WILLOW CREEK — Ezra Homan, the mill foreman who entered every Ice-Out competition from its founding in 1927 until his final entry this year — an unmatched streak of 61 consecutive contests — died Tuesday at his home on Homan’s Pond Road. He was 79.
Ezra Homan was the connective tissue between Willow Creek’s industrial past and its uncertain future. He began working at the Willow Creek Hardwood Flooring Company in 1906 at age sixteen. He retired as a foreman in 1964 after 44 years. He was present for every significant event in the mill’s history.
But his true legacy was the Ice-Out. Ezra entered the first impromptu competition in the spring of 1927, when a group of mill workers idled by a logjam began making informal bets on when the ice would clear from Homan’s Pond. He was 21 years old. He never stopped.
“Sixty-one Ice-Outs,” said Jed Thorne, the town historian. “That is not a record. That is a devotion. Ezra believed that as long as the ice cleared and someone was there to note the time, Willow Creek was still Willow Creek.”
Ezra kept a spiral notebook — held together with electrical tape — in which he recorded ice thickness, water temperature, barometric pressure, and wind direction for every Ice-Out date since 1927. He never won the competition but finished in the top ten five times.
“It was never about winning,” his son Amos told the Gazette. “He used to say that predicting the Ice-Out was like predicting your own birthday. It comes when it comes. The point is to be there when it happens.”
Ezra Homan is survived by his son Amos, who inherits the spiral notebook and the family homestead on Homan’s Pond Road. The notebook will become the foundation of Amos’s own championship prediction methodology.
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- Ezra Homan, Age 16, Begins Work at the Flooring Mill
- Ezra Homan Retires from Mill After 44 Years, Never Took a Sick Day
- Amos Homan Wins First Ice-Out Championship; Homan Family Legacy Continues
- Edwin Thorne’s Gazette Article Christens ‘Homan’s Pond’ in Print