the Harvard Arts Blog at Harvard University, where she teaches journalism. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Castine.