Updated: 'I'm glad Clabby's not here to see it'

Clarence Tanner, and his niece, Ella Corr; below, his tombstone, and his former house in all its glory. (Picture of house: Courtesy photo)

WEST LEBANON - Clabby Tanner once asked a Prospect Hill resident if she would write the epitaph for his tombstone in Latin, “so people would have to work to see what it said.”

Eccentric, controversial, a character, a poet, lover of dogs and children. Those were all words used to describe Clarence “Clabby” Tanner, who for five decades resided at the “graffiti house” a stone’s throw from Milton at the bottom of Prospect Hill.

The longtime landmark was destroyed early Saturday in a nighttime blaze that sparked memories of the legacy of Tanner and the house that became part of the fabric of this section of town.  

When Tanner was living in the house, which was well into his 80s, he didn’t wear his political feelings on his sleeve; he painted them on his house.

“Oh, he hated Nixon,” said his niece, Ella Corr, of Champion Street. “Hated Bush, too.”

Among the sayings Tanner painted on the natural wood clapboard house through the decades: “Free Nelson Mandela,” the black South African civil rights crusader who spent years in prison during that country’s apartheid era; “Stop the American war in Nicaragua,” a war seen by many as an illegal war waged against rebel groups in that country in the 1980s; and “Free Leonard Peltier,” a Native American imprisoned for two life terms in the deaths of two FBI agents. Some say Peltier, who many believe was wrongly accused and convicted of firing the fatal gun shots that killed the two agents, still resides in a federal prison in Florida.

But there was also poetry as well, a lot of it, created by Tanner, and other whimsical messages as well.

Tanner was born on St. Patrick’s Day 1912, and he had the gift of gab.

“That house had a lot of character, and he was a character,” remembered Corr. “A lot of his family lived in that house over the years, but he lived there the longest.”

Tanner served in the Army and the Navy, including service in World War II, and retired from a shoe factory in Haverhill, Mass. 
Corr and others remembered her uncle as a gregarious, longtime bachelor who always had tons of people in the kitchen of his home and always had food ready to serve them when they visited, and mostly listened.

“He always had baked beans on Saturday and always had food on the table,” she said.

Others in the neighborhood remembered him for his unique style of interior decorating. One room was wallpapered in lottery ticket order blanks, another in labels from beer bottles.

Another remembered his love for dogs and how he’d walk around the neighborhood with his pockets full of dog biscuits to feed them.

During his decades at the house cars were constantly stopping and taking pictures of the protest graffiti Tanner had created, Corr said.

“He put his viewpoints on the house, he didn’t care,” she said. “He was a character, he was expressing his opinions.”

Yesterday cars were constantly driving by the charred remains of the house again, taking pictures and remembering its history.

“It’s sad,” an emotional Corr said. “I’m glad Clabby’s not here to see it. He’d be sad, too.”

In the late 1990s Tanner moved into a house owned by Corr. He died four years ago this month, in 2009, at the age of 97.

Tanner is buried in a small, quaint cemetery near his beloved former home, at the top of Prospect Hill. His epitaph is not in Latin. Based on writings from the 15^th-century French poet François Villon, it reads:

O’villon! sweetest singer

 of them all mad

sad poet without

 peer who asked then

as I ask now

where are the snows

 of yesteryear …

To you who gaze

 upon these lines

 for me shed no tears

But remember him

who gently asked

where are the snows

 of yesteryear.