Expecting two friends to join her at her neighborhood community pool one day a few years ago, Suzan Franks tossed towels on two adjacent chaise lounges and sat in the third.

Instead, three guests arrived, creating a slight seating dilemma.

Seeing their plight, a kindly gent in a fourth chair spoke up.

“I’d be more than happy to move down a few chairs,” he offered.

“I did a double take,” said Franks, a former Nashua alderman, school board member and state legislator. “I know you … your voice … you’re somebody famous, right?” she recalled blurting.

Franks – who moved six years ago with her husband, Rick, to Citrus Hills, the Hernando, Fla., resort community with the heavy Nashua flavor – gained far more than a chaise lounge that day. The chance encounter sparked a friendship with iconic New England radio and TV host Dave Maynard, the man behind the gentle, friendly voice Franks and legions of other New England baby boomers grew up listening to.

After she got over her admitted giddy schoolgirl reaction to meeting “a real-life famous person” a few months later, Franks, by then running for a seat in the Florida state senate, knocked on Maynard’s door to ask for his and his wife’s support. Five minutes turned into an hour, and the next day Franks made her pitch:

“Would it be OK if I wrote down some of these stories you’re telling me?”

The Maynards agreed. Thus began more than two years of weekly or twice-weekly visits at which “most of the time, all we did was laugh,” Franks said.

But there must have been a lot of meat in between chuckles, because Franks is now ready to release “The Dave Maynard Spin,” a comprehensive anthology blending classic Maynard anecdotes, career highlights, backstories and “would-you-believe” tales and tracing the nearly 50-year radio and TV career of the enduring personality who died in February at 82.

Upon the book’s release Wednesday, Franks will head to the Nashua area for a series of book signings starting Aug. 7 with two events: an afternoon appearance at the Courville at Nashua on Hunt Street and an evening signing at the Nashua Public Library.

The tour will kick off at the Courville because Maynard was the spokesman for its parent, the Courville Communities, for several years. The firm enjoyed a special relationship with him, company President Henri Leblanc said.

“Dave was a huge part of the Courville family,” Leblanc said. “… He took his role as our company spokesman seriously. Not many people could light up a room the way Dave did.”

Franks couldn’t agree more. From that initial poolside encounter when Maynard playfully made her guess his name – one of his hints, Franks remembers, was “… and Goliath” – the Maynards and the Franks were inseparable.

“The Dave Maynard we knew is the exact same person we all heard on TV and radio,” Franks said. “He was fun, he was fascinating. He was the kindest man I’ve ever met in my life.”

Known for his generosity and behind-the-scenes support of many Boston-area causes, Maynard raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Boston Children’s Hospital, to which he also donated proceeds from the sales of three cookbooks he published, Franks said.

Finding a cure for macular degeneration was another of his causes, which probably numbered in the dozens. Whether on TV or radio, hosting his famous kid-talent show, “Community Auditions,” or recording the next of his enduring “Maynard in the Morning” segments, Maynard’s “overall focus was always on helping people,” she said.

Maynard launched his career at former Boston stations WHIL and WORL, which morphed years later into WMEX. By then, Maynard was settled in at WBZ, where he enjoyed the bulk of his career. But for a man who virtually lived in front of a microphone, Maynard had a hard time getting off the ground when he began trying to capture his stories for posterity, said his wife, Pat Maynard.

“We got a recorder, but he kept telling the same story over and over,” she said. “Somehow he couldn’t get past (versions of) that first story. So when Suzan asked, he welcomed the opportunity. It was something he’d always wanted to do.”

Indeed, it would border on the tragic to allow even a few Dave Maynard tales to go forever untold. His “Community Auditions” discovered comedian Sarah Silverman and “ER” star Scott Grimes.

His first interview, with jazz great Louis Armstrong, launched an unforgettable string that included Julia Child, Fats Domino, Phyllis Diller, Nat King Cole, Angie Dickinson, Warren Beatty, Jimmy Stewart, Zsa Zsa Gabor, inimitable Celtics broadcaster Johnny Most and members of 1960s rockers Herman’s Hermits.

A 22-year spokesman for Crimson Travel, Maynard led dozens of tour groups around the globe, even gaining passage into China and Russia when doing so was quite an accomplishment. Franks said she calls that chapter “From Russia With Love?”

Over the years, the Maynards befriended a number of Citrus Hills “snowbirds” from the Boston area, including quite a few from Nashua who made plans to retire there as soon as developers Sam Tamposi and Gerry Nash turned the first shovelfuls.

“We grew very close,” said former Nashua resident Barbara Pouliot, whose late husband, J. Herman Pouliot, was Telegraph publisher from 1971-89.

Pouliot’s home at Moody Beach, a seaside neighborhood in Wells, Maine, is among Pat Maynard’s destinations on her upcoming visit to New England.

“It’s my first excursion North alone,” said Maynard, who is renting an RV for the visit – pets in tow – to reconnect with family and friends in Boston, Lynn, Gloucester, Danvers, Cape Cod and southern New Hampshire and Maine.

For Franks, who Pat Maynard called her husband’s “number one fan – next to me,” the weekly sessions with Maynard are her biggest takeaway from the project.

“I couldn’t believe how fascinating it was,” Franks said. “It was like listening to the pied piper of broadcasting. But with one caveat: He didn’t just charm the children, he charmed everyone.”

Enthralled as she was with Maynard’s stories – and hang-on-every-word knack for storytelling – Franks was further wowed when Maynard flipped the latch on trunks full of photos, memorabilia, notebooks of jokes, scripts and news clippings.

“I thought this would be maybe 30 pages,” Franks said with a laugh. “When I hit 43,000 words, I asked Dave, ‘Do you want to publish this?’ He said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’?”

These days, Franks believes the world would be a better place if there were more Dave Maynards on the air.

“We don’t need more of the Rush Limbaugh kind of vitriol we hear all the time,” she said. “We need Dave’s style (of broadcasting), people with his talent and class.

“For Dave, any day was a good day if he could help someone.”

Dean Shalhoup’s column appears Saturdays in The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6443 or dshalhoup@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Shalhoup on Twitter (@Telegraph_DeanS).