Elise Hawtin was one feisty woman

When Elise Hawtin’s SUV rolled down the hill several years ago, she pulled herself out of the overturned vehicle, left it lying there, and yoohooed to the state trooper to take her to the airport, which he did. She wasn’t about to miss the plane and her reservation to view an exhibit at Washington’s National Gallery.

Mrs. Hawtin, 85, benefactor, ecologist, sportswoman and no-nonsense resident of Northeast Harbor and Sutton Island, died Dec. 13 in Bar Harbor, with scarcely any public notice.

Descendant of the Schirmer music publishers, Mrs. Hawtin was a patron, volunteer and ticket holder of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra and the Mount Desert Festival of Chamber Music. She helped prime the pump for the restoration of Northeast Harbor’s Azalea Garden and was chairman of the board of the Northeast Harbor Library.

For Bangor Symphony Orchestra’s auctions, she invited then manager, Robert Bahr, into her Northeast Harbor home to help himself to any of her family treasures. Few of the family paintings and antiques they picked up in their travels were off limits for the fund-raiser. Dr. John A. Bradford, president of the symphony association, who first interested Elise in her participation locally, treasures a picture of Claude Debussy she gave him.

She came by her support of music through her family. Her grandfather, Gustav Schirmer, a summer resident of Islesford, Little Cranberry Island, was host to the musical greats of the 19th and 20th centuries: Toscanini, Horowitz, Schnabel, Rubinstein.

Her parents, Rodman and Gertrude Fay, summered in Northeast Harbor. Her mother, a Maine enthusiast, was in her day alleged to be the oldest person to climb Mount Katahdin. Mrs. Fay lived to the age of 103 and died in 1989.

Elise Hawtin and her devoted husband, Ray, continued well into their 70s the tradition of climbing and camping on Mount Katahdin despite Elise’s three hip replacements and ankle fusion.

They met skiing in Switzerland in the 1940s. Col. Hawtin was a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Germany. They subsequently lived in Washington, Colorado, Japan and Russia and moved to Maine year round in the 1970s.

The Hawtins skied every winter in France for a month or more with their nephew, Dr. Richard Neville. Summers they lived on Sutton Island and cruised the coast of Maine on their sloop. After her husband’s death she continued cruising, enlisting the aid of a Maine Maritime Academy student. She was a formidable tennis player and a indomitable ecologist. When the huge osprey nest on the coast of Sutton Island was threatened by DDT spraying and the bird population was declining, she was in the forefront of getting the pesticide banned.

The Hawtins were gracious hosts. Every summer guest at Ray’s birthday party went home with a present. One year a passing yacht with another wealthy family, the Mellons, stopped at the Hawtins’ dock and tried to hire away the band playing at the dockside party house. In no uncertain terms, Elise shooed them away.

When the 911 emergency service was installed on Mount Desert, her home’s address, next to the Azalea Garden, was now on Peabody Drive. She said she never liked the Peabodys and objected to the name. In a rage she telephoned the Department of Transportation and tried to get the name changed. To no avail.

On the Cranberry Island ferry neighbors often help one another. One day when her husband, Ray, tried to assist my husband with his bags, she shouted out, “That’s Dickie Dudman, don’t help him. We don’t like him. He called Sutton Island an evil island.”

Richard was nonplussed. What had he done to cause such an outburst from a total stranger? Then he recalled that in a story for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, some years before, he did refer to Sutton Island as an evil island (because they wouldn’t let off-islanders pick their chanterelles or berries). We subsequently became good friends.

Mrs. Hawtin was a graduate of Radcliffe College. Her first marriage to Lindsay Ware ended in divorce. She is survived by her nephew of Phoenix, Ariz., a niece, Betsy Neville, of Deering, N.H., and a sister, Hope Cobb of Princeton, N.J., and East Blue Hill. There will be a memorial service this summer in Northeast Harbor, where additional stories about this feisty woman’s sayings, and doings will be told.

Helen Sloane Dudman lives in Ellsworth and Islesford.