Potter History

This is Jan's sister, Kerstin, also known as Ken, signing in to give a bit of Potter family history. Now that Caleb is going home, - hooray!- family history might put the events of this summer into perspective.

The Potters have always been great risk takers, "roughed it up good", throughout the centuries. The earliest known Potters settled south of Boston in the 1600's, and were soon expelled to Rhode Island, because their wild lifestyle did not conform to Puritan standards. Their descendant, "Captain Potter" was a privateer (yes, pirate!) sailing out of Newport in the 17oo's, attacking ships involved in the triangle trade for His Majesty.

In the early 1800's, Abadnigo Potter left the relative security of Rhode Island, and settled in the wilds of Vermont, where he founded some textile mills in the town of Pownal, becoming an early industrialist. Relatively well established there, he went into the hills and brought back an Indian wife of the Mohegan nation - a socially rather risky action at the time. His three sons went into politics, that is, they disagreed with the town officials, and in a drunken rage, burnt down City Hall. This earned them the official title "The Three Wild Potters". One of their sons, Chauncy Potter, ran away from this unstable home as a boy and hopped on the Boston & Maine Railway as it ran through town and started work as train porter. He worked himself up in the ranks, and became Station Master at Porter Square Station in Cambridge. Here, he took another risk, and married a lively young woman, very many years his junior. The marriage was stormy, but produced George Potter, the greatest risk taker of them all.

George, Caleb's grandfather, was sent to college to become a lawyer, but secretly got his degree in Far Eastern poetry. He travelled the world over, explored and experienced as much as he could, and never "let anything dangerous enter his mind". When stationed in Okinawa, he took the family out on trips to outlying islands (whose inhabitants had never met a non-native, and could have been nasty...) on a very temperamental de-commissioned PT boat. Neither impending typhoons, coral reefs, or constant engine trouble would stop him. Due to the absence of nautical charts, he regularly explored channels by diving into the shark infested waters. Soon after returning to the US, this risk taking continued; once, we camped on an unfamiliar beach close to the water, and at midnight, we woke to being washed by the incoming tide, with three month-old Jan floating out far out to sea in his bassinet in the light of the full moon. I will mention just one more example of disastrous family outings; our trip through the Mexican desert in a VW bug (all five of us), with nothing but a bag of limes - not even a drop of tequila, or water for that matter - , and of course the car got stuck in an arroyo with desert stretching to the horizon...and we almost died.

And then there is Jan - we all know him....

Most Potter family stories end with "and we almost died",...but then didn't and then we went on to tell some very exciting tales. This is where Caleb comes in, as he continues the same family tradition. As he returns home, and in the years to come, I fully expect him to eventually look back and tell his grand children about his skate boarding adventures and how he never let anything dangerous enter his mind.

Portrait of the Potter men in 1992 or so:
Jan, George, Kai, Caleb, and Max