You might see Walter Dale perusing the booths at a book festival in Waterville, attending an art show opening downtown or scrutinizing paintings at the Colby College Museum of Art.

You might meet him at the Fairfield Antiques Mall where he sells a variety of tables, floor lamps, artwork, maybe even some ceramic, papier mache or Italian glass clown figures.

At 88, Dale is a collector, painter, poet, antiques dealer, lover of music and reader of everything. He is energetic and walks quickly.

“I’m into a whole renaissance of living,” he said. “Right now’s the most exciting time of my life. I’m doing things I wish I started doing 30 years ago. But I wasn’t ready then.”

His has been on an interesting journey, from growing up in Fairfield, the “illegitimate” only child of a mother who taught him to love music but ended up having a nervous breakdown and being sent to a mental institution in Bangor.

“I was known up and down the street as being born illegitimate and that caused me a lot of problems,” Dale said. “Kids could not play with me. That’s why I became very sensitive to people’s treatment of Blacks and others who were treated very poorly.”

He was farmed out to various relatives in central Maine until 1955, when he graduated from Lawrence High School. That summer, he worked on a floating log sorter in the Kennebec River to earn enough money to attend Boston University, where he majored in English and history. He earned a bachelor’s degree there and then a master’s in philosophy. He taught at high schools in New Hampshire for a few years.

“My whole idea was teaching kids to love words. Words are freedom. Words are a way to freedom.”

Dale recalled his past Tuesday, while sitting in his living room on Carle Street in Waterville, surrounded by watercolor and oil paintings, books, jazz and other music CDs, his large clown and lamp collections, picture frames, ticking clocks and his own artwork, done mostly in acrylic on paper.

“There are two here I’m still working on,” he said. “I call it nonobjective. I don’t like the term, ‘abstract.'”

Beside him on a stand was a thick stack of paper squares on which he has jotted down ideas for writing poems. He loves poetry, including the works of Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke and Emily Dickinson.

He listened to Frost speak at Colby College when he was in high school, and twice later, in Boston, he said. The trips he took to Colby when he was young piqued his interest in art. He recalls being particularly struck by a show of John Marin’s works, depicting coastal Maine, and discussing it with then-museum director Hugh Gourley.

“I think he’s one of the great ones,” Dale said.

Dale’s own works include a series of acrylic paintings portraying multicolored geometric lines and forms, reminiscent of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky.

When he was younger, Dale became interested in filmmaking and communications and won a fellowship to a Canadian Film Board program in Montreal. Back in the United States, he became video project director at the Port Washington Public Library in New York and later did projects at Queens College, one of which involved interviewing and recording prison inmates for a cable TV documentary.

He eventually left the academic world and started buying antiques and peddling them to stores up and down Fifth and Sixth avenues in New York.

“That was a hell of an experience,” he said. “I made a lot of money on those little stores.”

Married with three children, Dale bought a house in Fairfield where his family moved, but he stayed in New York. He and his wife divorced.

About 15 years ago, tired of the fast pace and noise of the big city, he moved back to Maine, settling in Waterville.

If you run into Dale in his travels, you might engage him in conversation. He is curious and interested in people. But he won’t claim to be anything special.

“I’m just a regular guy who’s lived an interesting life,” he said.

Amy Calder has been a Morning Sentinel reporter 37 years. Her columns appear here Sundays. She is the author of the book, “Comfort is an Old Barn,” a collection of her curated columns, published in 2023 by Islandport Press. She may be reached at [email protected]. For previous Reporting Aside columns, go to centralmaine.com.