OBITUARY: Lewis Percival Hartstone (Kluck) October 21, 1937 – October 2, 2017 Hard-working, humble man of land and sea
Lewis Hartstone ended up as a dairy farmer – which is interesting because he was never known to be interested in cows.
That is not to say he came to dairying from some corporate career with his money made in banking or somesuch.
Far from it. Lewis made his living from the Waikato land and sea, usually in control of some sort of machinery, as a member of the Hartstone family of Raglan.
If he was in charge of something with a large motor, Lewis was a happy man. He loved big machinery, and he was to spend most of his working life operating trucks, diggers, rock crushers (his brother John ran the Okete quarry), and trawlers.
Lewis was born in Woodville, near Palmerston North, at the tail end of the Great Depression. They were hard times, and his father Jack had a job shovelling metal for the Raglan County Council on a government relief scheme.
It did not take the young Lewis long to earn himself a nickname. He sat that straight in his highchair his father called him Kluck, after the WWI German Prussian general, Alexander von Kluck.
Lewis, like so many of his generation, left school the day he turned 15, with a set of life skills he had learned outside of the classroom. He was, from an early age, an accomplished deerstalker, duck shooter, and truck driver, having learned this last skill on his father’s lap.
The Hartstone fortunes took a turn for the better in the years following the war when a Captain Hardy of the Northern Steamship Company came looking for Jack. At the time the company was barging goods to Hamilton on the Waikato River and Hardy had heard Jack owned a truck.
On a handshake, Jack became an agent for the company, transporting from the Raglan wharf general goods such as molasses, malt (for Hamilton’s breweries), potatoes, sweet South Island hay (for Waikato racehorses), and oats.
The Hartstone family was to become a mainstay of the Raglan economy from the 1950s – they started as truckers, but soon expanded into quarrying at Okete, farming, trawling, and finally shop owning – they ran Hartstone Seafoods in Kahikatea Drive, and Five Crossroads, Hamilton, for many years.
Somewhere along the way they also acted as the Raglan agents for Air New Zealand, the Waikato Savings Bank, and the South Waikato Electric Power Board.
Lewis was the quintessential ‘‘hard case’’ – fond of his rum-and-coke, doughnuts, fish-and-chips, mince pies and sausage rolls.
He saw the funny side of a lot in life; was good natured; never lost his temper. He would walk away to potter in the shed, rather than argue. His sense of humour ran to dry, his love of music to country and western, and his cars all American. He owned GMC and Dodge trucks. When he died he left a Dodge Ram with a Cummins engine, along with a restored 1951 Ford F1 truck.
‘‘His was a life of hard yakka. He’d help someone out at the drop of a hat, but never ask for anything in return. He was a very humble man,’’ wife Carol said.
Lewis was one of the first to sign up for the Raglan sea rescue – and had a hand in bringing many people home.
When he had the mind to, he would regale listeners with stories of his derring-do midnight truck runs down the Taupo-Napier road delivering fertiliser to his father’s farm.
Those were the days when the government was opposed to the trucking industry and supportive of the railway. To protect the rail freight service, truckies were not allowed to run loads over long distances, and Lewis’s midnight runs to Jack’s place were timed to avoid the local constabulary.
The family move to fish trawling came about when they bought a small fishing vessel.
Around 1966 the Hartstones built their first steel trawler, the Lady Ruth, named after Lewis’s sister, Ruth. Lewis earned his skipper’s ticket and the fleet was expanded to include the Challenger; the Lady Sarah (which ran aground at Rakaia Mouth earlier this year); and the Torea II (te reo Ma¯ori for the oyster catcher bird).
Lewis was a twitcher – he loved birds. Wife Carol says he would often come home with ducklings in his pocket, which they raised as pets before releasing them. The ducks would come back for a visit – though presumably not during the shooting season.
In later years, Carol and Lewis bought a rainbow lorikeet, and called it Bubby. The chatty bird travelled everywhere with Lewis, often going out on jobs with him, until one day he fell off the ride-on mower and landed between the tyres and the blade.
Man and bird were both pretty quiet when they returned to the house that evening, and Carol says it took Lewis a day or two to come clean. In the interim, the family thought Bubby, quiet as he was, was moulting. After all, he certainly had lost a few feathers.
The Hartstone era in Raglan for Lewis and Carol ended in 1997 when Tainui bought out the fishing business, and the family moved on to other interests. Carol and Lewis bought a dairy farm in Ohaupo – Lewis did all the digging, carting and shifting around the place, and left sharemilkers to look after the cows.
During this time, he opened another interest, contracting his digger to neighbours, and, for a while, going swamp kauri hunting with a mate in Patetonga on the Hauraki Plains. The kitchen and window frames of his new house are swamp kauri.
But it was not all plain sailing. Carol recalls him coming home one evening, distinctly downhearted, without his beloved digger. He had managed to get it stuck fast on a neighbouring farm.
‘‘He was really upset about the environmental consequences. He had to use two large machines to extract it, and then it had to be scrapped.’’
When he finally stopped working and sold the farm in 2007, Lewis took the first long holiday of his life and travelled the United States with his younger sister. He visited cities and towns from Los Angeles up to Anchorage, taking in Las Vegas (he gambled, and lost, $5), the Grand Canyon, Seattle, Calgary, and the Alcan Highway.
His highlights of Alaska were not necessarily what one would expect. There was the old Rio truck spotted abandoned outside Fairbanks; the front tooth he lost to rock candy in Whitehorse; and the visit to Chicken (population in summer: 17).
He built one house above Lake Ngaroto with Carol, then, tired of mowing lawns, they decided to move into Hamilton. It was to be one project too many for Lewis. His birthday party already in advanced stages of planning, he died a few weeks short of his 80th, the River Road home uncompleted.
Lewis leaves his wife of 31 years, Carol; four children; three stepchildren; and their families.
● A Life Story tells of a New Zealander who helped to shape the Waikato community. If you know of someone whose life story should be told, please email Charles.riddle@wintec.ac.nz