Victor M Kumin

Victor Montwid Kumin, a long-time resident of Warner, NH, died peacefully at his home on December 23, 2016. He was 95 years old. He was the husband of poet and author Maxine Kumin, who died in the 68th year of the couple’s marriage in 2014.

Victor was born on August 2, 1921 in Worcester, Mass, the third child of Samuel Kumin and Clara Montwid. His parents, both originally from Latvia, came to the United States as young children in the late 1800s with their respective families. When Victor was 13, his widowed mother moved the family from Worcester to Brookline, Mass., where Victor attended Boston Latin School, graduating in 1939. He was one of nine Boston Latin graduates that year accepted to Harvard, where he majored in chemistry. After graduating in January 1943, at the height of World War II, he went to work at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Laboratory doing research on underwater explosions, before entering the U.S. Army in June 1944. In September 1944 he was plucked from basic training in Alabama and dispatched, un-briefed, to Los Alamos, New Mexico to work on the Manhattan Project. There, elevated to Technical Sergeant, he found several of his Harvard professors and co-workers from Woods Hole already engaged in developing the atomic bomb. Former editor of the Concord Monitor Mike Pride wrote of the moral dilemma that participating in the development of nuclear weapons posed for Victor, noting that he lived “with knowledge that he played a small but significant role in creating the bomb. ‘I thought that this was necessary to terminate the war,’ [Victor] said. ‘Having done that, the wisest course for us was to lead the way into a peaceful world without nuclear weapons.’”

During an army furlough in April 1945 he met his future wife, Maxine Winokur, on a blind date in Cambridge Mass. Maxine chronicled their courtship in letters in “Love in Wartime”, published in the American Scholar in 2012. They were married in Philadelphia on June 6, 1946 and spent their two-week honeymoon in East Andover, New Hampshire in a farmhouse overlooking Highland Lake owned by Victor’s maternal uncle Solomon Agoos. Thus began not only their long marriage but their love for New Hampshire. After the honeymoon, they moved initially to Woods Hole, where Victor was again employed by the Underwater Research Laboratory, and then settled in the Boston area, raising three children in Newton Highlands, MA.

Victor worked for many years as a chemical engineer, first for the Kendall Company’s research division in Walpole, Mass., and then for Charles T. Main Associates in Boston. In 1968 he enrolled in a two-year night school program at Northeastern University, Boston, earning a Masters in Urban Planning in 1970. In 1972-3 he held a Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was active in local Democratic politics in Newton, and in the civil rights and anti-war movements in Boston.

In January 1963 Victor and Maxine bought a long-abandoned property in Warner, NH, that they named “Pobiz Farm”. They re-located permanently to Warner in 1976 and spent the ensuing years restoring the house, barn, fields and woodlands, ultimately putting much of the land into conservation with the New Hampshire Forest Society.

As a New Hampshire resident, Victor engaged eagerly in the community. He was an adjunct professor at New England College, served on the Board of the New Hampshire Civil Liberties Union, and chaired the Board of the Lake Sunapee Visiting Nurse Association. He spearheaded the effort to renovate and expand Warner’s town library and served on other town committees. Victor also took great pleasure in fierce games of Scrabble, walking in the woods with his dogs, stocking his pond with trout (for the blue heron to fish out), watching the Red Sox (win and lose), and incessantly reading history and biography.

Victor is survived by three children: Jane, of San Francisco, CA; Judith, of Contoocook, NH, and Daniel, with wife Elizabeth Hodges, of Concord, NH, and two grandchildren, Yann Victor Kumin of Medford, Mass and Noah Hodges Kumin of Brooklyn, NY. The family wishes to express its deep gratitude to Cari Young, who took loving care of Victor over the last three years, as she had done for Maxine, as well as to long-time farm caretaker Susannah Colt.

Services will be private. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the NH Civil Liberties Union.