SHREWSBURY, Vt. (WCAX) – A building dedication at Spring Lake Ranch in Shrewsbury now honors a Super Senior whose journey from surviving the London Blitz to directing the mental health facility spans nearly nine decades.
When you’re 92, you’re bound to have many memories.
Michael Wells has pages and pages of photographs, but very few of the time when his life could have ended in an instant.
Wells was just 6 when German bombs rained down on London during World War 2, as described by famed CBS radio broadcaster Edward R. Murrow. “A half an hour ago I could read street signs in the flash of anti-aircraft batteries,” Murrow said.
Murrow sent dispatches of the London Blitz back to listeners in America. Wells lived it.
“One bomb landed about as far away as the stairs out there. But it blew out like that, rather than that,” Wells recalled. Fortunately, the bomb just made a big hole in the ground. “Everybody experiencing the same thing, I just assumed this was normal.”
Wells was a sickly child, and that carried on to adulthood. He joined the English Army, ready to fight in Korea, but it was not to be. “I wanted to serve, I never told them I had any problems,” he said. A severe case of pneumonia ended his tour of duty.
Wells married Phyllis, an American.
Reporter Joe Carroll: What did you like when you saw him?
Phyllis Wells: Everything.
Reporter Joe Carroll: How about the English accent?” she was asked.
Phyllis Wells: That helped!
“I was surprised that she said yes,” Wells said.
He had been a bit of a wandering soul before they met. At 25, the Englishman made his way to New England, taking a job at a mental health facility in Shrewsbury called Spring Lake Ranch.
“‘We’ll take you on, $10 a week, plus room and board. Come whenever you want,’” Wells recalled them saying. “And I thought it was a nice thing to do for a couple of months, a change of scene, change of country, change of environment.”
Phyllis would meet her future husband at the ranch while visiting a friend. It was the perfect job for Wells and he instantly fell in love with Vermont.
For Phyllis, it took some time to warm up to living in the sticks. “I cried a lot the first year or two,” Phyllis said. “I had never dealt with country living, the road didn’t get plowed beyond the main house, and we lived considerable beyond that.”
Wells worked his way up to director. Phyllis was the bookkeeper. “And a lot of both residents and staff, through the years, are our best friends,” she said.
“I’ve been very lucky and an enormous amount of chance, and it just came out of God knows what,” Wells said.
Their long history at the ranch, marked more by hard work than luck, recently culminated in a special honor at Spring Lake Ranch. Surrounded by family, a building where staff and residents gather is now called Wells Commons.
“Oh, I thought it was perfect,” Phyllis said. “All that fulfilled everything he wanted to do in life.”
“It’s good, it’s just plain good, it’s very nice that they did that,” Wells said.
A sign of a life well lived.
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