Deceased March 15, 2015
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In Memory
Our classmate Peter Madsen Kling of Laconia, N.H., died on March 15, 2015. A true son of New England, Pete was born in Laconia on Jan. 9, 1932. He came to Amherst from Stevens High in Claremont, N.H. One of my teammates on the 1950 freshman football team, he shared a room with Dave Esty '54 and me as sophomores in North College and a suite with me when we moved to the Psi U house in our junior year. He married Cynthia Guild that summer and moved off campus.
After graduation, Pete and Cynthia returned to New Hampshire. Their marriage ended, but Cynthia survives him and lives next door to their oldest son, Kurt, near Laconia. Son Chase is in Vermont, one daughter, Peer, defected to New Mexico and the other, Julie, lives in Massachusetts. Six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren are also part of the family.
Skiing and sailing were Peter's lifelong passions. He was a longtime member of the Winnipesaukee Yacht Club where he raced on both water and ice, and the "Old Timers of Cannon Mountain." Pete actually introduced me to skiing, lending me a pair of his old skis and instructing me on a hill near Amherst and taking me and Bill Tehan '54 on a weekend adventure to one of his favorite ski areas. Although he was out of touch with the College for a number of years, Pete returned to join our group of Psi U's for a dinner in Deerfield before our 50th Reunion. Always very much his own man, Pete lived a full and rich life with his children and his many faceted involvements with the lakes, seas and slopes he loved so well.
Tom Blackburn '54
These memories of Pete come from his son Kurt:
My father did not go gently into the goodnight. There was not much gentle about him: he would swerve off any highway anywhere anytime to complain to the police officer that the blueflashing lights on the parked cruiser were distracting to drivers and would cause accidents and possible blindness; every fall when he set the woods and fields on fire around our house, he demanded the badge number of the firefighter sent to hose it down (they drew straws at the firehouse to see whose turn it was to hose down Pete Kling); he enjoyed concerts, movies and graduation after first checking and reporting on locked fire exhibits, often offering to "shut things down." The first and last event he attended and remembered fondly was the Cub Scout Blue and Gold Banquet where Mickey Harris memorably lost control of the spaghetti he'd eaten on the stage at Gilford Grade School. Pete often sported a black beret during sugaring season, conducted out of the garage. I remember emptying sap buckets after getting off the school bus (driven by Helen Dockham) and the many consequences of spilling a full bucket of sap down myself (one reaction was the sudden warm involuntary loss of bladder control) and watching the sparks fly out through the firestack at night while the sap was boiling. (I also remember telling Mickey Harris something on the bus and Pete punching me in the stomach so hard I couldn't breathe all the way down the mountain to Gilford Village. Pete warned us often of the dangers of thin ice--we were not allowed to skate on the pond until my father deemed it safe. We would watch, holding our breaths as my father, not a slender man, would venture onto the ice and we'd hear the ice crack under his feet. One year for Halloween, my father sported a Fred Flintstone mask which caught on fire while he was smoking a cigarette through the mask. In reciting the story of his brother-in-law's life, he could not say that Dr. Peter was Jewish.
My father's artistic abilities came into full bloom when it was time to cut and paste his inspection sticker and change its color--there were many sudden swerves when Pete was evading police detection of his sticker art. He could make the biggest cannonballs, he could carry me thrilled and terrified out to the big waves where I was sure I'd drown and sure he was the strongest man on earth. His shoes were enormous, his comb-over the worst. He could not tolerate hints of behavior in any of us which he far exceeded in his own youth. He took us to the dump to see the guys flying remote control planes and took each of us up for a first ever plane ride with a pilot at the Laconia airport. He loved the Shore Diner and Moe and Behulah Levine's "last one" army store. He would often badger my mother to look at a "growth" somewhere on his body. (She always declined.) We were warned never to "sign anything" when we went near the Mormon church with our grandmother. There was always a right way and a wrong way to do everything. (He magically shared with us the right way.) Any attempt by me to have social contact outside of the house was called "fooling around in the bushes." He told my sister she would never get married because she was too ugly. He told me that he had been brought up to think that women were stupid. He waited the rest of his life for my mother to come to her senses and come back. His goal in life was to be "colorful," he played the bass viol (he bought one in many pieces in a cardboard box), he warmed the teacup in the right way to drink a cup of tea, he enjoyed an extended period of warming the cognac in the snifter every night after supper my senior year. He loved Flo's special sauce and closed the door and took us to the Nubble. He fell out of the canoe, went through the ice and drove without lights on I-89. Pete never went to Thanksgiving but jingled some bells one Christmas eve in the backyard, reminded us a working child is a happy child and often warned that we could learn swiftly what it was to be on the outside looking into the inside. He painted my no edge wood skis with bear trap bindings black so I could pretend they were Head skis. (I regretted that he forgot the white dot on the tip.) Learning to ride the t-bar with Dad was truly a learning experience--he kept advising me to just rest my rear bumpsie slightly against the bar, when the bar was actually up around my armpits. Falling off the t-bar was an unforgettable experience. (Those ski tips would cross and the falling down was really slow and really fast.) When the sky was falling, he drove three hours down to Northampton and three hours back to Gilford. The sky stayed up, but it was never the same again.
Pete was a lifelong Democrat and advocated for the economically challenged all of his life. He was very clear about what was morally correct and not at all shy about expressing those opinions. He always felt the Federal role was to protect the population in whatever challenge the country faced.
Pete was a voracious reader of the New York Times, to a fault, and if it was not reported in the Times, it was not true. His other passion was the New Yorker magazine and the writings of Seymour Hirsh.
Peter loved to sail his ice boat on bendy ice early in the season. He was the subject of many concerned public safety officials who were bent on protecting him from himself. Chuckles were usually evident, but our family always expected his demise would be thru the ice, but he gave up the boat three years ago.
Of all his passions for the outdoors, skiing was truly his real love and especially the slopes of Cannon Mountain in the Whites. His parents had taken him to see the opening of the tram in 1938, and he fell in love with the magic that surrounds that piece of New Hampshire granite. In the last of his days on earth, he mentioned to me that he thought he might not get another trip up the tram but he was OK with that.