Charlie Plummer – A mountain of a man

By DAVID KITTREDGE
Renaissance Redneck
Charlie Plummer was driving past a used car dealership in Newport one day in the early 1970s when he noticed four men struggling to load a seven-and-a-half-foot snow plow into the back of a pickup truck. He pulled his vehicle onto the lot, hopped out of his truck and told the men to stand aside. According to an eyewitness that I just spoke to, he hooked a chain to the front the plow and grabbed the chain with one hand and muckled it onto the other end of the plow with his other hand and set the plow into the pickup truck bed all on his own. A seven-and-a-half-foot metal plow weighs approximately 630 pounds. As I said in the headline, he was a mountain of a man.

Charlie was a tree surgeon, meaning a person knowledgeable about pruning damaged trees. He also cleared tree limbs away from electrical lines. Unfortunately, Charlie was severely injured in 1949 when he contacted an electrical line while trimming trees. The electricity melted Charlie’s face and it flowed to one side leaving him severely disfigured. He also lost an eye, which was covered with a black eye patch from then on. I have heard that when his wife at the time saw his injuries, she left him. Charlie had received $100,000 in insurance money, which could have been used to repair his mutilated face but he drank the money up instead. Charlie from that time on went on many drinking binges.

The first time I worked with Charlie was in 1971 on a project on Eastman Pond as it was known at the time. I was working with my Uncle Ron forming and pouring the concrete overflow which, along with the new dam, would help create Lake Eastman when it was finished. The bigwigs of Eastman had sent Charlie down to help us as a punishment for going on a two week drunk. He was working as a logger, and they probably did not want him operating a chainsaw until his head had cleared. We worked with him with no incidents and he was as gentle as a lamb.

In 1975 at the age of 45, Charlie went on trial for manslaughter. He had severely beaten a man because the man had ripped his Bible. The elderly man who died, a Mr. Buranen, had also told Charlie that he was going to take Charlie’s girlfriend and bring her to Mexico. This had set Charlie off and he had beaten the man so badly that a doctor testifying at the trial said that the man looked as though he had been in a severe car wreck. Charlie had been on a five-month drinking binge at the time.

I went to the trial, and at one point Charlie’s lawyer explained to the jury that when Charlie walked down the street children who looked at him would scream and run away. Charlie had been charged with manslaughter, but he was found guilty of a lesser charge of negligent homicide, and he received a sentence of three to five years hard labor at the New Hampshire state prison.

I worked with Charlie again about 20 years ago on a chimney that was surrounded by new metal roofing. I did not want to build a staging on the metal roof so the owner of the house hired Charlie Plummer and his bucket truck to lift me over the metal roof to work on the chimney. What I did not realize was that Charlie planned to be in the bucket with me so he could run the hydraulic controls himself. I weighed in at about 250 pounds, and Charlie had also gained weight over the years. I asked Charlie if the apparatus could hold both of us at once, and he growled “Of course it will!” He showed me the safety certificate, and we calculated that we were within the weight limit, barely. Charlie climbed into the bucket and I followed, squeezing into what little room there was left. Charlie and his bucket truck did get me to the chimney, but the ride was a jolting one with me banging into Charlie or vice versa. Bumping into Charlie was like hitting a rock or perhaps a boulder would be a more fitting term. 

Noontime rolled around and Charlie said he was hungry and that he wanted to go to lunch. I, being a mason, wanted to stay to get the job done as we only had another half an hour of work left, and I had enough mortar to finish the job already mixed up. If we left I would have to make up another batch of mortar. Charlie growled, saying that he was hungry and that he was leaving, and that I was welcome to go along we him and his dog. So we went to McDonald’s and Charlie order five cheeseburgers, two of which were for his dog. When the burgers arrived, Charlie threw two of them on the floor of his truck for his dog to eat. The cheeseburgers landed uncomfortably near my feet. As his dog wolfed them down I was very thankful to be wearing work boots. After lunch we managed to finish the job.

Charlie has passed on since then. 

As I sit here writing with the Thanksgiving holiday bearing down on us, I am very thankful that I never had to walk a mile in Charlie Plummer’s boots.