BRATTLEBORO — Deb Tillinghast, eldest child of Marcel Leclaire Sr., remembers a day in May of 1967 when she was 12 years old and her father came home from work wrapped up in a blanket.
“He stunk,” she remembers of her father, who had served the Brattleboro Police Department for almost 25 years, including as chief of police from 1981 to 1984. He died April 25 at the age of 89. “And he was cold. We had no idea why.”
The reason? Leclaire had thrown himself into the Connecticut River to try in vain to save the life of a drowning woman.
“In those days, sewage and chemicals from factories were still being put into the river,” remembers Tillinghast. “We didn't realize at that moment he had been trying to save a life.”
Later that month, her father would be honored by the town with a certificate of appreciation from the American Legion and an editorial in the Brattleboro Reformer.
Under the headline “An Outstanding Policeman,” the editorial stated that “Marcel H. Leclaire of Brattleboro Police Department plunged, clothed into the cold waters of the Connecticut River in an unsuccessful try to save a drowning woman. Now, Leclaire has received a citation of outstanding service for that act, for helping in the birth delivery of a baby and investigative work.”
“To me, he was almost larger than life when we were kids,” his daughter says. “The funny thing is, I didn't start looking at him as a regular human being until I was an adult. He had such a big presence.”
A humble and quiet spoken man, and the eldest of 15 children, Leclaire was born in Burlington and moved to Brattleboro in the 1940s.
In news reports of his ascent to police chief, Leclaire, who dropped out of school at 13, said he would use himself as an example when he previously served as a juvenile officer. He said he would encourage kids to stay in school whenever they told him “they were going to drop out of school and make a lot of money.”
“You never pick up those years,” he said.
“Even though he had only an eighth-grade education, he worked hard through the years,” Leclaire's son Ed remembers. “He did it all in service to others.”
Hard work en route to the police department
As a young man, Leclaire worked many jobs, including positions at the cotton mills in town and at Crosby Milling Co., turning his paycheck over to his father to help his family.
Upon turning 18, he went on to join the Marine Corps., where he served in Morocco as a French interpreter, as he spoke only French in his home growing up.
Tillinghast remembers people arriving at their house, knowing that her father spoke French Canadian.
“They'd arrive with questions about car registration, or some other question whose answer could only be found in English. The word was out that a local policeman could help them in French and they would find their way to our door.”
During his time in the Marine Corps, he met his wife, the former Dorothy Fuller, and they returned to Brattleboro.
Leclaire continued working in the local mills, but dreamed of becoming a police officer. He earned his high school equivalency degree, then went on to graduate with a degree in criminal justice.
He applied to be a police officer four times. Finally, in 1960, he was hired by the Brattleboro Police Department.
“It wasn't easy to go back,” Leclaire remembered when accepting the job as chief, “and it was a little embarrassing at first.”
Choosing to become a police officer was also a difficult choice financially. He took a pay cut for the privilege.
“My wife didn't initially think it was a good idea, to join the police force,” Leclaire said. “With a $20 pay cut and three kids, we knew it would be hard for a while.”
His choice remained hard. His children - the Leclaires would go on to have five of them - speak of the fact that their father always had another job on the side to earn enough money to remain on the force.
Tillinghast remembers that he was often working.
“He worked at the Galanes' store, he did odd jobs, he was a handyman,” she recalls. “Sometimes he'd take us kids with him. He was gone a lot, but when he was at home, he was a present kind of father.”
“With five of us kids, he did the grocery shopping and he'd always take one of us with him,” she continues. “It was such a special time to be alone with him. I would change into a dress to go with him. It was that special.”
“I think it was his Marine Corps influence that helped him choose law enforcement as a career,” Tillinghast said. “He had a strong sense of right and wrong.”
Known for his ability to talk issues through with people from all walks of life, he was proud of the fact that he never needed to fire his service revolver.
That skillset was put to the test in May of 1970, when nearly 1,000 people in Brattleboro gathered to protest the killing of four young Americans by Ohio National Guardsmen at Kent State University.
Former Windham County Sheriff William Graham looked back on the event with Brattleboro Union High School students, in a discussion recounted by Reformer Editor Norm Runnion in a 1988 column. As Runnion described the conversation, Graham “talked about some of the us-vs.-them tension that prevailed in these parts in those days, when Vermonters suddenly were confronted with a multitude of hippies and hippie-related culture,” and police officers faced a new learning curve.
During the demonstration, a young male protestor climbed up to Baker's Bookstore window on Main Street and lowered the U.S. flag to half-mast.
“Vermonters didn't like that, to put it mildly,” Runnion recalled. “It was Policeman Marcel Leclaire's savvy and sense of command in that crowd that defused a potentially violent confrontation. The protest ended peacefully. It looked for a time as if it would not.”
Ed Leclaire remembers that his father was attentive and would have eyes everywhere.
“We had a specific route walking home from school. I was to go up Main Street and then up the hill to Birge Street to our home,” he said. “I had cousins on Frost Street, and so one day I went with them.”
“That night at dinner, my father questioned why the route was altered that day,” he continued. “He ruled with a strong hand, but he had a big heart.”
When Marcel Leclaire finished his career serving the town of Brattleboro - under medical stress due to a cloud of what the town attorney at the time described to the Reformer as “scurrilous” rumors about his management of the police department - he went to work as security officer at Vermont Yankee, where he was also an instructor, teaching the values important to him along with the technical and procedural things necessary for the job.
His son Ed says, “He served the community again, but in a different capacity. He took his experience with the police department and brought service to the community in a different way.”
“He really did his share and more,” he continues. “To me, he was a man of service, not just a father. He always served others. That's his legacy.”