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Daniel Wellehan Jr. ’55: A lifetime well spent in Maine
By Maria Healey
“It’s a lovely day down on the beach.”
So says Daniel Wellehan Jr. ’55, who is a lifelong resident of Maine—his summer cottage at the northern end of Old Orchard Beach in the town of Scarborough, has been in the family for years. He thinks the description of a typical day at Old Orchard Beach will “sound very wasteful,” but in fact it sounds delightful.
“Get up. Put on your bathing suit. Have breakfast. Go down and play on the beach.”
Wellehan loves to sail—he is an ocean racer—and has done it for much of his life. Summers in Maine are among the things that drew him back to his home state after his years at Holy Cross and in the Navy. Nowadays, he has “become fond of getting south of Key West” and leaves Maine for part of the winter—but, Wellehan mostly lives in Yarmouth, close to where he was born and raised. He settled his own family there and raised six children.
His roots in Maine go all the way back to his parents meeting for the first time in Old Orchard Beach. Wellehan’s father, Dan Sr., grew up in Lewiston and worked first as a shoemaker, beginning as a teenager, and then as a retailer. In 1914, he and Charley Lamey (who would later marry Dan Sr.’s sister) founded the Lamey-Wellehan stores—which became Maine’s Family Shoe Store and recently celebrated its 90th anniversary in 2004.
In 1946, Dan Sr. co-founded Sebago, Inc., specializing in recreational footwear. Sebago went on to become an industry leader and successful global brand with distinct ties to Maine. Through the years the Sebago brand bore the stamp of Maine’s tanneries, shoe factories and outdoor heritage.
Talking about his home state, Dan Jr. cites his family, the landscape, the distinct seasons and the recreation, not only as he felt them growing up, but as he remembered them while he was away from Maine, at college, and while in the Navy, touring all over the world.
Now, Dan Jr. is linking his affinity for Maine with Holy Cross. At the time of his 50th reunion last spring, he established the Daniel J. Wellehan Jr. Family Scholarship Fund with a $100,000 gift. Preference in awarding the scholarship will be made for students who live in Maine.
Dan Jr. wanted to earmark the funds for something with particular meaning to him.
“The option I found most appealing was that of a scholarship for a deserving Maine student,” he says. “That identified with all of my past.”
Dan Wellehan Sr. met his wife, Kathleen McGuinn,in 1931. Having grown up in Worcester, she was a piano teacher and an organist at a number of churches. In the summertime, she went up to Old Orchard Beach to play in a trio of Worcester girls at the Vesper Hotel. Dan Sr. was vacationing in Old Orchard and met her there. The couple married and settled down in Lewiston, where they had Dan and, several years later, his brother, Jim ’60.
The shoe business soared in the first part of the 20th century. The Lamey-Wellehan Stores expanded steadily during the 30s and 40s, with new stores opening in Portland, Rumford, Augusta and Lawrence, Mass. After World War II, “in an era when penny loafers and saddle shoe oxfords were the standard uniform for all high school and college kids,” Dan Sr. (the sole owner of Lamey-Wellehan after the death of Charley Lamey) teamed up with two other shoemakers to meet the demand and founded Sebago.
“As a youngster, during school vacations, I’d work in the warehouse,” says Dan Jr. “I can’t say I liked it, but I didn’t dislike it. It was very welcoming—an old-fashioned kind of industry. The processes and techniques went back to the time just prior to the Civil War. It was very labor intensive, and each person had to perform a certain task upon the product. I just related very well to it.”
A graduate of Saint Dominic’s High School in Lewiston, Dan Jr. notes that the “key piece” to his attending Holy Cross was the fact that his mother’s family came from Worcester. Dan Jr. had an uncle, Jim McGuinn, who was a graduate of the Class of 1915 at the College—and two other uncles were members of the Society of Jesus. His high school football coach had also gone to Holy Cross.
“Early on, the twig was bent in that direction,” he says. “I remember the excitement when I was a youngster of some of the basketball teams back in the early days, listening to Holy Cross on the radio in the great NCAA victories. The College was very high on the list.”
Leaving a sequestered Maine for the city of Worcester, Wellehan learned something more about his home state: how far away it was from everything else.
“This was an era when turnpikes were not a part of the picture,” says Dan Jr. “It was a considerable distance to get from Maine to other parts of the world. When I got down (to Worcester), it was certainly like coming into a different civilization.”
Many of his classmates had graduated from Regis and Xavier and Boston College High School, big city schools. He remembers his first year as one “very intense struggle” to catch up—particularly in the classic languages—but also in the ways of the world outside of Maine.