The Sponsor Line on the Fourth of July Program

Priscilla Whitcombe stood on the town common in Castine, Maine, on a warm Friday evening in the first week of July, holding a photocopied twelve-page program stapled at the seam, and — for the seventh summer in a row without Henry — the small quiet ache she has learned to carry between her sternum and her second cup of coffee.

The program had been printed at the small shop on Main Street by a Castine printer named Wendell Dyer, who has been running the offset press in the back room since the summer of 1988 and who has known Henry Whitcombe since the summer he first walked, at forty-one, into the shop to have a Sunday chowder recipe copied for Priscilla's mother — halfway through which Priscilla had gone into labor with their second daughter, Ellen.

Priscilla held one corner of the program. Her nine-year-old granddaughter Millie held the other.

On page four, in twelve-point Garamond, above the $2,500 line, under the italic heading In Memoriam, was the name:

Henry L. Whitcombe (1946–2019).

Priscilla read it slowly. Millie, who is learning to read Garamond alongside her grandmother, read it slower.

At nine-oh-two, the barge in the harbor sent the first shell up over Nautilus Island. It bloomed white against the last blue of the sky. Millie, on her feet, said what nine-year-olds have said on the common in Castine since the summer of 1893, in the plain sentence of a girl who has been waiting for the first shell since supper:

Oh, Grampy.

What the program says on page four

The program has been printed at the shop on Main Street every summer since 1988. Wendell sets it, on the small offset press in the back, in the last two weeks of June. The paper it is printed on is the same cream stock Wendell has been ordering, one skid at a time, from a mill in Skowhegan since the year Henry Whitcombe drove down to Skowhegan with him in a rusted Ford F-150 to help him load it.

The sponsor list begins on page three.

The $50 line is long. It runs, in three columns of small careful type, from Adams to Zwicker. There are two hundred and eleven names. Some are families. Some are boats. Some are the small businesses on Main Street — the bookstore, the bakery, the little insurance office above the marina — that Wendell has known his whole life.

The $250 line is shorter. Forty-eight names. Two are the town's two law offices. Six are summer residents whose grandparents built the shingle-style cottages up on the point in the 1890s.

The $500 line has twelve names.

The $1,000 line has five.

The $2,500 line — the one that pays for the finale — has one. It has had one name on it since 1994. Since 2019 the name has been set, in Wendell's small careful hand, under the italic phrase In Memoriam.

Henry L. Whitcombe. 1946–2019.

Priscilla keeps that line going. She wires the money, in Henry's name, from the joint account they have never bothered to close, on the first Monday of June. She has done it every summer for seven summers. Wendell sets the line without asking.

What the paper prints on Wednesday

The Castine Patriot, Wednesday edition, six days after the Fourth.

Page three, above the fold. In the small careful hand of the paper's longtime correspondent Bettie Coombs — eighty, retired kindergarten teacher, correspondent for the Patriot since 1996 — a full column runs down the right side under the headline:

Fourth of July Fireworks Sponsors, 2026 — Thank you, Castine.

Bettie reprints the whole sponsor list, page for page, from Wendell's program. She has done it every summer since 1996. She does not, as some editors would, cut it for space. She runs the $50 line in three columns of eight-point type across the bottom of page three, and she puts the In Memoriam line — the one above the $2,500 finale — in nine-point italic at the top of page four.

The paper is on the porches by four in the afternoon on Wednesday.

Priscilla reads it on Thursday, on the porch of 14 Perkins Street, with the second cup of the Green Mountain roast she has been buying by the pound at the little grocery on Water Street since 2003. She reads Henry's name. She folds the paper along the crease. She puts it on the small mahogany drop-leaf table by the door.

Bettie does not send the Patriot to anyone in Northampton.

She has never been asked to.

What the CRM has, on the same Thursday

Somewhere on the second floor of a converted brick building on the campus of a small women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, on the same Thursday morning at nine-fourteen, the record for Priscilla H. Whitcombe, class of 1970, reads as follows.

Address: 14 Perkins Street, Castine, Maine. Class: 1970. Degree: B.A., English literature, 1970. Spouse: Henry L. Whitcombe (deceased 2019). Giving since: 1971. Last gift: November 12, 2019. $75. Status: Lapsed. Interests: Class notes, library, chapel.

There is no field on the record for the $2,500 line above the finale on page four of the Castine fireworks program.

There is no field on the record for In Memoriam, since 2019.

There is no field on the record for Millie, who is nine, and who has been coming to the town common on the first Friday of every July with her grandmother since she was three.

There is no field on the record for Wendell Dyer, who has been setting the program on the offset press in the back room on Main Street since 1988.

There is no field on the record for Bettie Coombs, correspondent for the Patriot, since 1996.

The fall appeal will land in Priscilla's mailbox in early October. It will be addressed Dear Friend. It will not mention Henry. It will not mention the program. It will not mention the seven summers she has kept the finale in the sky over Nautilus Island in his name.

Priscilla will read the first paragraph.

She will put it, still open, on the mahogany drop-leaf table by the door.

She will not write the check.

The program is the annual report

Every fundraising office in America publishes an annual report. It is printed on heavy stock. It is designed by a firm in a city an hour by plane from any donor who lives on it. It arrives in the mailbox of a widow who did not, this year, give.

Down the street from that widow, at a folding table on the town common, a photocopied twelve-page program has been listing her family's name — in a small careful Garamond — for thirty-two years. The program cost three hundred and eleven dollars to print. It was set by a man named Wendell whose Ford F-150 her husband once helped him drive to Skowhegan. It carries, above the $2,500 line, the italic phrase In Memoriam.

The program is the annual report.

The annual report is not.

We have been sending the wrong document to the wrong person for thirty-two summers.

What Rōmy is doing about it

Rōmy does not stand on the town common on the first Friday of July.

It does not fold the twelve-page program at the seam, and it is not going to help Wendell Dyer load a skid of cream stock into a rusted F-150 in Skowhegan on a warm afternoon in the middle of June.

What Rōmy does is smaller than that. It is a reading.

Rōmy reads the small papers.

All of them. The Castine Patriot, the Ellsworth American, the Republican Journal, the Camden Herald, the Lincoln County News, the Boothbay Register, the Mount Desert Islander, and the small weekly in Blue Hill that prints two hundred and forty copies and folds by hand on the second floor over Peninsula Wine and Spirits. It reads the Fourth of July Fireworks Sponsors column above the fold on page three. It reads the Community Notes at the bottom of column two. It reads the small italic phrases — In Memoriam, In Honor of, In Loving Memory of — in the plain unhurried way Bettie Coombs sets them, six days after the Fourth, in her sunroom on Water Street.

It cross-references — quietly, in the corner of the associate director of advancement's screen at eight-forty on a Friday morning — every name against the CRM.

On the Friday morning after Bettie's Wednesday edition, Rōmy puts, at the top of the associate director's list, a small quiet note:

Priscilla H. Whitcombe, class of 1970 (B.A., English literature, June 1970), longtime donor from 1971 to 2019 (lapsed since her husband's passing that November), widow of Henry L. Whitcombe (1946–2019), whose name has been set above the $2,500 line of the Castine fireworks program under the italic heading In Memoriam every summer since 2019. Bettie Coombs, correspondent for the Castine Patriot since 1996, reprinted the sponsor list above the fold on page three of Wednesday's edition. Suggested: one plain cream card, this week, in your own hand, to 14 Perkins Street, Castine — addressing Priscilla as Prissy (per class notes, 1968), mentioning Henry by first name, thanking her — quietly, in a sentence she will remember — for keeping the finale in the sky over Nautilus Island in Henry's name for seven summers. Would you like a draft, in your own voice?

The card goes out on Tuesday.

Priscilla reads it on Thursday, on the porch, with her second cup of Green Mountain.

By November her fall appeal — addressed to Dear Prissy, with a handwritten postscript that reads and thank you, for Henry, for the seventh summer — comes back in a #10 envelope with a hand-cancelled stamp. The check inside is a four-figure gift, not the $75 the file expected. In the memo line, in blue ink, in seventeen careful characters:

For Henry's finale.

The paper was never the point. The program was never the point. The barge in the harbor was never the point.

The reading was the point.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before anything else, do one small unfashionable thing.

Pick, from your lapsed-donor list, the three whose address of record is a small coastal town — a town with a common, a harbor, and a weekly paper you have never opened. If you cannot remember which three, pick the three whose last gift arrived in the fall of the year a husband's obituary ran in the alumnae magazine.

Go to the website of the small weekly in each of the three towns. If the paper does not have a website — and about a third of the papers Downeast still do not — call the town clerk and ask, in your kindest voice, whether she would fax you the Wednesday edition after the Fourth. She will. She has been waiting for a reason to.

Turn to page three. Read the fireworks sponsor list. Read it slowly, in the plain unhurried way Bettie Coombs sets it, six days after the Fourth, in her sunroom on Water Street.

If a name you know is set above the fold — a donor, a donor's late husband, a donor's family — take a plain cream Crane's card from the top drawer of the credenza.

Do not put a case for support in it.

Do not put a QR code in it.

Do not sign it with a title.

Write three sentences, in blue ink, in your own hand. Say her name once. Say his name once. Say the small specific thing the program set in Garamond — the finale, the $2,500 line, the seventh summer — and say, in the plain language of a person who was paying attention, that you read it above the fold on Wednesday afternoon.

Walk it, on your lunch break, to the post office on your corner.

The barge in the harbor over Nautilus Island came home on Saturday morning.

The program is still on the counter at the shop on Main Street, stapled at the seam, under Wendell Dyer's small careful hand.

Bettie Coombs has been holding the finale, in the italic phrase at the top of page four, since 1996.

Turn to it. ♡