Staff Writer
HOULTON — For close to 50 years, Alice McQuarrie has worked in Houlton’s probate office.
“I will have been there for 47 years come May, and I’ll be 82 years old in June,” she said. “Over half my life has been spent in those four walls over there. So, I guess you’d call it home.”
The daughter of Frank and Harriet Crawford, Alice was born at Madigan Hospital and grew up on the family’s B Road farm with one sister, Alma Crawford Gallop. Alice’s education started early at the Niles School, a schoolhouse also on the B Road.
“I went to school when I was 5 years old. I wasn’t supposed to go then, but my mother was a teacher and all my friends were going to school,” she explained. “So, my mother went and talked to the teacher; there was an empty seat so they let me start. That made me graduate high school on my birthday when I was 17 years old.”
Niles School was a small, country school, recalls Alice, with eight grades, four on one side of the room and four on the other. So, after completing eight grades at Niles, starting at Houlton High School with so many other students was a big change.
“But I made it through,” she says.
After high school graduation, Alice studied at Ricker Junior College for a year. And not long after, in the summer of 1944, she first started at the probate office.
“They called me to see if I’d go over to the courthouse. No interviews, no nothing,” she said. “So, I went over there, and I’ve been there almost ever since.”
Alice worked at the probate office for about eight years, resigning about six months after she married Wilfred McQuarrie — the Hodgdon man she first met on a blind date.
“A friend of mine was going to the movies with a friend of Wilfred’s and she asked me if I’d go,” explained Alice. “I wasn’t too enthused because I wanted to go to a ballgame that night. I was kind of wrapped up in the Collegians’ ballgames. So, all the time [I was on that first date] I kept wishing I was over at the ballpark.”
But the two hit it off and married on June 5, 1952. Alice resigned her job at probate in December 1952, staying home 13 years to raise the couple’s three children, Michael, Mary and David. Wilfred worked as a farmer and then later as a mechanic.
“Wilfred started out working on his father’s farm, but times got hard so he went in with my brother-in-law doing mechanic work at the Houlton Truck Garage. He worked there until he died in 1979,” explained Alice. “I worked over there, too, for three years doing bookkeeping for them. I loved the bookkeeping and thought I’d never go back to the probate court. But then, my friend Phyllis Oliver, went in as deputy register [in 1969] and she called and wanted me to go back. I told her I’d go for three months.”
Alice ended up working with her friend for 30 years and has been at the probate office ever since, even skiing into work one day.
“We never used to close the office for snow,” she explained. “I remember one year, I got on skis and came in. My parents were boarding in state children, and one of them skied down with me from the B Road and then he came back later and we skied back home.”
The job has changed plenty over the years, and Alice has adapted to the various changes, learning the computers and other technology that’s become part of the job.
But when she’s not working, Alice likes to read (mostly historical books and some romances) and play video games.
“I’ve got canasta on my computer and cribbage,” she said. “I’d like to have Scrabble, but I haven’t got that yet.”
She also likes visiting her children and grandchildren. Her two sons live in Arizona and her daughter lives in the Brunswick area.
When asked about some of the different things she’s learned over the years, Alice said patience was something she’s tried to learn.
“I’ve learned through the years to take things as they come,” she added.
