By Edith Pawlicki
(October 14, 2024) — A celebration of life will be held on Sunday, October 27, 2024 for Normand Caleb Manning, Jr., who died at age 81 while bushwhacking through Cockaponset State Forest on Sunday, October 6, 2024.
He had had a full and busy day with family, who realized he was missing on that Sunday evening and deduced he had probably tried to walk home from his niece Edith’s house to his own home at about four in the afternoon, a hike he frequently proposed, but from which he was repeatedly dissuaded.
Family, community members and police searched for him for five days. Longtime friend and fellow Granger, Clark Gardner, found his body on Saturday morning, October 12, 2024, by parking on a forest road and then walking toward Norm’s home in a straight line, through a bog and several bushes. Norm’s resting place was beneath mountain laurels, about three-quarters of the way to his house from his niece’s home, though it seems likely he detoured to the south, where he was seen by a mountain biker and where some corn husks were recovered. Norm had been carrying a bag of corn husks home to his cows.
Norm’s final walk was in keeping with his life, for he was as strong and stubborn as an ox. He was born in 1943 in Waterbury, Connecticut while his father was deployed for World War II. (He did not meet Normand, Sr until he was almost three years old). His parents bought a farm in Haddam in 1949; besides his college and military years, this is where Norm lived the rest of his life. He attended Middletown public schools, graduated from UConn in 1965, and then served in the Naval Reserve during the Vietnam War.
After leaving the navy, he worked at Sibley Company in Haddam until 1985, and then at Zygo Corporation in Middlefield until his retirement in the mid-2000s. Although Norm worked full-time, he also kept one or two milk cows on the farm, and every Saturday, he would drive “the milk run” to bring milk to various siblings and cousins across Connecticut. Norm was an avid reader—frequently reading even as he drove the milk run, to the dismay of his nieces and nephews who would hitch rides to visit their cousins—and acquired and abandoned books everywhere he went.
Norm was an active member of the Congregational Church of Haddam (now the United Congregational Church of Haddam and Higganum) as well as the Higganum Grange #124 and the Pomona Grange throughout his life. He loved to help others and was generous with both his time and money to all those around him, despite practicing extreme frugality in his own life. He is survived by nine of his ten siblings, twenty-four nieces and nephews, and thirty-seven grandnieces and nephews, all of whom he adored, which he expressed through endless teasing.
The October 27th celebration of Norm’s life will be held at Haddam Congregational Church, starting at 2:00 p.m.
Photo above provided by Helen Luk: Normand Manning with his great niece, Elizabeth Luk, while hiking at Gillette Castle State Park.
