The New Hope Gazette, January 10, 1980, p. 3 New Hope, Bucks County, Pennsylvania

The passing of New Hope's First Citizen 'leaves a lonesome place against the sky'

Dr. John A. Flood remembered

By CHARLES SHAW

An important part of New Hope disappeared last week with the passing of Dr. John A. Flood.

Dr. Flood - thrice Chief Executive of the Borough, 60 years a dentist, devoted father, husband and churchman - undoubtedly was the First Citizen of New Hope.

He was known to thousands of tourists as the man who sat on the front porch of his home at 28 South Main Street on fair Saturdays and Sundays to watch the passing parade. One of those tourists said, when illness forced Dr. Flood to remain inside:

"New Hope's just not the same without Doc Flood out on the porch."

New Hope will never be the same without Dr. Flood anywhere. As a poet said about Lincoln's passing, Dr. Flood's death "leaves a lonesome place against the sky."

The last time I talked at any length with Dr. Flood - although I visited with him briefly on several occasions since then - was on his 91st birthday two years ago. He was still in love with New Hope - "always will be," he said, although he wished "it was the way it used to be when there wasn't so much noise and the town wasn't so crowded."

In the old days," he said, "I'd sit on the porch and recognize almost everybody who went by - artists, actors, writers. It was a real friendly town then - It still has a lot of good people - but we seemed to be a lot closer to each other then."

Dr. Flood saw New Hope change a lot from the sleepy little town with its grist and cloth mills that it was when he bought one half of his present home in 1916, a year after he was graduated from George Washington University's school of dentistry in Washington. He had come to know and like New Hope from the time he was four years old, when his newly widowed mother took him from his birthplace in Jersey City to live with his grandparents Michael and Mary McGuire in Lambertville.

The late Dr. J. Gibson Petrie, the dentist father of Dr. Alfred G. Petrie, who, with two sons, Jay and Kurt, practices in New Hope today, suggested that young John Flood become a dentist. The young man, who had learned meat-cutting, among other things, in Lambertville, went to Washington and supported himself by working during the day as a meatcutter so that he could go to dental school by night.

Dr. Flood practiced dentistry for 60 years, for a few months in Delaware immediately after graduation, then at Trenton State Hospital, next at offices in both Trenton and New Hope and finally in New Hope alone.

Three times the people of New Hope called him to the office of Burgess [now known as Mayor] - in 1925, 1949 and 1957.

"We didn't have any police force then," he recalled. "We had Miles Delaney as constable... we hired Jim Maxwell as chief... we had others working part-time. But I got a lot of phone calls. We had a lot of calls that people were going to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge, but we'd usually calm them down.

"We had a report one night that a woman was running around town without any clothes on, and, sure enough, when we caught up with her, we found the only thing she was wearing was a pair of highheeled shoes. She was an artist, a fine one (she's been gone from New Hope for a long time now; so you wouldn't recognize her name) who was an alcoholic. She hadn't had a drink for ten years; but she had a lot that night. My wife got her into our house and got some clothes on her. We fed her coffee all night. She was really ashamed when she sobered up.

Dr. Flood could always see the other person's point of view. He always was an art-lover, and he encouraged artists throughout the years by buying their paintings, often at prices higher than the artists asked. A few painters paid their dental bills with art. Today, his home is a veritable museum: He owned six Redfields, two Gerbers, three Sotters, one Lathrop, one Snell, one Leith-Ross, one each by the Nunamkers father and son, three Bowlers, three Sharps, two Jean Halters, four Folinsbees (including portraits of himself and his wife), one Crilley, five Bill Neys and a Harry Rosin sculpture of Dr. Flood's head. He had paintings by quite a few others whose names don't come to mind immediately.

"We don't have any more room on the walls," Mrs. Flood said.

Shortly after he moved to New
Hope, Dr. Flood was married to Rose Schermerhorn, to whom he had five sons and two daughters. His wife died in 1947, and he was married three years later to Eleanor Ingoldsby, a Trenton high school teacher. Speaking of his two wives, Dr. Flood said, "I don't know any man could be as lucky and as happy in marriage as I have been.

Two of Dr. Flood's sons, Fred and William, have passed on. Dr. John A. Flood, Jr. is a surgeon; two sons, James and Edward, are dentists. Daughter Rose Marie, a former teacher, is married to Frank Kulp, and Rita, a graduate nurse, who was killed in an automobile accident last month, was married to Anthony Granados. Rita's two children are into dentistry; a son is practicing and a daughter is still in school.

Dr. Flood, in his final illness, missed not being able to go to church. Every Sunday morning and on other holy days when he was well, he would ride up the hill to St. Martin's Church for Mass. But, even confined to his home, he did not have to miss Mass. His wife's brother, the Rev. Gervaise Ingoldsby, a retired priest, served Mass in the Flood home.

Speaking of New Hope a few years ago, Dr. Flood said:

"It has always been a lovely place to live, but it took others to show me how nice it was. It took the artists to show me.

"They started coming here at the turn of the century - Redfield, Lathrop, Garber, McPeak. There were George Sotter and Alice Sotter, Nunamaker, Spenser, Bill Taylor, John Folinsbee. Bill Noy came to town, and he gave us a lot of good philosophy. Bill Noy helped change the face of New Hope; he knew that change was inevitable because change is the law of nature."

And if you asked him about the one thing he liked best about New Hope, he would say:

"The people."

'He walked softly from the battlefield.' Alyce Reese, one of Dr. Flood's nurses wrote this note to the Flood family shortly after Dr. Flood passed away: "The Mighty Warrior did not win the battle, but neither did he lose it. He simply laid down his weapons and, as gently as he was in life, he walked softly from the battlefield at 5:25 a.m."

Obituary

This article included four photos, but the available copy is not of adequate print quality to reproduce them here. In two photos he is shown seated on his front porch, at 28 So. Main Street. One caption states, "The last time Dr. Flood was on his front porch -- in July 1977," and another "Dr. and Mrs. Flood on the porch. Another pictures him exiting a voting booth in November 1975, and an older portrait shows, "Dr. Flood as he was sworn in by Justice of the Peace Donald DeLacey for his third term as Burgess [now Mayor] of New Hope in January 1958. Mrs. Flood holds the Bible."

Posted 10-31-1998 by Tom Rue.

CLICK THE ABOVE IMAGE FOR AN ARTICLE ON THE FLOOD HOUSE.

Credits.

Link to The New Hope Gazette, a member publication of the Intercommunity Newspaper Group of the Journal-Register Co., which published the above article.

Link to NewHopePA.com.

Link-backs.

Visit the page of Terry Burroughs (Firewife) on New Hope history.

FLOOD GENEALOGY