A New Book Celebrates the Vermonters Who Posed for Norman Rockwell 

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• Stephen Haggerty (left) with Norman Rockwell's son, Jarvis, in March

Steve Haggerty's memories of vacations in Vermont in the 1960s and '70s conjure images worthy of Norman Rockwell paintings. There's a reason: Some of them literally were Rockwell paintings.

"Norman got his models, most of them, within a two-mile area," Haggerty said, referring to Arlington, the southern Vermont town where Rockwell lived and created his much-loved magazine covers between 1939 and 1953.

By the time the Haggerty family arrived in 1961 to spend summers outside Arlington, Rockwell had moved south to Stockbridge, Mass. But many of the locals who'd posed for Rockwell's best-known works, including covers for the Saturday Evening Post, remained, and some are still around. Haggerty came to know Rockwell's models as townsfolk and neighbors.

Now he has connected those names and faces with iconic Rockwell works in a new book, Norman Rockwell's Models: In and Out of the Studio. "He didn't like professional models because they were too stiff," Haggerty said of Rockwell. "These people in Vermont had very expressive faces" — signs of the ups and downs of workaday life, a strong and appealing theme in Rockwell's art.

Carl Hess, pictured in Rockwell's "Freedom of Speech," owned the gas station near the farm where Haggerty worked as a kid. That farmer was Floyd Bentley, recognizable as the forlorn-looking man seeing his son off to college in "Breaking Home Ties." The young woman in hair curlers in "The Gossips" was Doris Crofut White, mother of Haggerty's childhood friends Beverly and Debbie Wright.

Given that Haggerty's youth hangouts — the Arlington village green, the red covered bridge swimming spot on the Battenkill River — were a literal stone's throw from Rockwell's former home and studio, his own biography seemed fated to intersect with the Rockwell canon. After graduating from Southern Vermont College in 1981, Haggerty earned an MA in journalism from the University of South Carolina — studying with two professors who had been Saturday Evening Post editors. Today he divides his time between his family's property in Sandgate and his home in New York.

In 2014, while promoting his collection of poems and stories, Cows in the Fog, Haggerty caught up with Donald Trachte Jr., who'd grown up in Arlington. As a 5-year-old, Trachte had served as Rockwell's model for the December 1953 Child Life magazine cover of a little boy meeting Santa Claus, hand in hand with a little girl (modeled by young Melinda Pelham, another Arlington resident). Trachte had been organizing Rockwell model reunions with Buddy Edgerton, Rockwell's go-to Boy Scout model, since 2010. (Edgerton died in 2022 at age 92.) Trachte shared his contacts with Haggerty, and "Steve picked up the ball and ran with it," Trachte said over the phone.

Haggerty took several years to interview the 25 people featured in Norman Rockwell's Models. Fortunately, many of them still lived near Rockwell's southern Vermont scene. Pauline Grimes (née Adams) posed as a 5-year-old for Rockwell's 1953 mural "United Nations," which hangs in the United Nations building. She still lives in Cambridge, N.Y., just across the Vermont border. In a telephone interview, she remembered Rockwell finding her through another famous regional painter.

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• Norman Rockwell's Models: In and Out of the Studio by S.T. Haggerty, Rowman & Littlefield, 312 pages. $45.

"He was looking for a Black family when he was going to be doing the United Nations [mural]," she said. "He was a friend of Grandma Moses, and we were friends of Grandma Moses ... She mentioned our name, the Adams children. Sure enough, we got a call." Rockwell made Grimes' family — her mother, Martha, and her siblings Paul, Carl and Marybeth — "feel right at home," she said. In the resulting image, Grimes stands solemn and in prayer among an assembly of culturally diverse figures behind a row of UN Security Council members. She also appeared in a Rockwell cover image for Look magazine in 1965.

For another child model, Tom Pelham, who was featured in a Massachusetts Mutual Insurance ad, Rockwell's work sometimes came home. His father, Gene Pelham, an accomplished artist in his own right whose work appeared on two Saturday Evening Post covers, worked as Rockwell's chief photographer and assistant, sometimes scouting models. Photographs were central to Rockwell's process, since he drew and painted directly from them.

"Dad respected him and understood his talent," Pelham, a former state finance commissioner who now lives in Berlin, Vt., said in a phone interview. He cited one incident, however — documented in Haggerty's book — in which Rockwell and Gene Pelham disagreed about whether to punch the clock on Christmas Day. Otherwise, Pelham recalled Rockwell's good rapport with locals. He "liked the people he was using as models," Pelham said. "He liked the people of Arlington. There's no doubt about that. And that's a gift."

Norman Rockwell's Models is a trove of charming small-town lore, backstories that helped build a legend: There's the one about young Ruthie McLenithan, the badass girl whose marbles-playing prowess is depicted in a 1939 Post cover — "Marbles Champion" was rooted in truth. There's the shocking tale of how Trachte and his siblings came into possession of a Rockwell original worth millions — finding it hidden behind a false wall in their father's Sandgate studio.

As Rockwell's work gains value in the wider world, his Vermont years remain a source of local pride. The quaint Norman Rockwell Exhibit, located in the Sugar Shack in Arlington, invites visitors to connect Rockwell images with local models' profiles. Rockwell's Retreat is a bed-and-breakfast in the artist's former Arlington home and studio. Trachte said he's planning a Rockwell model reunion in August. As he told Edgerton roughly a decade ago, "We're going to have reunions until the last man is standing."

Haggerty's book comes along at an opportune time to refresh and preserve the fondest and most poignant Rockwell memories — those of the people who gave his work its enduring vitality and character.

Updated May 10, 3:05 p.m., to correct the spelling of Doris Crofut White.