David Irwin

David Irwin

Peterborough NH - David Ronald Irwin passed away suddenly at his family home in Beaufort, South Carolina on April 26. He was 77.



A man of routine, he went that afternoon for his regular nap in his study with the dog by his side and a dozen pictures of his grandchildren on the wall. He did not wake up. He did not suffer and he escaped the slow decline he had always feared.



David was born in Hamburg, New York in 1946, the only child of Elizabeth Rainbow Irwin and Ronald Irwin. He was valedictorian of his high school class and worked summers in a steel plant to help pay for Dartmouth. His 1968 college yearbook showed him with long sideburns and listed his membership in a fraternity, two things his children found hard to imagine.



Upon graduating, he worked briefly as an English and math teacher and a track coach at the high school in New Ipswich. His fellow teacher was Anne-Marie McGovern, from a boisterous Irish family of four kids. They were married for more than 50 years and he was endlessly devoted to her.



He liked most the things he learned and made himself: the home he built for his young family from a book on carpentry; the community newspaper he bought and ran; and the handful of businesses he owned and grew, often prosperously. A lifelong reader, he immersed himself in history, international affairs and politics. It is possible he read every book on Teddy Roosevelt ever written in English.



Even though it was mostly a hobby, he was a newspaper man of the oldest sort. He owned one local paper, edited another, and later became a columnist. He asked endless questions. He possessed a typewriter well after the year 2000. He relished the up-close opportunity afforded by the New Hampshire primary and visited small events for candidates from both parties each cycle. His attendance came from curiosity more than from support. Deaf in one ear from measles as a child, he often stood in the front of the room to hear.



Once, inadvertently, he was photographed next to right-wing Republican candidate, Pat Buchanan. The picture of him listening intently, trying to make out Buchanan's words, ran in the national press, drawing questions from bewildered friends. Years later, at a policy forum, he quizzed Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum about his signature sweater vests.

David was a careful planner who kept his own counsel and needed time to think. He made decisions slowly. His friends knew him to be gracious, loyal, determined, and deeply principled, with a sense of humor so dry only those who understood him best could be sure when he was joking. Often he could be overheard chuckling to himself later.



He came to love the peace and the slow-moving rivers of South Carolina's Low Country, where he and Anne-Marie began spending winters fifteen years ago. He worked each morning in the yard or on the house, taking frequent coffee breaks and occasionally deciding to make it a "half half-day."



He was enormously proud of his family. Their safety and their future were of the highest importance to him. He leaves behind his wife Anne-Marie, their two sons, Josh and Andrew and their respective wives Kristin and Hillary. He was also a devoted grandfather to Sullivan (13), Piper (9), Addison (6), Anna Kate (5) and Jameson (2). They called him PopPop. He watched them learn to ski and sail, just as he had taught his own children.



The grandchildren knew exactly where to seek him out: on the screened porch that ran the full length of the house, reading glasses on his nose, his coffee getting cold. From there, he could see across the sprawling lawn where the deer liked to gather, past the treehouse in the live oak, all the way to the dock and the wide river beyond it, flowing past in the sun.