Paul H Boulanger

Paul Henry Boulanger, of East Hampton, beloved husband, son, father, grandfather, and brother, passed away on Sunday, April 27th, 2025. He was 77.

Nobody was more surprised than Paul that he lived this long. His secret was that he didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, and in recent years subsisted mostly on sorbet, donuts, and gallons of Diet Mountain Dew.

His early life was filled with mischief and a checkered school record. Before he was old enough to drive, or even reach the pedals, he got a paper route, saved up, and bought a car. This was an early, and in retrospect relatively subdued, sign of his big dreams, fearlessness, and general defiance of rules and authority figures.

In high school, he swept a sweet and studious small-town girl, Susan Brack, off her feet with his good looks and bad-boy charm, and played drums on the patio of her parents’ house. In return, he survived her parents’ hazing when they sent the city boy to help lop some meat off the deer that was hanging in the attic.

After graduation, Paul completed an apprenticeship and worked as a machinist and contract engineer, including at a company that made acrylic peace signs and at another facility that made nuclear products for the US Navy. He volunteered with the East Hampton ambulance and fire department for 50 years, stopping only when he caught COVID on a call in early 2020. For many years he covered Saturday nights. Nobody wants that slot because it means you can’t go out on a Saturday night, or travel on the weekend. When his daughter was in college in Boston, they would drive up early Saturday morning and then turn right around and drive back, so he was home in time for call. It sometimes seemed like he was Cinderella and his coach would turn into a pumpkin if he wasn’t home by midnight.

He rode motorcycles and collected cars and crashed a few of both. Boats too. Guns went off in the house only twice: once in a bloodless shotgun-cleaning accident that left their canopy bed frame riddled with buckshot, and once because there was a squirrel. His many stories of hijinks and narrow escapes have horrified and entertained his family for years.

At work and at play, Paul was resourceful, independent, creative, and irreverent. He didn’t take himself too seriously and didn’t think much of people who did. He was generous with his time and gifts, which included non-linear thinking, amazing mechanical ingenuity, and similar ingenuity in putting together blistering strings of curse words. Friends and family knew him as a guy who could fix anything…though maybe not permanently. He insisted on always having vice grips, duct tape, multiple knives, and rope with him, choices that did not sit well with the TSA when he traveled.

Paul was a frequent shopper at the scrapyard and was dejected when his favorite store, the town dump, became a transfer station. He was also madly, irrationally generous. If you mentioned a thing you liked, he'd get you eleven when he found them at a great price. (If anyone wants a flashlight, please contact the family.) Nothing made him happier than hearing someone say, “Oh, I really need X,” and then finding it for them. To feed that desire, he had to maintain a lot of…inventory. If you have some at your house, it’s yours now. If you don’t, and would like some, please let us know. We have everything in stock, much of it in multiples.

He claimed to be antisocial, but somehow Paul knew almost everyone in town, as well as their kids, spouses, exes, dads, moms, and dogs. At one point there was a lot of construction and an influx of new residents into town.  When the scanner went off at 3am, he rolled over, still asleep, and mumbled “I don’t have to go, I don’t know those people”. It seems this was a first. (He did eventually wake up and go on the call, though.)

Paul was a loyal friend who respected and valued people from all walks of life. The bottom line for him was whether he thought you treated people right. He loved his family fiercely and would talk your ear off about how proud he was of his daughter, and of his grandson, who he doted on and taught to play Texas Hold ’Em at a tender age.

Paul was a devoted husband for 55 years. He cared for his wife Susan through her serious illness, and when he couldn’t do it all, called in favors. People brought flowers and food and built a wheelchair ramp. When he started to need more help himself, friends and neighbors had his back, for which we are eternally grateful. Our family is also forever in debt to Charlene for all her help in recent years. We couldn’t have done it without you.

To leave online condolences, you can visit https://www.spencerfuneralhomeinc.com/obituary/Paul-Boulanger. No flowers, please. Seriously, what would have made him the happiest is for you to hang out with a friend and reminisce about his antics, or spend the day helping someone, or go buy something wildly impractical at the scrapyard.

No amount of time with Paul would have been enough for his family and friends, though he gave us enough flashlights, and memories, to last several lifetimes.

To send flowers to the family or plant a tree in memory of Paul H Boulanger, please visit our floral store.