Old Lyme — As he’d done for many years, Norman Emerson delivered the benediction Saturday at the end of the Old Lyme South Volunteer Ambulance Association’s annual banquet.

“It was a very simple, nondenominational type of benediction,” Carrie McCarthy, chief of services for the ambulance association, recalled Monday. “He was a very kind man.”

On his way home from the banquet, held at the Clinton Country Club, the 90-year-old Emerson died in a car crash along with his passenger, Janice Brentlinger, 87, of Niantic. The accident occurred near the intersection of Mile Creek Road and Baily Road just after 10 p.m., when Emerson’s car hit a narrow section of the roadway and crashed into a bridge abutment. The two were pronounced dead at the scene.

McCarthy said ambulance crews from Old Saybrook, who were covering for Old Lyme during the banquet, were the first to respond to the scene. Several Old Lyme volunteers also responded, some of whom knew Emerson personally from his many years as engineer and volunteer ambulance driver, and his continuing involvement as a social member of the association for the past half-dozen years.

“It was very difficult for our members,” said McCarthy, who first met Emerson when she was 16 years old and was volunteering with the ambulance association for the first time.

Fire Marshal David Roberge, who also knew Emerson from his many years of service with the ambulance association, recalled him as someone who was “always there to help” in his community, and wasn’t shy about speaking his mind. He will be missed by many people in town, he said.

His niece by marriage, Kathleen Emerson, and great-niece, Cristine Emerson, had similar memories of the man they knew as “Uncle Norman.”

“He was feisty,” recalled Cristine Emerson, who was his caregiver. “He was about as real as they come.”

Emerson had trouble walking in recent years but got around with the aid of a motorized scooter.

“He got curbside service, whenever he would go to places around town like the post office,” his great-niece said. “And he loved going to the Scoop Shop for ice cream.”

Emerson was well known in Old Lyme, having worked as a town constable and as a patrol boat officer with the Rogers Lake Authority. A native of the town, he lived for many years at the Point O’ Woods shoreline community, where he also worked as a security guard.

“He was very, very proud of his neighborhood,” Kathleen Emerson said. “He loved Point O’ Woods.” Emerson was also a member of the Old Lyme Grange and the Pythagoras Lodge of Masons, among other organizations and volunteered with the fire department.

Fellow ambulance association volunteer Barbara Rozanski, a friend for 30 years, described Emerson as "sort of like the overseer" at Point O' Woods, making sure all the residents there were taken care of.

"If anybody needed help, he would always make time to do it," she said. She recalled that he started the scholarship program at the ambulance association, where he spent many Saturday nights on duty waiting for calls to come in.

One of the proudest moments of the last decades of his life, Kathleen Emerson and her daughter, Cristine, recalled, came in 2001, when Emerson was awarded his high school diploma during graduation ceremonies at Old Lyme High School. In 1943, when he was a senior in high school, he left a month before graduating to join the Navy. After serving in World War II, he remained in the Navy through the next two decades, serving in both the Korean and Vietnam wars.

“He graduated right in line behind my brother Joshua,” Cristine Emerson recalled. “Joshua was 18 and he was 75.”

At the time of the graduation, a state law had recently been enacted affording World War II veterans who had not been able to graduate the chance to receive their diplomas.

Emerson was predeceased by his wife, Jessie, who died in 2009. Kathleen Emerson said his daughter is en route from her home in California and that funeral arrangements are incomplete.

State police in Westbrook had no further information Monday on the accident, which remains under investigation.

j.benson@theday.com