Posted by Terry Powers on January 8, 2023:

Pete Palmer left Lowell for West Point, then donated book collection to city's high school before his death LOWELL - One was near the end of his life. The other near the beginning. As a child, Charles Dana "Pete" Palmer met Union Army and Spanish-American War General Adelbert Ames. Ames was a distant relative living in Tewksbury, not far from Pete's home in the Belvidere neighborhood of Lowell. Years later, in a note his daughter recently discovered, Pete remembered the aging general told him to "do your duty and go to West Point." "Obviously, my father never forgot that," his daughter Valeria Palmer said. At 17, Pete enlisted in the U.S. Army. He entered West Point in the final days of World War II, the start of a long military career. Earlier this month, on Nov. 9, Pete died at the age of 92. Pete was born in Lowell in 1927 to a prominent family. His father Dana Palmer was an assistant principal at Lowell High School and his grandfather, Charles Dana Palmer, served as the city's mayor from 1888 to 1891. His older sister, Peggy, married John Costello Sr., the former publisher and owner of the Sun. Pete is also a distant relative of Benjamin Butler, another general for the Union Army and governor of Massachusetts. Despite growing up during the Great Depression, his daughter Charlotte Lekakos said Pete described a youth in Lowell of "unlimited freedom." A 13-year-old Pete, joined by several friends, peddled bikes 326 miles from Lowell to Hershey, Pa., stopping in farm houses along the way. The photo of the smiling boys ran in the Lowell Sunday Telegram. It was one of several long bike rides for Pete. When Pete was in his 70s, he biked the route again with his wife, Jane, another Lowell native, meeting up with him in the evenings. Jane, now 91, said her husband enjoyed his childhood in Lowell and his childhood friendships lasted long into adulthood. "We had a happy time and I was always impressed by the steadfastness of their relationship and the fun they had," she said. At times, the group was "naughty." She and her daughter Charlotte recalled a story of an old Ford Model T that Pete bought with his friends as a teen to deliver papers for his Sun delivery route in Belvidere. It was too decrepit to register so when a police officer caught the boys, the cop, as the story goes, told them to drive the car into the river, his family said. Both Pete and his wife graduated from Lowell High School. Just months before his death, Pete's life crossed again with the institution when he donated about 150 books about the Civil War and Reconstruction. Robert DeLossa, the social studies department chair at Lowell High School, said the collection will be available to anyone in the Lowell Public Schools community for research. Such a gift is rare for any institution, especially a high school, he said. "There are several (books) that are quite rare and not so common," he said. Valeria said her father collected the books when he was working on his graduate thesis at University of Oklahoma on the short-lived, pre-Civil War Free Soil Party. Both Palmer and Jane were avid readers and picked at least one home based on the bookcases, she said. "Less room for guests, more room for books," Valeria Palmer said. She said her father read history books, did the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink and played solitaire. He was driven by a need to understand topics completely, Valeria said. "Which made it really difficult when I tried to teach him something on the computer, because he had to know how it worked," she said. Jane described her husband as a "woman's libber before they had it." "He had a very profound patriotism," Charlotte said. "Self-disciplined and athletic, but humble, humble, humble." At West Point, Pete was a distance runner and skier, a hobby he continued into his 80s. Later in life, when he lived in Florida, he took up sailing, tennis and golf. He participated in his first Boston Marathon in 1959 coming in No. 53. He would go on to run 18 marathons over a 40-year period. As treasurer and chair of the Carolina chapter of the U.S. Track and Field Association, Charlotte said he encouraged others to run, especially women. She said Pete was also passionate about mathematics and tutored students. "He tutored it, but he also slept with a calculus and algebra two book on his bedside table," she said. "When he was cremated I put the calculus book in with him." Aside from several years in the 1950s, Pete did not live in Lowell after attending West Point. He was sent to Italy, Korea and Germany during his career in the military. He also took posts in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Georgia and Kansas. In Florida he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and sent on a tour of Vietnam. When he returned to the United States, he settled in South Carolina, where he earned a Master of Business Administration and opened a Hallmark Card store with Jane. He was living in Washington, D.C., at the time of his death. Graveside services will be held at Hildreth Cemetery in Lowell, a historic, private cemetery where both Butler and Ames are buried. Valeria said she and Pete got involved in the family cemetery a little over a decade ago. To raise money for its maintenance and funding, Valeria said she found about 500 living descendants of the family spread across the world. Her father compiled updates on the cemetery and issued a newsletter. "This was his retirement project," she said. "He was the type of person who could not be idle." She said she feels fortunate to have worked on the project with her father, who taught her so much. "He was a soldier," she said. "He was a scholar. He was a wonderful father. He taught me to be fearless." www.lowellsun.com/2019/11/26/pete-palmer-left-lowell-for-west-point-then-donated-book-collection-to-citys-high-school-before-his-death/

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