David Souter

None of this [Washington eminence] held any appeal for David Souter, who after returning home from his Rhodes scholarship at Magdalen College, Oxford, crossed the Atlantic only once again, for a reunion there. Who needed Paris if you had Boston, he would remark to friends. When the court is in recess, he gets in his Volkswagen and heads to Weare, N.H., to the small farmhouse that was home to his parents and grandparents.

from a 2009 NYT consideration of Souter by Linda Greenhouse.

I remember reading that remark when I was a kid, maybe in Alex Beam’s column in The Boston Globe. I’ve sometimes thought that myself when back in Boston. Although I’m usually back in the spring or fall. I don’t think too many people think that in February.

When I look at my (rare) photographs I never seem to quite capture the magic.

A shy man who never married and who much preferred an evening alone with a good book to a night in the company of Washington insiders, Justice Souter retired at the unusually young age of 69 to return to his beloved home state. 

We need more of this. I’m reading his obituary and Charles Grassley, who was at Souter’s confirmation hearing, is still a damn senator!

After he retired, Justice Souter sold the family farmhouse and moved to a home he bought in nearby Hopkinton. The reason, he explained, was his large book collection, which the old farmhouse could neither hold nor structurally support. Reading history remained a cherished pastime. “History,” he once explained, “provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.”

One of the best aspects of Boston is that it’s one big history book.