By then Big Roy Carnes was dead. His son, Roy Junior, Milliard's predecessor in the House, had retired from the State Senate as chairman of the Committee on Post Audit and Oversight to become chief executive officer for financial operations of The Buehler Corporation, a New England textile company then completing its changeover from manufacturing to importing fabrics, mostly from the Far East, and beginning its relocation to Anderson, South Carolina. Two of the original trustee/beneficiaries, Chassy Spring and Fiddle Barrow, still survived, but Spring was in ill health in a rest home in Gloucester, near his son's home in Marblehead. Spring did not attend Merrion's inaugural, and would die within the year.
There had been three purposes for that meeting, held in Fox's main office in the white six-room bungalow with green shutters and a white picket fence that the Fox Agency occupied in the center of Hampton Pond (in Canterbury, Hampton Falls and Cumberland, the Fox Agency operated storefront satellite offices providing coverage extending into Holyoke, Springfield, Chicopee and Amherst and Northampton). Carnes, citing the demands his new position made on his time and energies, and the imminence of his permanent departure from New England, had invoked the buy-out clause. Stating in his letter to Walter Fox his confidence that Fox and the others would give him 'honest weight," he had waived his right to demand appointment of a disinterested appraiser, noting in passing that he had 'often wondered why the hell Chassy ever thought it would ever be a good idea to give an outsider access to the books; what if he got curious and decided he wanted to know where the dough'd originally come from?"
Fiddle Barrow offered two proposals, prompted in part by his own increasing frailty but precipitated by Spring's incapacitation. The first had been to convert the securities into shares of a moderately aggressive mutual fund, Spring no longer being able to supervise the trust's investments and no one else among the trustee-beneficiaries appearing to have either the time to assume his oversight of market investments or the acumen to do it with confidence. The second had been to cede the management of the property at 1692 Eisenhower Boulevard to Valley Better Residences, Inc." so that thereafter the only task remaining to the trustees would be negotiation and deposit of the checks representing their profits.
Merrion, Fox and Barrow voted unanimously to convert the stock into shares of the Dreyfus Fund. Conformably to Edmund Spring's written statement of his father's wishes 'he said to have him vote the same way as everyone else does, whatever they want to do' Barrow cast Spring's vote as his proxy. They further voted to direct the Dreyfus Fund to transfer shares in the account to be established in the name of the trust in the amount of $143,000 to Roy Carnes, Jr." and to put the apartment building under Valley Better management.
Neither Merrion nor Fox then or later had perceived any need to divulge their common interest to outsiders. But each time Merrion after that went into any kind of community meeting or social occasion not knowing in advance exactly what he was in for, and found that Walter Fox was also involved, he was glad. Because they had that one financial thing in common, and treated it as clandestine, to Merrion it seemed they had a bond of secret knowledge. Fox seemed to share that belief. Each of them knew that the other possessed a reserve capability Tuck you' money hidden from the world, and hoarded the knowledge along with his own treasure.
As Merrion's business to the casual observer would have seemed to consist principally if not entirely of his job at the courthouse, so Walter's had appeared to be the Fox Agency, the insurance and real estate brokerage he'd inherited at the age of twenty-nine from his grandfather, Philip, in 1968.
On July 18th, 1968, the day of Philip Fox's funeral in the Episcopal Church of St. John in Hampton Pond, government offices and small businesses there and in Hampton Falls, Canterbury, Cumberland and neighboring sections of Holyoke, Chicopee, Northampton and Springfield displayed hand-lettered signs in their windows and on their doors:
"Closed 11-1, in Memory of Phil Fox." Or just: "Philip Fox. 1882-1968." A columnist for the Springfield Union wrote: "Phil Fox died having spent a lifetime demonstrating, not declaiming, to all who knew him his unshakable belief that faith without good works is useless."
Even Fred Dillinger eulogized him. In his Transcript column he described Fox as 'the man who singled himself out if he was not first recruited, as he usually was to lead the area when it was time to solicit donations. It didn't seem to matter to him what the cause was.
