(Host) There will be a memorial service tomorrow afternoon in Essex Junction for Frederick Allen, who died this week.
Frederick Allen lived a full Vermont life. He worked on a farm, sold Christmas trees, raised squash and pumpkins by the acre, and made maple syrup for decades.
His handcrafted pitchforks and rakes were famous at the Champlain Valley Fair’s early implements display. Jim Littlefield is the Expo’s director of special projects, and he says Fred Allen developed a bit of a fan club.
(Littlefield) “You know he was not a young man but he came, and he put in a full day of making the pitchforks or making the rakes, whatever he was working on at the time. And he’d sit in that booth and make the shavings, and he prepared ahead of time which was a little unique. He put the wood he was using into water, so he could bend it, and he had his own unique formula for how to make these rakes and pitchforks, and he had quite a following of annual visitors to the Fair.”
(Host) Allen worked at IBM for 27 years and was a thirty year member of the ski patrol at Stowe.