Joan M. Shatney

COLEBROOK, NH — COLEBROOK, NH—Joan M. Shatney, 85, a British war bride who followed her soldier back across the ocean and made New Hampshire’s North Country her cherished home, died Saturday morning, June 23, 2012, at the Upper Connecticut Valley Hospital in Colebrook after a lengthy period of failing health, during which she was visited and kept company by a host of family and friends. Joan, who came over to this continent at war’s end with 943 other war brides aboard a converted liner, was literally plunged from one world into another, from a life as a child of a privileged civil servant’s family in India to the wife of a legendary New Hampshire guide with whom she operated one of the region’s more famed hunting and fishing camps at the virtual edge of the northern New England wilderness. Joan Margaret Shatney was born on February 4, 1927, in Calcutta, the daughter of Henry (Jack) Jerome and Alice (de Dombal) Jerome. Her father Jack, wounded in World War I and then further debilitated for life in a mustard gas attack, went to India to supervise the country’s first Fiat plant. The Jeromes had planned to return to his family home in Canada, but residency issues kept them in England until, six years later, the advent of World War II. It was there, at age 16, that Joan met Rudy Shatney, already a well-known guide in New Hampshire’s Clarksville-Pittsburg region, who had just purchased Joe Beauchemin’s sporting camps at Clarksville Pond before enlisting in the Army shortly after Pearl Harbor. Like many U.S. soldiers who went to England for their basic training, Rudy was housed---more like adopted---by a local family, and met his bride-to-be, Joan at a community dance. “She was being bothered by someone,” her daughter Kathleen recalled her saying, “and he stepped in to her defense.” For her part, Joan recalled in an interview with Ellie Gooch in 1995, “He was gorgeous, twenty years old and curls all over his head.” Rudy had been hand-picked for a crack scouting outfit in the 29th Infantry, doubtless due in part to skills he had honed during his upbringing in the woods, but said nothing about it at the time. His battlefield combat, often in stealth and hand-to-hand, would earn him medals for valor and scars that he carried for the rest of his life. But on that first meeting Joan taught Rudy the Jitterbug, then all the rage, and they danced the night away and began dating, and shortly afterward Rudy was shipped out for D-Day, landing on Omaha Beach, where his outfit was pinned down for three days before advancing to claim higher ground. As men returned to England from the battlefield, it was customary for people in the communities where they had trained to line the streets and ask them about fellow soldiers, and Joan and her family were told that Rudy had been killed. But several months later, a letter from him arrived with the news that he was returning for treatment of wounds, occasioning a joyous reunion at a military hospital. Upon recovery, two things occurred. Rudy, by then thoroughly in love with this woman with the strange accent, said he wanted to marry her, but would not until the war was over. And then he shipped out again, back to France and service in the entire European campaign, mainly as a scout, after which he was awarded two purple hearts and the Silver Star, the latter for leading a relief column to his trapped unit’s rescue, although himself wounded. Somehow, toward the end of all this, he managed to send Joan a letter with $100 in it, suggesting that she go shopping for engagement and wedding rings, adding, by the by, that he’d be in England for three days on his way home---just long enough for a wedding. Several months later, Joan stepped aboard a converted sister ship to the Queen Mary, bound for what, for Joan, was the New World in many more ways than one. “I stepped into a log cabin in a howling wilderness full of men catching fish and shooting things,” she was fond of recalling with a laugh, describing the whole thing as the epitome of culture shock. Later, whenever someone picked up on her carefully preserved accent and asked how she happened to come to this country, her answer was always “A Yank.” When friends asked her how she coped with it all---the falling in love with a soldier destined for the battlefield, the harrowing waiting for word of his fate, the long trip across the ocean, the immersion in camp and backwoods life---she said “I’d have followed him to the moon.” But that was the way Joan met just about any challenge, and she fell into the hard life of the sporting camp world with a will and a whistle, serving up huge breakfasts and suppers to hoards of hungry hunters and fishermen, cleaning cabins, doing laundry, and not just putting up with, but participating in the robust and ribald life that was peacetime America, when soldiers who had seen the worst the world had to offer came home to raise families, make a better life, and raise all the hell they could in the process. Rudy and Joan’s first daughter, Jeanette, came along in 1947, and Kathleen joined her five years later. Even while the sporting camps’ business and family duties grew, Joan began working on the outside to help sustain things, mainly as a legal secretary, first for Fred Harrigan and then for Ivory Cobb and later on for Waystack & King. The Shatneys and the Harrigans, both World War II service families, became fast friends, and were soon keeping steady company and creating all sorts of shindigs with similarly rooted families in Colebrook. As their children would later say whenever they got together, that World War II crowd was something else. They were an energetic and convivial bunch, managing to put on dances and carnivals and all manner of civic-minded events even as they worked hard to overcome the past, make a living and raise their families. Joan lost Rudy in 1992, but continued to live summers at Clarksville Pond, spending winters at her home on Pleasant Street in Colebrook. She worked at the gift shop at The Balsams, later retiring and enjoying her home in Colebrook and her grandchildren and friends, who were legion. In addition to her husband, she was predeceased in 1967 by her elder daughter, Jeanette Phillips. Her family includes her younger daughter, Kathleen Domanico and husband John; two grandsons, Treavor McKinnon and wife Myka of Burlington, Vt., and Alex McKinnon and wife Whitney of Newbury, Vt.; two great-grandchildren, Madeleine Joan and Grace Natalie Rose McKinnon; her son-in-law, Maurice Phillips of Florida; a brother, Michael Jerome of Toronto and a sister, Constance Butt of Cornerbrook, Newfoundland; and a niece, nephews and cousins. The family will hold calling hours on Friday, June 29, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Jenkins and Newman Funeral Home in Colebrook. A graveside service will be held at 10 a.m. the next day, Saturday the 30th, at the Colebrook Village Cemetery. The Rev. Richard Davenport will officiate. In recognition of Joan’s lifelong commitment to neglected, abused and homeless animals, the family suggests that donations in her memory be made to the nearest Humane Society chapter or animal shelter of one’s choice. Condolences may be offered to the family on-line by going to www.jenkinsnewman.com. Funeral arrangements are under the direction of Jenkins & Newman Funeral Home, Colebrook, NH.

Joan M. Shatney

February 4, 1927 - June 23, 2012