Aunt Edith was a very special lady. She delighted in the smallest wonders of nature. She marveled at fascinating snippets of history that she found along her travels through life. But more importantly, she understood that all these things …. so exciting to her … had to be shared.

She did this in hundreds of newspaper columns under her Edith S. Dolan byline in the Lewiston Evening Journal and later in the Sun-Journal. Earlier columns had her Edith Labbie byline.

She wrote almost daily until her death on the Fourth of July 25 years ago.

Many authors say that writing is in their blood; few can back up the claim more solidly than Edith. She was about 10 years old, growing up in the 1860s family farmhouse where my wife, Judy, and I live, when she published her own handwritten newspaper. They were copied individually to sell for a penny or two to neighbors.

My grandmother (Edith’s mother) taught in a one-room Auburn schoolhouse, so of course her writing was encouraged.

Following Edith’s death, family members, friends and co-workers at the Sun-Journal collected memories and anecdotes. Here are some of those stories.

Her daughter, Nancy Cote, recalled in 1967 that her mother learned by experience, and that included journalism. It was in the 1950s when Edith Andrews, recently a widowed mother of three young children, got a job as a reporter for the Lewiston Evening Journal’s “social page.”

She was a naïve country girl in the city, but she was never afraid to tackle a challenge.

“She would get lost in Lewiston when she went out on assignments,” her daughter recalled.

Ed Kisonak, the Journal’s city editor, urged Edith to be assertive, and Kisonak said Edith started exercising her assertiveness right away, and on him.

Aunt Edith never hitched up well with the mechanical or technological world, but she always found an appropriate means of accommodation. One of the family’s special memories concerns learning to drive. Edith, always a passenger in cars, finally decided to learn to drive when she was in her fifties. She took lessons and eventually got her license.

On one of her earliest solo drives, she found herself in Lewiston and needed to get back to Auburn across the dreaded North Bridge, a narrower version of the current Longley Bridge, during rush-hour traffic.

After thinking about it, she headed toward Lisbon and Lisbon Falls, crossed the Androscoggin River at Durham and drove back to Auburn by way of Riverside Drive. She avoided the traffic by adding almost 20 miles to her trip, but she accomplished the feat by herself … and it was a much more scenic route.

That was one of the ways in which she taught us that the long way around is often the better way.

Family knew Edith as a woman of extreme honesty. She was widowed at 29 upon the death of her husband, Willard Andrews, who lost his life to leukemia. With three kids to support, she took her first job at the Chick-A-Dee restaurant in Turner.

Each night when she cashed up, she would find herself short, so she would put in her tip money and come home with nothing.

This went on for a week before she tearfully confided in her minister, the Rev. Albert Niles of the First Universalist Church in Auburn. He came the next evening, hoping to discover what she was doing wrong. He soon noticed that she was ringing in the amount of money customers were giving her, not what the bill called for. It was an easy correction to make, and a great relief to Edith.

She also was a woman of great pride. A few weeks after becoming a widow, she received a check from a state aid program, which she promptly threw away. This ritual went on for a couple of months until she received a call from the office issuing the checks. She told them she did not need charity and that she would take care of her own children.

Once again, the minister interceded. He convinced her that there are times you give and times you receive. She decided she could accept the assistance, but not for one minute longer than she had to.

To Edith’s loyal readers through the years, it’s easy to recognize the trusting and generous personality that gave so much pleasure through her stories.

Dave Sargent is a freelance writer and a native of Auburn. He can be reached by sending email to [email protected]