LEWISTON — Cynthia Crocker’s name isn’t on a lot of plaques around the Lewiston area and that’s just the way she wanted it.
Crocker died Aug. 3 at the age of 94, and while many people remember her as one of the most generous philanthropists in Lewiston history, there are many more who have never heard of her.
Cynthia Crocker Courtesy of Ron Frizzel
“Nobody will ever know the full extent of it,” said Ron Frizzel, a longtime friend of Crocker. “She made some generous gifts and so many of them were anonymous. The people who received the money knew it, but it was never publicized.”
The results of Crocker’s generosity, though, are seen and felt across Auburn and Lewiston.
In 2004, the Greater Androscoggin Humane Society was badly in need of funds to build a new shelter to replace their 30-year-old facility, which was then located an inconvenient seven miles from downtown Lewiston,
It was desperate times and the shelter pretty much needed a miracle. They got one in the form of Crocker, whose family owned Pepsi bottler Seltzer & Rydholm, and who stepped in with a donation substantial enough to get the shelter project on track.
“I’ve always considered her the angel of the shelter,” said Steve Dostie, who was shelter director at the time. “Her donation really helped us reach above our goal when we built the shelter. It helped us get everything that we needed for the animals. She was like the cornerstone of the organization.”
Crocker, at the time, made that donation in the name of her brother, George Cotton, a fellow philanthropist who had died just a few months previously in a car accident. The beneficiary of Cotton’s life insurance policy, Crocker donated the entire sum to the shelter.
She eschewed the limelight, but later in 2004, Crocker was honored with the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce President’s Award, given for a lifetime of charitable work.
Former Chamber President Chip Morrison remembers Crocker’s propensity for kindness well.
“She was a major philanthropist in this community,” Morrison said on Friday. “If the community needed help, I didn’t have any trouble at all calling Cynthia to ask for that help. She was always available and she was very approachable.”
Crocker was at one time the vice president and treasurer of Pepsi bottler Seltzer & Rydholm, a company started by her parents 80 years earlier.
The business was sold in 2004 and Crocker’s generosity only went up.
“There were some generous gifts after the sale,” said Frizzel.
In the mid-1990s, Crocker and her brother also donated money to Central Maine Medical Center for the creation of a new cancer treatment center. It was a sizeable donation and there is a plaque commemorating that one, but it’s in the name of Cynthia Rydholm, Crocker’s mother, who died in 1993 — again, she had chosen to do her good deeds in a quiet way that honored somebody else.
“She was just a wonderful human being,” says Frizzel, “but a very quiet one; a very private one.”
If Crocker was known for any one thing beyond her generosity, it was her love of animals, and for dogs in particular.
“Her compassion and love for animals really shined,” says Dostie. “Cynthia never wanted to be recognized for the things she did for the shelter. She did it because she believed in the cause of the Humane Society. She really loved animals and understood about their proper care.”
After the new shelter was built, Crocker continued to make yearly donations to the Humane Society. She did it, say the people who knew her best, because she genuinely wanted to help animals and people in need.
“She was such a supporter of ours, and of animal welfare in general,” said Katie Lisnik, current executive director of the Androscoggin shelter. “Especially dogs.”
Lisnik said Crocker used to come to the shelter frequently to look at the dogs, bringing her own along to strut about in the dog park outside the shelter.
“Every year, she made a very generous donation,” Lisnik said. “And she also loved the dog park, so we were always able to use some of the donation to help keep that park a very active and open place for dogs in our community.”
Yet it was not always the big, visible causes that drew Crocker’s kindness. Frizzel remembers a time in the 1970s when a local dry cleaner’s building burned to the ground with the uniforms of almost every sport and cheer leading team at Edward Little High School. The business was uninsured.
This was at a time when Seltzer & Rydholm was still a business powerhouse in the community. When someone associated with the school turned to the company for help, they got it at once.
“With just one desperate visit to Seltzer & Rydholm, the problem was fixed within hours,” Frizzel wrote in a memorial to Crocker. “Visits like this built hospital walls, cancer centers, purchased emergency equipment, bought food for the needy, built little league parks and then contributed more advertising dollars to the teams by filling those parks with Pepsi signs.”
Crocker lived in Falmouth. It is expected that she’ll be buried at the start of next week, although details have not yet been announced.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
