Column – On my watch
By Anne W. Semmes
It was all the news coverage of the passing of our late Governor, U.S. Senator, and First Selectman Lowell Weicker that led me back to that curious discovery made years ago in my mother Elise Humphreys’ travel diary I inherited. In 1923 she was 18-years-old embarking on a three-month tour of Europe with her father, Hugh Humphreys, and her best friend Irene Morrow. The three embarked out of Boston on the SS Samaria (Cunard Line) on May 31, bound for Liverpool, England.
On the first page of her diary, she titles it: “People Met on Boat.” Fourth on the list were “Mr. and Mrs. Wicker,” followed by “Ted Wicker…Lowell Wicker…Fred Wicker,” and “Florence Wicker.” (Forgive my mother’s misspelling!) Surely the young gathered a bit on board!
Finding this years ago after moving to Connecticut I assumed then this was U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker’s family, but a search found in the New York Times archives this to be Weicker’s grandfather, Theodore Weicker! And what an accomplished man he was! Like his grandson!
He was “a pioneer in the field of modern manufacturing of pharmaceuticals.” He began his career in his early 20’s in his native Germany working for “the old German house of E. Merck,” then emigrated to New York in 1885 to become a partner of Merck’s American branch “opened on his recommendation.” He would then partner with a Mr. Lowell Palmer (kin to his wife) to acquire the Squibb Company in 1905. He would die in 1940, age 79, on Horse Island, Riverside, CT.
And yes, he and wife Florence Palmer Weicker had four children, three sons and a daughter. And I could not resist reaching out to his great grandson Scot Weicker with this discovery of connecting his great grandfather and family with my to-be mother 100 years ago!
Perhaps, I shared, Theodore Weicker was taking his family to visit his roots in Germany.
Whatever, his great grandson Scot is pleased to share this travel story news with the great, great grandchildren. Maybe one of them will discover just where Theodore Weicker and family were headed?
Remembering Artist Mimi Sammis
A day before Lowell Weicker died, Mimi Sammis, extraordinary artist, late of Greenwich, died on June 27, age 82. What is truly remarkable about Mimi is how she rose up from tragedy to lead a life celebrating forgiveness, love, peace, and hope, impacting many in such with her bronze sculptures, her teachings, and her mentoring.
So, there she was in Greenwich with two grown children, doing her art when her husband, Avery Rockefeller is killed in a car crash on Lake Avenue. Mimi was a survivor. I learned that profiling her and her art during the pandemic and how that affected her: “When you say, ‘Make me an instrument of thy peace, [quoting St. Francis] and love and forgiveness every day, it becomes such a fabric of your being that with the outside that’s going on, you just keep looking for the best.”
Dealing with that tragedy Mimi escaped to the artist colony of San Miguel Allende in Mexico, where she learned to sculpt in bronze. “To do sculpture was really easy for me,” she told. “When I put my hands on the wax or the clay, the work just comes through me. I don’t have to think about it…and they had a school down there that actually cast in bronze.”
She moved with her kids to where her grandparents had summered, in Narragansett, R.I
And there she was inspired by her rocky shores and front row of the moonscapes she would capture on canvas. And there she would host for many years an “Artist Circle” gathering of painters, sculptors, writers, dancers, musicians, singers and photographers, for support of their creative process.”
But then there was that other tragic moment when her 300-pound bronze female sculpture, “Embrace of Life” that had graced the Tiverton Four Corners in Rhode Island was stolen away by two thieves. “They were looking for scrap metal,” she shared, “because they were on oxycontin and heroin, and they were hacking it up into pieces.” No pieces of sculpted metal were ever found, and thanks to Mimi the thieves got off Scot free. Her wish was, “I would really like for them to get clean.” She would learn one of the thieves had applied himself to “fixing up boats,” and he would show up at the installment of her Embrace of Life II sculpture, making amends.” Mimi’s take? “That whole thing might have happened just so that guy got straight and has a good life now – who knows.”
The bronze sculpture that lives in my memory is of her five grandchildren dancing on the rocks, their arms outstretched to the heavens. Those five grandchildren are celebrating what their grandmother has imparted to them, joy, peace, love and hope. Mimi’s epitaph could surely read as she has quoted Einstein saying, “Nothing can be destroyed, it can only be transformed.”
