By Laurie O’Neill — [email protected]
“Renaissance man” connotes a gifted individual — one who is constantly learning and mastering new skills.
The term, however, seems inadequate to describe the late Dr. Seymour DiMare.
A graduate of Boston University Medical School and a local surgeon, a pharmacist’s mate in the U.S. Maritime Services (beginning when he was just 17), the commanding officer of the 44th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (M.A.S.H.) during the Korean War, a dairy farmer, a Revolutionary War reenactor, and a founder of the Center for American Studies in Concord, DiMare packed a great deal into his 97 years.
But the experience that seemed to affect him the most, even when he would tell the story years later, is being a ship’s mate and assisting with the evacuation of Holocaust survivors from a concentration camp. Much later, he would joyfully reconnect with one of the survivors who, as a boy, was afraid to get on the ship.
While in the Maritime Services, DiMare was also part of a “chaotic” mission, he noted in a letter, to help the underequipped and struggling Greek Army by transporting donkeys from Virginia to Greece so the animals could be used to carry artillery into the mountains there.
DiMare said that the ship’s crew discovered that a minefield had been laid across the harbor entrance at Kalamata and they had to blast their way through it.
From Concord to Cuttyhunk
DiMare’s zest for life was evident in everything he did, including playing the harmonica, lobstering from his skiff, sailing on his catboat “Sou’Wester,” reciting Italian and Shakespearean sonnets from memory, and ballroom dancing.
The family spent summers in Cuttyhunk, the outermost of the Elizabeth Islands off the Massachusetts coast. DiMare and his wife, Paula, eventually retired there. He served as the unofficial Cuttyhunk historian and would drive down to the town docks on his golf cart to greet visitors.
Seymour and Paula DiMare established a facility on Cuttyhunk to provide first aid for islanders who would otherwise have to take a boat for medical care. Paula continues to manage the visiting doctors who provide services there.
A passionate storyteller
DiMare, who died in August, was a loving father, grandfather, and husband who prized making connections and helping others. He was devoted to Paula, whom he called “darling,” his children, Sarah Atwood (married to Pete) and Tyler DiMare, and his grandchildren, Peter and Caroline Atwood.
A passionate storyteller — unraveling his history chapter by “sometimes heartbreaking” chapter, says Atwood — DiMare would hold listeners in thrall. If the story were particularly poignant, “he would grab your hands and look into your eyes,” she says. “We were often in tears.”
Tyler DiMare told a favorite story about his dad having lunch with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at a diner when both were in graduate school at B.U.
Atwood recalls vividly her father’s account of meeting a fellow physician who turned out to have played an unforgettable role in his past.
Robert Lazlo Berger was a thoracic surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess who was instrumental in creating Boston’s Holocaust Memorial, a project DiMare supported. One day, the men met for the first time and began chatting. Berger mentioned he had been freed from a concentration camp as a young boy but that he was so frightened he at first refused to board a U.S. vessel with other evacuees.
“I think I helped you get on that ship!” an incredulous DiMare declared. The two remained friends until Berger’s death in 2016.
Though he didn’t talk about it much, DiMare’s family sensed that he struggled when he was with the 44th M.A.S.H.
“We know he was frustrated by the poverty he saw and that he felt a sense of helplessness,” says Atwood. “He would always find a way, though, to do surgery on the local residents who needed it and provide them with medicine.”
DiMare’s family believes that an image of him performing surgery at the mobile hospital was incorporated into an etched mural on the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C.
White button-down and Dickies
As a child, Atwood would accompany her father on his hospital rounds after church on Sundays, wearing the little nurse’s cap and apron that her grandmother had made for her. When she was a high school student, she observed him performing surgery.
Watching her father care for his patients with such kindness and concern inspired Atwood to pursue medicine. She is a pediatric cardiac nurse at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Atwood remembers that when he was not at Emerson Hospital, her dad “was dressed in his ‘uniform’ of Dickies pants, a button-down white shirt, and lace-up brown work boots” to do the haying, repair equipment, feed the cows, and tend to the horses at the family farm, Stoneymeade.
“He found solace in working outside,” she says.
Through their love of horses and riding, DiMare met Gertrude Prescott, a descendant of Samuel Prescott, who had evaded the British after Paul Revere’s capture and alerted the Minutemen in Concord and Acton.
Gertrude had been reenacting the ride, but when she had to give it up, DiMare took over — for more than 25 years. He also served as a marshal in the Patriots Day parade.
Tyler, who works in real estate, wrote a letter to the elder DiMare on the occasion of the latter’s 80th birthday. He said he was “filled with envy and pride” by what his dad had done with his life.
“I am the luckiest person alive to call you my father,” he wrote. “I love you with all my heart.”
Expressing such sentiments was not unusual in the DiMare family.
“Our whole family,” Atwood says, “was about love.”
