Interviewer - So, I'm here with Bob Greenwood on January 21st and we're at 105 North Road here in Chelmsford and we're just going to have a little conversation, learn a little bit about each other and what Bob's been doing in town here. So when did you come into town, Bob?

Bob Greenwood - I came to town in 1925. I was born in the millhouse down the center.

Interviewer - Really? On Cushing Street?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, right in the corner there.

Interviewer - Did you live there or how did that happen?

Bob Greenwood - My folks lived there and the doctor that delivered me was Dr. Scoboria, you know the Scoboria House?

Interviewer - Yes.

Bob Greenwood - It was up by the library. Well, he walked down, delivered me, had a cup of coffee and walked home. That's what they tell me.

Interviewer - It was just a neighborhood delivery?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - So, what was your family's name at the millhouse?

Bob Greenwood - Well, my father was Raymond H. Greenwood and my mother was Catherine. My mother came from Lowell.

My father originally came from Lowell when he was young, moved to East Chelmsford and then to Chelmsford Center. He moved to the millhouse because he worked for a fellow by the name of Pat Haley who owned the Odd Fellows Hall and had a market in the corner of that building downstairs on the corner near the brook and my father was a meat cutter there for I don't know how many years and then he went to work for Ted Emerson, Brad's father, worked there for five years and then went into business for himself, contracted during the 20s and was in the business until he retired and then my brother and I took it over and my brother, one of my brothers, was in it with me and he died in 82 and I kept running it until 1990 and then I retired and closed the business out.

Previous to that, years back, my father was on the Board of Health. He got elected in 1936 and served for 14 years. Also his last two or three years he was on the Board of Selectmen and he served on there for about nine years and I later, I had another brother, the one that passed away.

He was on the Park Commission when we had a Park Commission. He was on that for three years and then in 1956 I ran for Board of Health and served six years on there and then from then on I was out of politics a while until I got on the Conservation, but in between there I worked for the Board of Health whenever the health inspector, Jack Emerson or Richard Day, if they were sick or out, I subbed for them off and on and when Richard Day first came to town, we had a health inspector who had a little problem and he quit abruptly and I took the job for two or three weeks until Richard Day could give a notice and come to work and then later Jack Emerson asked me after I closed off my business, asked me if I would do some sewer inspectors for the town and I done that for about 12 or 15 years right up until now and now everything is practically done so they have no need for me now because they have one inspector that works full-time.

Job I had, the contractors had to put money in escrow for my fee.

The town handled it but they paid me, but I had to bill the town and that's how they did that with contractors that were installing sewers on one of their new streets instead of the town having to pay for that. They would make an M-Pay for the installation of the sewer on their developments and I done the inspections and the contractor put money in escrow for my fee.

Interviewer - Well, let me go back, test your memory back to when you were little on Cushing Road. It was Dan Haley's market in the Oddfellows Hall, did you say?

Bob Greenwood - That was Pat Haley. Dan was his brother and Dan used to run the grain mill, General Mills Grain Mill.

Interviewer - Okay, so that was down at the end of the street. Was that on the left side, the same side as your house or was it on the right side?

Bob Greenwood - The grain mill?

Interviewer - Yes.

Bob Greenwood - No, it was up and back where Harvey's got the building now. Bill Harvey owns the building.

Interviewer - That's where the pond was filled in. Now the grain mill was there before the pond was filled in, wasn't it?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, the grain mill was there and the pond was there and I don't know how that come about, how that pond got filled in.

Interviewer - It got filled in by Harvey's.

Bob Greenwood - Is that how it happened?

Interviewer - Yeah, they had the lumber company there back in the 70s.

Bob Greenwood - Yes.

Interviewer - And one of the old grain mill building, I thought it was, burned.

Bob Greenwood - Yes.

Interviewer - And I think they were using that part of their lumber business. But before that, they had filled in the land, filled in the pond, got permission to do that.

Bob Greenwood - I didn't know that. I often wondered how that got filled in. All of a sudden, one time, I went up there and the pond was gone.

Interviewer - I think it was sort of a fly-by-night thing. I heard rumors that it wasn't entirely above board. But anyway.

Bob Greenwood - Couldn't have been. But we had no conservation then.

Interviewer - That's true, right. No historic commission.

Bob Greenwood - And years ago, in the teens and the 20s, people used to skate there and they had, you know, on that pond.

Interviewer - So you remember this?

Bob Greenwood - No, I don't remember.

Interviewer - Oh, you don't. But you know that...

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I know. I've heard my folks talking about it and other people.

Interviewer - But there was water in it when you were younger.

Bob Greenwood - Yes, there was.

Interviewer - The dam, at the end of the street was the dam. Could you see the stones?

Bob Greenwood - Sure. In the dam? Oh, yeah.

Interviewer - And now there's a ramp and a cement wall in about the same spot.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, exactly.

Interviewer - You can see the stone dam around to the left side.

Bob Greenwood - Right.

Interviewer - Back of the brick building, you can see remnants of it.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And then there's a pipe. I think it's a three-foot pipe.

It goes under that parking lot through the parking lot of the restaurant over there in the bank, where the Canada Dry used to be. There's a line that goes through there and across Littleton Road and under a corner of the cemetery and then up and then it goes into an open brook.

Interviewer - That was the brook that used to feed one of the brooks that fed the pond and the other one was Beaverbrook. I forget the name of the little pond. But now it's all in a two-foot pipe.

Now, that's what comes out when you drive up over what used to be the dam. There is a sluice way on the right where the water comes out. So that must be from that.

Bob Greenwood - That's where that line comes through. And then it takes all the drainage from up on Bridge Street. There's a brook that comes down through and Littleton Road's on one side and Bridge Street goes up. And that's what feeds down there.

Interviewer - So back to the store, just for a second. Was the store... See, Patrick Haley was at the grain mill. No, Daniel Haley had the grain mill.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, he was.

Interviewer - Patrick was at the store. Was that in the Oddfellows? You said it was at the corner next to Beaverbrook.

Bob Greenwood - It was in the building, but one section in one corner was the market. And then later, a fellow by the name of George Eno bought it from Pat and run it, the store.

Interviewer - Was it called Haley's Market at the time?

Bob Greenwood - In the end, it was called Eno's.

Interviewer - Eno's.

Bob Greenwood - That was there just before World War II. And then it went out. I think it went out just after the war or during the war.

I wasn't there. And then it ended up that same area in that building, there was a real estate guy, Carl Peterson. He was also a selectman at one time. He had a real estate office there.

Interviewer - In the front part of the building?

Bob Greenwood - In that corner, yeah.

Interviewer - Okay, front right corner. Just in the corner.

Bob Greenwood - Because after the war, Warren Leahy started the first bank, or they called it the Chelmsford Bank at first. Then they changed the name. But he had the downstairs and most of the building after that.

Interviewer - I remember that. That was our bank back in the 70s.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. I used the bank too. Same one. Pardon me.

Interviewer - So when did your family move away from Cushing Place?

Bob Greenwood - Well, in those days, a lot of people when they worked for somebody, they supplied them a house.

Interviewer - So this was company housing then?

Bob Greenwood - Well, when my father lived there, Haley didn't own it. I don't know who owned it, to be honest. But I think it was originally, I'm not sure, built for the mill up there, somebody that probably...

Interviewer - Our understanding was it was a mill counting house, so it was part of the mill operation.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. But in those days, they were renting it. And after my father went to work for Emerson, he bought a house of Ted Emerson's father, Ralph, on Fletcher Street, where the bank, Five Cents Bank, and we lived there for a good many years.

One time in those days, early in the 20s, I was probably about three years old, we had to move because the well, there was no Tom Warner down there, the well went bad. And we moved down here to the house at the corner of Dalton Road and North Road. The old, well, Fred Russell owned it, but it's the Colonel Simon Spaulding House.

Interviewer - So you lived in that house?

Bob Greenwood - We lived there for a couple of years, and then...

Interviewer - That was a rental at the time?

Bob Greenwood - Well, yeah, it was a two apartment.

Interviewer - Two in the main house?

Bob Greenwood - The guy that owned it, Fred Russell, who, I don't know if you remember him, but his daughter was Arlene Laporte. Do you know them?

Interviewer - Don't know.

Bob Greenwood - He was a father that owned more land in town than I think anybody. He used to buy every piece of land he could. He had it all over town, small pieces, some lines.

And he lived downstairs, we lived upstairs. And I was about three, I remember living there. He had a miniature golf course out in the back along North Road.

You know, there's a new house that hasn't been built too long.

Interviewer - Yeah, next door.

Bob Greenwood - Well, where that house is, he had a miniature golf course there.

Interviewer - Really? Was it open for public?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. And he had a little stand there.

Then if you come up North Road, when I first moved here, I moved here in 1953. And there was nothing, only Brown's Farm across the street here. All the houses, there was nothing there but the old colonial over here.

And a guy named Bridget Brown lived there. And right over here, just beyond North Gate Road, there's a house with a driveway right off North Road. There was a vegetable stand in another house off to the right or north of it a little bit.

People by the name of Gagdon raised vegetables out there and sold them right there.

Interviewer - I just have to stop you for a minute because you just answered a question. I have some pictures from my work at the Historical Society. Two of those pictures that I scanned within the last couple of months are pictures of Gagdon's stand.

And it says right on it, Gagdon. And I had no idea where that was until you just told me.

Bob Greenwood - It was about, the stand itself was right where their driveway is. That was here when I moved here. Well, I remembered all my life.

It was here as long as I can remember until, you know, they moved and their house got knocked down and things got changed. And then this road had another stand.

Interviewer - So what was the stand on North Gate or on North Road?

Bob Greenwood - No, North Gate wasn't there. That was all Brown's Chicken Farm. And Gagdon's was separate from that.

Then when you're up the road, there's the old Whittemore place. That's where the parrot, the painter...

Interviewer - Are you talking on this side of the road?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. You know, the big old house.

Interviewer - Fleur Whittemore. It's sort of a bluish-green house.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, right. Well, and right next to that is Earlwood Road right up here.

Interviewer - Yeah, there's a road on the right side of the house.

Bob Greenwood - Well, Peachtree Road is up next. That's a new one that Laporte put in. It's a private road.

Then that house is on the other side, the Whittemore place. The people that owned that, the guy was a wheelwright. He made wagons.

Interviewer - We have some fantastic pictures that were taken between 1890 and 1900.

Bob Greenwood - Years ago, before World War II, they had a barn that was a big ramp.

Interviewer - Went up the right side.

Bob Greenwood - They used to, yeah, they used to get the wagons up here.

Interviewer - Do you know roughly what year that might have been torn down?

Bob Greenwood - Gee, I don't.

Interviewer - We have pictures at the Historic Society between 1890 and 1900 of the operation, fully operational with the blacksmith's personnel and wagons and, you know, men up at the top of the ramp.

Bob Greenwood - Right.

Interviewer - And the fancy Floyd Whittemore sign, and it says Carriage Manufactory up on the roof just below the peak. And then I have another picture that shows it as a derelict building. I think the ramp is still there.

You can see it's the same building, but you can tell it's been unused for decades.

Bob Greenwood - I know it was there when I went in the Navy, which was 1942. So it was, it come down sometime, I think, after that. Then next to that was the Lion's Den.

Interviewer - I remember that. That was still here in the 70s.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, and a guy named Allen owned that, and that started after Prohibition. And he lived across the street in that big house, and he had a stand, that big vegetable stand.

Interviewer - Do you remember what number it was? What road was the Lion's Den?

Bob Greenwood - The Lion's Den? Oh, geez.

Interviewer - Is it a higher number?

Bob Greenwood - I've been there a few times, so I shouldn't remember. In fact, my father bought the house across the street knowing that for, didn't live in it, but rented it and had it for a while. No, I can't remember what number it was.

But you know the house that's directly across the street?

Interviewer - No, but was the Lion's Den toward Drum Hill from here, or on this side of the road?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, it was on the right.

Interviewer - Okay.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, and it was, you know, you know where, the street that's right next to it.

Interviewer - Next to the Whittemore House?

Bob Greenwood - Just, yeah, going down back. Well, the Lion's Den was on the other side, and there was a barn nearer the road than the Lion's Den. The den was on the other side, and Al had owned the barn originally.

Interviewer - But the Lion's Den was on this side of the road, wasn't it?

Bob Greenwood - Yes, yeah, and so was the barn.

Interviewer - And the barn was the same side.

Bob Greenwood - And his house was on the other side, and the Lion's Den, and down and back of the Lion's Den, down all those streets down and back, Al had owned that.

Interviewer - So he developed that?

Bob Greenwood - That's where, no, he used to raise vegetables and farm it. Then when he sold it and sold the den and another family bought it, and they run it for years, and then they sold the land to a builder in Tewksbury. And he built a lot of those houses and put some of the side streets in down until you hit the old westlands.

And I'm trying to think now, Earl Ramsbottom, he was the guy that bought the, he came from Tewksbury, he bought the Lion's Den for Ballard. And then when he sold it, he sold it to a fellow named Swindell, and it caught a fire. And that's how it ended up going out. Because it burnt and they never really got it going again. And when they did, I think the trouble was over the license. It had been a dead license for, he hadn't used it.

Interviewer - I think I remember that. That's what happened in the 70s when we were in town.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, and that's when the den went out of business. And it got finally knocked down and they built a house there. Then further up North Road, you know where Loisel's big house is on the hill?

Well, they had a stand right down by the road, right where their, right in back of where their wall is. There was no wall there. And then across the street, another family had a stand and a farm.

And if you went up further North Road, up where the rotary is, you went, there was Zeya's where the McFarland's, the McCarthy School, that was Zeya's farm. The town took it by eminent domain. And Zeya's used to have a stand there and they sold vegetables.

And the road dipped down there and Old Westford Road came in on the other side of where the, back this way, near where you could go in to go around the school. Old Westford Road came in there and went straight across down by the little dump.

Interviewer - So they twisted it over to match the rotary.

Bob Greenwood - And before Route 3 got built, there was, you went up a hill there. That was part of Drum Hill. And right where Old Westford Road came in, then you went up straight.

You went up a hill to the top and then down the way it goes down the other side. And when they built the highway, they changed Old Westford Road. But when they first built Route 3, they only had two lanes.

And it died at the top of the hill there. And then you went on to North Road. And until that, until they built the other lanes, Old Westford Road went across just like any other road did.

And that's the way River Neck Road did. It went across just the regular two lanes of Route 3 till after World War II. See, they built that first lane, two lanes, before the war.

And then they stopped. Then after the war, I forget what years it was, but then they started the other lanes and made it a highway and put bridges and chains.

Interviewer - So you're saying on River Neck Road, where it crosses Route 3 on a bridge, it used to be a stop sign?

Bob Greenwood - All around. And it was very dangerous. Because people got on that and it only started down at Bell Ricker Road.

You know where the ramp is to go on down at Bell Ricker Road? Well, that's where the first lanes of that, they only went to there. And they went from there to Drum Hill.

But people used to get on it there and go pretty fast because it was quite straight and well along. And anybody trying to get across on River Neck Road, you'd have to be very careful. And they had some very bad accidents there.

When my father was a selectman, they put up a big sign because they had been bugging the state to put lights there. And I think Volpe was governor then. And they put a big sign up, the selectman did, State Highway Death Trap.

And the reporters went up and took pictures. And the governor was bull.

Interviewer - Did he get the job done?

Bob Greenwood - Well, eventually they did. I don't know if that urged them. But they had a great big sign up because they had some real bad accidents there.

But there's been a lot of changes now down in Chelmsford Street. I remember when the Raleigh went from Lowell out to Putnam Avenue, and then it stopped and come back. And it run alongside where Skip's and those restaurants on that side.

And where the ice cream stand, where all those buildings are, except Palmer and Plaza, that was high ground. But right where the hotel is, where the new restaurant is, all that was swamp. And Mr. Kidd, Kidd's Dairy, Bobby Kidd's, do you know him?

Interviewer - I actually do because I think they own the Firehouse Restaurant in Kingsborough. And also my grandfather, he was a milk producer up in Pelham, New Hampshire, and he used to sell to the kids.

Bob Greenwood - Well, Bob Kidd's grandfather bought a piece of land there from Brad Emerson's father. He owned it. And he filled it in and put the ice cream stand there.

And I forget what year that was. It had to be around 36, 37. And he run that for a few years.

And before World War II, he put the diner in. And he run that until Steve Willis bought it after that.

Interviewer - The story I heard was that they started selling hot dogs and snacks out of side window at the ice cream stand. And that got to be so popular, then they got the diner.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, yeah, they did. And they used to give you a big cone for the money, a nickel, you know. They done a very good business.

And then they start running the restaurant. And they might have bought the land all at once, I don't know. But they filled that in and put the restaurant in there.

And then later, Charlie Parlee, who is my wife's cousin, he and his brother-in-law bought the land out back. And they were going to build the first hotel there. And then before that, the bowling alley went in down where the second hotel is now.

Interviewer - I didn't know there was a bowling alley.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, right at the end of Parlmont, the road stopped. And there was a bowling alley, a good size one. In fact, I'd done all the digging there when they built it.

And the bowling alley was up for a good many years. And then Dumont, Charlie Parlee's brother-in-law bought that land, knocked the bowling alley down, and put up the hotel. He built that hotel, the second half.

He built the first one, then the second one. And then the driveway behind there was my father's land where those buildings are, Alton, Meaton House Road.

Interviewer - Yeah, now that was, was that a pig farm at one time?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, Emerson had a pig farm. Way down back, it was moreover by Buckman Drive. And in the 30s, I think it was, I was kind of young, but I remember the fire.

The thing caught a fire and a lot of the pigs burnt up. And that got away with that. But behind, but on my father's land, we had a garage in our sewage and drainage business there.

But my father always had animals. He always had, he used to buy old racehorses and keep them just to let them graze. And he raised ponies.

And he just did it here for, he always liked, he liked that better than he did the contracting business. But there wasn't that much money in that business. But we had a garage down there, a concrete building, which got knocked down in the end when he sold the land to Purity and Demoulas.

They, they heard that Stop and Shop was decorated by my father's land. And the Purity and Demoulas found out. And they came and offered him more and he sold it to them.

They bought it together. Then later, Demoulas bought, Leo Kahn, who owned the Purity, bought his share out. And he kept it for quite a few years.

And Charlie Parlee bought most of it.

Interviewer - And that's where the hotel is?

Bob Greenwood - Pardon?

Interviewer - Is that where the hotel is now?

Bob Greenwood - No, that's where Emerson's was. The Meat and House Road, that's where my father owned.

Interviewer - So they were anticipating putting a grocery store there at one time?

Bob Greenwood - Demoulas and Stop and Shop wanted it.

Interviewer - They were both planning to put a grocery store there?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. I think, what I think was, I think Demoulas and Purity only did it to keep Stop and Shop out. Because they never had any plans to do anything.

And when Demoulas put it, had it, see he had the market down on Chelson Street then. And he had no real plans, I don't think. They just did it to keep Stop and Shop out.

And it stayed like that until Parlee bought it from Demoulas. And then he built the road, because my father owned two houses on Fletcher Street. One was where Parlee put the road in.

Interviewer - The Meat and House Road?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, right. And then the piece where my father's house was, after my father and mother passed away, we sold it to Dr. Currie. And he sold it to the bank.

He got a piece from the church and made some deal with them. And he built them their other parking lot and moved a building for them that was a garage. And he made a deal to get, buy a small piece of deer land and put it with the one my father had, where our house was.

And then sold it to the Five Cents Savings Bank. It wasn't that long ago. Another thing people don't know, on Fletcher Street, there used to be two bridges.

Yeah, see people, there was Emerson where the doctor's offices are.

Interviewer - Yes.

Bob Greenwood - That was Ted Emerson's land.

Interviewer - Yeah, it was in back of the pond and it was the back acreage of the farm.

Bob Greenwood - He owned all the way almost to the end of Fletcher Street on that side, but a guy named Sturdivant owned a piece of it. And he had a garage on the other side of Fletcher Street. But up more about where, he had a garage about just beyond where the filling station is now on the climb.

His house was there. And then his garage was just up a little further. And he owned a small piece where the TV place is on the right just before the lights on Fletcher Street.

He owned a piece there. But Ted Emerson owned the rest of that all the way. And it tapered down to Fletcher Street.

And in wet times, there was always water. And I can remember when the first bridge was there, it was only, oh, probably about 15 feet the other side of the, about where the driveway comes out from the bank.

Interviewer - So the bridge was for Fletcher Street?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, it was there. And water only went under it when it was real wet. And it was there. It kept Emerson's lower end of the field dry.

Interviewer - I'm really interested to know about this because somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 or 15 years ago, I was driving home from work and I took the, my alternate route is Fletcher Street and then up Worthen Street and Westward. And there was close to a foot of water on Fletcher Street. I drove through it very, very slowly.

And it was flooded. In fact, the basement of St. Mary's, the entire garage was completely filled with water. And the whole thing was like a lake.

So what you're saying still happens every now and then.

Bob Greenwood - You know, see, people, when they talk about building and stuff, when St. Mary's built the church, my father told them, he said, you're putting it too low. You're going to have water. And they said, well, we got architects and engineers.

He said, well, this has always been wet. And they, the church knew it because that was from Fletcher Street where the church is. From Fletcher Street on the church's land, you go straight off Fletcher Street.

So about 50 feet was all swamp. When I was a kid, it was all swamp. And even after World War II.

And later, the highway department piped the brook underground. And the brook went down to my father's land and took a hard turn. And where it turned, that was one of his bonds.

And went about, I'd say, 100 feet and then took another turn and then went another about 50 feet and took another turn. And went right down through where Meaton House Road is now, down that area, and out into Emerson Swamp, where the hotels are now. And the town piped it all underground.

But it never had much pitch. Because, as you can tell the lay of the land, it's not...

Interviewer - Yeah.

Bob Greenwood - And when we were young, there was a second bridge up by Emerson's, where the pipe comes across by the bank, where the brook comes out behind the pond.

Interviewer - The drain for the pond?

Bob Greenwood - Because if they're not lower than the brook, they're on the same level. And that's not good. Because you've got such a long line, and there's very little pitch on the whole line.

It goes all the way down to where the hotels are, and now it runs out to 495. And before there was anything there, and Emerson's place was the same way, when we were kids, we skated on Emerson's, and we used to skate down where the hotel is. We could skate right up to the trolley track on Chelson Street.

Because the water went right up there. And then going down toward Lowell a little, Emerson had, there was high ground, and he had a gravel bank there. And across the street, he owned where the apartment houses and Dunkin' Donuts on Chelson Street. There was a road in there, and he had a gravel bank in back there. But all that area where the hotel is was all swamp. And they had a, how Emerson got from Fletcher Street, he went down with his tractor or truck to the, down back there.

And then they had a road made with railroad ties through the swamp that was pretty stable, and they'd drive across it to get to the high ground down the other side. And right beside where the new animal hospital is, that wasn't all flat there. When the Bowling Alley, the people that built the Bowling Alley bought the land, they bought that piece, there was a hill there.

And it went up probably, must have been 15 feet higher than the rest of the land where, 15 feet higher than Fletcher Street. And it went up, and when it got to the top, then it started going down till you hit the swamp on the other side. So, but that was all cut down, and they used the fill that they took from there, they used it out filling in the swamp.

Interviewer - I got some other Fletcher Street questions for you. Martin Gruber, when he built the animal hospital.

Bob Greenwood - Sure.

Interviewer - I heard that that building, that Lane 2 building shed was part of Ted Emerson's farm, it was in back, and they were going to originally raise it, bump it up a story, and when they did that, they found out it wasn't structurally sound enough, so they sold it or gave it, moved it over, and Martin Gruber used that as his vet hospital, originally.

Bob Greenwood - It's almost true, but what happened is, Emerson, the top part of that house down there was a piece of Ted Emerson's, and they had a...

Interviewer - You're talking about the animal hospital part?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Hospital, okay.

Bob Greenwood - The actual part of the house down there was part of Emerson's, back end of Emerson's big house, and they had no cellar in it. They had a guy with a shovel-dozer digging a cellar, and they had the house, that part of it propped up, and before we got it dug, it fell in. And so they took the top part of it, moved it down to Fletcher Street, built a house, and put it in there, and made it the top part of the house, and the rest of the place was built.

Yeah, but that part, the top part of it, is part of Emerson's house up there.

Interviewer - Now, there was a smaller house next to it that was kind of cute that was torn down recently. Do you know anything about that house? It wasn't that old, I don't think, 30 or something.

Just to the right of the animal hospital, there was a house that was rented out, and that was recently demolished.

Bob Greenwood - Well, that's the house I'm talking about. That was the house. The animal hospital was all built.

Interviewer - Oh, my understanding was that the animal hospital was part of Emerson's house.

Bob Greenwood - No, the top of the house that they knocked down came from Emerson's.

Interviewer - So that was an accident then?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, absolutely.

Interviewer - And then they built the rest of the house underneath it? Because being on the historic commission, I was asked to go over and take pictures of the inside pre-demolition. They had asked for a demolition permit.

So I went in, and it was in kind of shabby condition. It had been all paneled inside, but the chimney was leaning away from it. So there were some features of construction that didn't seem quite right.

And I couldn't figure out exactly what the problem was, but now it makes sense.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I know. I knew that because I'd done the sewer inspections on the building. And I said to them, when are you going to knock the place down?

They said, well, we're waiting for the historic commission. I said, I wonder if they know. And I don't know whether the owner knew or not, but I said, he was there the day I was saying to the guys, well.

I said, I remember when they moved this thing down here. I said, it was up at Emerson's place.

Interviewer - Well, maybe that's the story. See, there's another connection. Fred, I think his last name is Ramsager, he is my neighbor across the street.

So he's our new animal doctor, his operation.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah.

Interviewer - So we immediately switched there when he moved into the neighborhood. And so I'm down there now and then chatting with him. And he's the one that told me that the animal hospital building had been part. But he must have misinterpreted your story.

Bob Greenwood - Where do you live?

Interviewer - We're on Lovett Lane.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah. Do you know the girl up there? There's a girl up there, I think she lives on Lovett Lane, that was on the conservation commission. Oh.

Interviewer - I'll have to look at the resident list to see if I ended up with the commission, because I wasn't aware.

Bob Greenwood - I'm trying to think of a name now.

Interviewer - Well, I can look it up because it should be on the town website.

Bob Greenwood - I think she lives on Lovett Lane.

Interviewer - Next question on Fletcher Street. There were four houses, you know, where there's the Village Green, Village Center, whatever it is. And then there's that convenience store restaurant brick building.

And then in the middle, I think it's Fred Church or one of the insurance companies.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah, Fred Church.

Interviewer - There were four houses along that street. I have pictures of all four houses. Two of them were like twin houses.

They kind of had a long sloping front and they were twins. Did he move those to that site? The twin houses or were they already there?

Bob Greenwood - I'll tell you, I remember them all being there. There was now the house my father owned where we lived, where the bank was. That was moved from, I don't know from where, from somewhere was moved down there.

And one of Emerson's houses that was straight across from ours, which would have been the last one when you got to the field, the main field, that was, I was told, was moved there.

Interviewer - Now, I don't know it to be exact. One of those houses, the one that had the large gable in the front and the recessed porch, that one, believe it or not, came from right in Central Square, just to the right of the gift shop building.

Bob Greenwood - Well, that would be the last one.

Interviewer - Yeah.

Bob Greenwood - The one that I'm talking about.

Interviewer - Yeah, so that's where it came from. I've got several pictures of that house in Central Square. Yeah. Back in the turn of the last century.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, that was the one that I was always told was moved there.

Interviewer - My understanding, too, of another story is that Henry David Thoreau, whose name was David Henry Thoreau when he was three years old, his parents lived in that house for three years, yes, and they had a business building next door, and after three years they moved to Boston, and when he got older he changed his name from David Henry to Henry David. But I think I read somewhere that both of those houses were moved, so I'm wondering where the other house went. Now, that was a more conventional, like a box, roof.

But the one that we're talking about had the nice gable in the front and the recessed porch, a lot of fancy woodwork. It looked pretty much the same at the old site as the new site.

Bob Greenwood - See, and then there was a house next to it that had a long porch, and then there was a little field, and the lane that Emerson's used to come down from the farm and go across Fletcher Street to go out back, you know, down where the hotels are now. Then there was two more houses.

Interviewer - Were those the twin houses?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, they were more or less enlightened, and they were there until the place, you know, until they knocked everything down.

Interviewer - Any idea if it was in the 60s or 70s?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, well, when they started to develop that land there, I got to think that it was in the... I think that had to be around the early 70s or late 60s, because, let's see, I was on the Board of Health from 56 to 62, and there was none of that development while I was there, I remember.

Interviewer - This was after 62.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, it was, yeah. And Emerson had a barn that was there when he sold the place. It wasn't the barn that was originally there.

He had an older barn that was there, my guess is, in the 1700s, 1800s, or somewhere there was an old barn when my father worked there. I remember that barn, and it was built into the slope where his house was. It was in back, and it was in pretty, I guess it was in pretty bad shape, and it ended up burning down, and a lot of the cows were buried over in the field there.

I forget what year that was, but then he built the new barn, and that was there until he sold the place.

Interviewer - I think the town bought it, didn't they? Yeah. And they used it for a short time for town offices while they prepared to move.

Bob Greenwood - Well, yeah, well, Dr. Currie ended up owning the Emerson house.

Interviewer - And then he bought it from the town.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, and Emerson had two houses out front there, you know, where the bank is sitting now. There was his house, and there was a little lawn, pretty good-sized lawn area. Then there was a house, and then another house right in the corner of Fletcher Street.

Interviewer - I don't remember those.

Bob Greenwood - Well, they were knocked down a long time ago.

Interviewer - Let me ask you a question. Do you have any pictures from around town that you'd be interested in letting us scan?

Bob Greenwood - I don't know if I have. I'll look. I got a picture of the millhouse with a horse and wagon in front of it that Jack Hanley, who owns it now, gave it to me when he found out I was born there.

I got that. I think that's... Yeah, here, see?

Jack gave me that one. And I think I got one of one of the brand-new fire trucks. I'll see if I can find it.

It was given to me. They didn't know who all these guys were, and I named them for them.

Interviewer - So they're all named right here.

Bob Greenwood - That picture is of a new fire truck that they got.

Interviewer - And what's the building?

Bob Greenwood - Well, this is the town hall in the center. You're right. It's on this side of it, on the south side of it.

Interviewer - It's confusing because that's the door, the ramp, the handicap ramp on those bushes out in front now. And we can almost date it because one of the windows got blocked by the vault when they installed the vault.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, and I think this was... well, can you see that?

Interviewer - I can't. It's dated already. It's a 1926 Maxim, so it was new.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, it was.

Interviewer - Well, these are very nice, Bob. Thank you for showing them to me. So, I distracted you.

I got you off of Fletcher Street. I didn't mean to do that.

Bob Greenwood - Well, that's all right. I know...

Interviewer - See, when I came on the scene, Dr. Currie and his controversial project was in process. So, I think those houses may have already been...

Bob Greenwood - Oh, the one down here?

Interviewer - Yeah, at the corner of Fletcher and North.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, where the Foucault House and the other house...

Interviewer - I didn't know that he lived right there on that corner, across from the church, kind of. Opposite corner from the church.

Bob Greenwood - Who?

Interviewer - Dr. Currie. He says he had a... or did he just own the house there?

Bob Greenwood - No, no. He owned the house.

Interviewer - The house, okay.

Bob Greenwood - He bought two houses.

Interviewer - Yeah, and tore them...

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - At some point tore them down.

Bob Greenwood - Well, he had them for years before he just had them and rented them. And he... Then I guess he always planned to do something with the land, but didn't do it until he got out of the dental business.

There was a big house where his dental office is now. There was a family named Nichols used to live there. And, in fact, the guy was a big...

he was Charlie Nichols. He was the head of the Republican Party around here. And, of course, in those days, most everybody was Republican.

You couldn't find a Democrat, and there was no such thing as independence.

Interviewer - There was a Nichols-Cranberry operation in South Chelmsford. I wonder if it was any relation.

Bob Greenwood - I don't think so. And I forget what business he was in. He was fairly wealthy for the times.

Then there's... My brother lives on Crosby Lane. He owns the house, the old...

where the first town meeting was down there on Crosby Lane.

Interviewer - At the end on the left?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, number 14. Yeah, it's on the left.

Interviewer - That's one of our historic homes.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. He's got it for sale now. Had it for sale a couple of years ago, but he had some doctor who was interested in it.

Interviewer - We have pictures of the barn. My dentist, Dr. Fadjo, that has Dr. Currie's old business.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah, I know Dr. Fadjo.

Interviewer - He's my dentist also. And his wife... He was on the historic commission that I'm on for a few years.

But his wife took some beautiful pictures of that barn while it was still there. And now there's nothing left but the foundation. They had a big fire.

And I noticed recently they did some re-landscaping with the foundation so it looks a lot better.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, he put a top on it for the garage. But he wants to get a smaller place. And he's got...

My sister lived up on Westwood Street. She taught high school over here. And she's got Alzheimer's now.

And he bought her a house. He's got it rented. He's going to move someday if he sells his house. But, you know, with the times...

Interviewer - We have a beautiful picture of that house taken from Crosby Lane, looking kind of north and east. And some of the ladies that lived there, they're all identified. It's a glass plate negative, so it's a really high-resolution super photograph. And it's from the 1880, 1900 time frame.

Bob Greenwood - I worked for that woman that lived there, Mrs. Simpson. She lived with her brother on the farm, Billy Kimball.

Interviewer - Which farm? On Crosby Lane. They had some land?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, they owned all that land.

Interviewer - Where 495 is?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, out back.

Interviewer - Did that cross 495 in that area?

Bob Greenwood - No, it went to there.

Interviewer - Just where Meeting House is?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, they went down by Meeting House and they met Emerson's land.

Interviewer - Okay.

Bob Greenwood - And he had a chicken business, a hen business.

Interviewer - I remember hearing about a chicken business back then.

Bob Greenwood - And he was also the Farm Bureau representative. My father hauled grain for them. They'd get it, come in up the center on freight cars.

And we'd bring it around to the farmers and deliver it. And when I was 9 years old, I used to work for that woman, his sister, Mrs. Simpson. I used to weed the gardens.

She had a lot of gardens. I worked for her for a while until I was about 14.

Interviewer - I wonder if that's the lady in the picture.

Bob Greenwood - Probably.

Interviewer - Because they're identified. I forget if the name is Simpson.

Bob Greenwood - And she had one son and a husband. The husband died about 1937, I guess it was. 36, 37.

Had a gallbladder operation in those days. You know, he didn't make it. And he was a Harvard graduate.

And so was her son. And her son was an engineer. Then he moved out of town, her son did.

She stayed there until she passed away. She had sold the house to my father. And she had the right to stay there.

So she lived about 10 years after he bought the house. But they were good friends of my father's.

Interviewer - So your father owned the house after the Simpsons. And then your brother inherited it from your father.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, my father gave him the house. He has two boys with cerebral palsy. So they do pretty well.

But they're not kids no more. One's 35 and the other one's 40, I think. And they do pretty well.

The youngest one has a job. The oldest one runs the computer and stuff for his father. Does some book work and stuff for him.

But the house is too big for him now. And he's been trying to sell it. Those kind of houses, you got to get somebody that's the kind of house they want.

And they're not too plentiful buyers, I don't think.

Interviewer - Somebody who's not afraid of an older house. In fact, they might have to plow some big bucks to stabilize it and maintain it.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, a lot of maintenance. But the town's changed quite a bit. The town where Demoulas was, there was a farm.

And there was a big hill there that was cut down when they built that place. It was Winters' farm.

Interviewer - What was the name?

Bob Greenwood - Winters.

Interviewer - Winters?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And I think they own the land across the street where Stop and Shop wants to build now.

Interviewer - The theater, the Route 3 cinema.

Bob Greenwood - The theater, yeah. I think they own that too. Then down on Billerica Road, you probably know about the old town farm.

Interviewer - Yes.

Bob Greenwood - On the corner by Billerica Road. Yeah.

Interviewer - Yeah. Yeah, the fellow that owns it right now hasn't quite figured out what he's going to do with it. He inherited and it's a little beyond his...

Bob Greenwood - Yes, it needs something.

Interviewer - It does need some TLC. He was hoping to make an art colony or something with the barn, but it hasn't happened yet.

Bob Greenwood - Then there was, you know, before World War II, there was a lot of farms around here. The town was small and it was nice. Now, this road, you almost have to get a permit to get out of your driveway. It's worse since the lights went in.

Interviewer - Because now people are used to moving smoothly. Before, you got all hung up because you had to be careful going through the intersections. Now you don't have to be so careful.

Bob Greenwood - Before the lights, not many people would cut through from Dalton Road and come up any of the side streets.

Interviewer - I know I use Dalton Road more than I used to because I know I can make a left turn, which I didn't do before.

Bob Greenwood - And if I wasn't here so long, I'd get out. But my opinion is anybody that buys a house on North Road is crazy because of the traffic. This house here, they're trying to sell.

It's had, the house next door, it's had three or four owners in the last ten years or twelve years.

Interviewer - Martha Sanders lives a little further. Did you know her?

Bob Greenwood - Who?

Interviewer - Martha Sanders. No. She was on the Historic Commission.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I didn't know. Where does she live?

Interviewer - It was a house just this side of the Spalding House that you lived in.

Bob Greenwood - Oh yeah, I didn't know.

Interviewer - I think I got her first name wrong. I'm getting old and forgetful too. She moved and went to Oregon.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, you mean Martha Sayer.

Interviewer - Martha Sayer.

Bob Greenwood - Sayer, but we knew her as Martha Sayer.

Interviewer - Okay, now it's Martha Sanders.

Bob Greenwood - I know where the house is. Just up, just...

Interviewer - Just one house this side. Yeah, it was real close to North Road. And I remember one day I got tied up on North Road and I realized that that was the moving truck because in order to move, the only place you could park the truck was right smack in the middle of North Road. So you had to go down one lane.

Bob Greenwood - She went to school with my daughter.

Interviewer - Did she? How about that?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I have three kids.

Interviewer - She was on the Historic Commission for many, many years. Now all of a sudden one day we had a meeting and at the end of the meeting she turned in her resignation and said she was moving to Oregon.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, is that where she was?

Interviewer - Very sudden she kept it quiet.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, now her husband had lost a leg or something, didn't he?

Interviewer - Yeah, I never met her husband.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I think he lost a leg. So I don't know what the situation was.

Interviewer - So that was another case where she lived right on the road and didn't have much driveway to...

Bob Greenwood - Well, I guess that was at that time. Good. She, yeah, I think her husband had lost his leg. I don't remember.

Interviewer - So we covered pretty good stretch of territory. We covered from Central Square.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Chelmsford Street, up Fletcher Street and then further down Chelmsford Street to the farms. Do you have many recollections of like Golden Cove Road and Chelmsford Street before 495 and Perm Farm and Perm Cider Mill?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah, Perm Cider Mill. That was...

Interviewer - We have some nice pictures of that.

Bob Greenwood - ...torn down from 495.

Interviewer - Yeah, I heard they burned it, did they?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - The fire department?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, they... That's how they got it out of there, but it was a big old building.

Interviewer - Yeah, that cider mill was a huge barn and they had several other large buildings too in a good size house. It was right in the path.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And there was a lot of, you know, changes when the highways went in. Like down here, there was a hill coming up once you got by Worthing Street.

You went across the brook, you came up and there was two houses on the right. Before you come to that, English Tudor house that were moved. One was moved over here on... I forget the name of the road over here.

Interviewer - Westford Street?

Bob Greenwood - Well, off of Dalton Road. Dalton Road, yeah. Off of Dalton Road.

Interviewer - Well, on Dalton, there's a house that was moved from 495. And then on Westford, there's a cottage that was moved. Nancy Clark, do you know Nancy Clark?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, sure.

Interviewer - Yeah, there was a small house that was moved from there, right next to 495.

Bob Greenwood - Right.

Interviewer - But then there was another one further down Dalton Road too. There was some down here on North Road that were moved out of the path too.

Bob Greenwood - One was moved over on Dalton Road. And the other was moved on... I forget the street.

It's a short street over off Dalton Road too. It was moved over there. They moved, you know, they moved quite a few of them, you know, when the highway went through.

And then there was... let's see. There was one down the west.

A brick house. You know the brick house that has you come on to Stedman Street from Jensen Street? Going that way.

Interviewer - Going up Stedman?

Bob Greenwood - Going up Stedman.

Interviewer - Before you get to the old school house?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. It's on the left, a brick house. There was another brick house there.

Interviewer - So they moved that around the corner.

Bob Greenwood - That was moved down to Maple Street.

Interviewer - In South Chelmsford?

Bob Greenwood - No, down here in the west.

Interviewer - Oh, Maple Street. Okay, not Maple Road. Yeah. Okay.

Bob Greenwood - Right. And, you know, nobody ever thought they could move a brick house even then. So there was a lot of changes.

Interviewer - Yes. How about Drum Hill area? Do you...

Bob Greenwood - Well, up there there was...

Interviewer - Do you know any of the farms along there?

Bob Greenwood - There was a slaughterhouse up there. Merrill's people by the name of Merrill run a slaughterhouse up on Drum Hill. That was Old Westford Road then.

And they run a slaughterhouse up there for years. And when the road went through, they got rid of it. They quit and went out of business.

Interviewer - So they ripped out one of the roads?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. But everything had changed around. The roads did.

Interviewer - They dug the road down and built up the bridge over it.

Bob Greenwood - And it used to be over where the pool company is. You probably remember when, I don't know if you were here then, when there was a cement business. A guy made septic tanks and stuff on Parkhurst Road. Armand Nadeau.

Interviewer - I think I remember a cement company.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. Nadeau started it and then another family bought it. Then they moved to New Hampshire and sold the place.

Interviewer - So that's where the businesses are in back of the car wash on Parkhurst Road?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. It was right in there.

Interviewer - I remember there used to be still sand there too because I remember going in there and buying some sand to put in my trunk once.

Bob Greenwood - That was Glenview sand. The gravel was way down. It was down further. You probably went in from Steadman Street.

Interviewer - From Hill Road actually.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, you could go in from Drum Hill too. Go in the back way. Yeah. Right along the low dump.

Interviewer - Yeah, when we first moved in town, the incinerator was still chugging away.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - In 1970. We lived on Princeton Boulevard.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah.

Interviewer - Right next to the Blue Moon.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, yeah.

Interviewer - It burned while we were there. I got some good pictures.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Blue Moon.

Bob Greenwood - Haven't heard that for a long time. Not many people remember that.

Interviewer - No, no. We just lived there for one year. We always wanted to see the platters, but we didn't make it.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Lost the place. So what are the memories of town? You used to go down swimming holes.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, we used to.

Interviewer - You used to skate on Fletcher Street.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, we used to go down behind the old town farm. They said the brook was polluted for years. This is River Meadow? Yeah.

Interviewer - Yeah.

Bob Greenwood - But we used to swim down there. Everybody did. All the kids from town, if you didn't go up to Hodge Point, you'd go down there and swim. It was an area that, you know.

Interviewer - Wide spot in the stream.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. Yeah. And it wasn't very big, probably 50 feet across.

Probably not even that wide, 40. So nobody ever got sick. Nope.

Interviewer - Pollution at all.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, right. And it was polluted. No question about it. Yeah. Things really changed.

Interviewer - So where did you go to high school?

Bob Greenwood - Chelmsford High. I didn't graduate.

Interviewer - So it was the brick, Chelmsford High.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - That was built in 1917, so it was in place when you were here. They didn't tear down the old center high school until around 1920s, I understand.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Long before the fire station, but I think they condemned it and it was still there when you were here.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. I remember the foundation and the old pieces of the old slate, blackboards, were still in the hole. Kids used to play in the hole.

Interviewer - So your dad worked for Ted Emerson at the farm.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, he worked for him for five years.

Interviewer - What kind of work did he do up there?

Bob Greenwood - He was a farmer.

Interviewer - So he did farming.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, milk cows and all that stuff.

Interviewer - Okay. Haying, bringing in hay.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Interviewer - Yeah.

Bob Greenwood - He'd done that when he was a young guy. Until he went in business for himself in the 30s, or in the 20s. I think he went in in 28 or 26, somewhere in there.

And he was a call fireman on the fire department.

Interviewer - The fire horn, the signals. Yeah. We have a list of the signal codes in our historic commission.

Bob Greenwood - And they had the fire whistle on the town hall.

Interviewer - Yep. They still got the tanks and the compressor downstairs.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And when the whistle blew, guys would leave their job and take off.

Interviewer - I remember when we moved here, they still used to test the whistle.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And they used to blow it when they had no school, too.

Interviewer - Yes, yes.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. Yep. Yep. Yeah, there was...

Interviewer - So, what else did they have for fun? Were there fairgrounds, like off Route 110? I know there was a fire muster area somewhere.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. But basically, every summer there was a carnival. We'd come to the school over behind the high school.

Interviewer - Behind the high school.

Bob Greenwood - And we just made our own. Other than that, go to Lowell to the movies. Mm-hmm. Swimming up at Hines Pond. We had no problem for activity.

Interviewer - Mm-hmm. We made our own. Yes, I remember that. I remember that. We used to go out until well after dark playing baseball.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer - In somebody's field.

Bob Greenwood - It was a little bad in those days. You know? There was a lot less trouble.

Mm-hmm. And they had a lot less trouble with kids, too. You know, there's so much they can get into now.

Interviewer - I think there's more things to do, but they're less social than they used to be. Yeah. There's more things, cable TV and games, that you can do at home by yourself.

Yeah. We used to always be outside. Everybody interacted and socialized. That's where we grew up.

Bob Greenwood - Right.

Interviewer - Outdoors.

Bob Greenwood - Every summer we always had a ball team. We'd go into Lowell to play a team.

Interviewer - Now, this wasn't any organized league, was it?

Bob Greenwood - No.

Interviewer - Just for fun, huh?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, there was no organized league. And we used to have a team and go into Lowell and play. And the team that won got the baseballs.

That was the reward. It was a big deal. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But now kids, they have to have organized. They don't have any...

Interviewer - Full uniforms.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - The team has to have insurance.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. We always played a game and had some guy, some man or some older kid from high school umpire for you. And we never had any trouble.

Interviewer - Who were your favorite teachers?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, I didn't have any favorite teachers. I wasn't a liker of school. When I went in the Navy, they kept sending me to schools.

I was a hospital corpsman. I had to go to school for that. And they sent me to motion picture operator school.

Interviewer - So these were about your college years, right? When you went to the service.

Bob Greenwood - I was 17.

Interviewer - Yeah. Did you leave high school?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, I left high school. Well, I was out for over a year before I was old enough to go to the service. I signed up when I was 16, but my father wouldn't sign my enlistment papers.

He had to okay it. So I had to wait until I was 17. Then he didn't want them, but finally pawned them into it.

And I liked it. I liked the job I had being a corpsman.

Interviewer - And the medical probably helped you later when you got into the health board.

Bob Greenwood - Oh yeah, it did. It was interesting.

Interviewer - How about we switch gears? I think people are going to be interested in your stories of the Conservation Commission along the way.

Bob Greenwood - Well, I'll tell you. I just resigned.

Interviewer - Did you? How recent?

Bob Greenwood - A week ago.

Interviewer - That's a big move.

Bob Greenwood - I've been on there 24 and a half years. I missed about 14 meetings in that time. I liked it.

I enjoyed it. You wonder why I resigned? When the meetings start being a job, it's time to leave.

I was reappointed last summer, last July, for three more years. But just like that, I started getting... So the meetings were a chore.

And we have counseled for 24 years. We've had a lot of people get on and then they'd show up every once in a while. I don't want to do that.

You owe the obligation to the people. The people come with lawyers and engineers. If you don't have...

And in the past, there's been times when we only had three members at a meeting. And we needed four.

Interviewer - It's not fair to the other members.

Bob Greenwood - They owed it to the people to be there or quit. And I wouldn't do that. I was on the Board of Health for six years and missed one meeting.

And I wouldn't... I don't know why they want to hang in. It's not a case of, well, I go.

You need to go. It's your job to accept the appointment. But I think what happens with conservation...

We don't get any publicity. I think some people want to get on and have the idea that maybe it's another step to something bigger. Get some publicity and maybe run for selectmen or something.

And when they don't get... Because I've had them say, some of them in the past that got on there, they'd say, doesn't the reporter write up your meetings? Don't you get any publicity?

I'd say, no. I'm not on here for that.

Interviewer - Let's hear about some of the projects over the years. You started at the beginning. What are some of your favorite projects?

Bob Greenwood - We got several pieces of property. Like the Cranberry Barn. We have a village off of Constable Road.

Interviewer - What's that property?

Bob Greenwood - It runs up toward Route 3.

Interviewer - Up near Ledge Road?

Bob Greenwood - Yes.

Interviewer - I think I know that property. There's a sign there.

Bob Greenwood - We got the one up on Littleton Road.

Interviewer - The Lime Quarry?

Bob Greenwood - The Lime Quarry.

Interviewer - Now the Torrey Gullion.

Bob Greenwood - Yes.

Interviewer - Torrey Gullion, she was the one that I replaced on the Historic Commission.

Bob Greenwood - We own a piece of Robin Hill.

Interviewer - Near the top?

Bob Greenwood - Yes, up. We don't own the top, but on the side there going up, we own.

Interviewer - Is that the road, the access road? Do you own that? So is that accessible to the public?

It's kind of a dirt road that loops around the tunnel.

Bob Greenwood - Yes, that is right of way for the Water Department. We own some land around the Lowell Connector in the swamp there. In fact, the manager wanted or they would like to put billboards there, but we wouldn't let them.

We voted against it. We got a steward program. I don't know if you know that.

Interviewer - I know Phil Stanway.

Bob Greenwood - Yes, a great guy. He does a classy job. He's really good. They do a good job at taking care of the reservations.

Interviewer - They monitor it, they pick it up, they do work parties, projects. I'm amazed at all the things they do. I was at the Lewis Farm dedication and that was a great project too.

Bob Greenwood - They do things like the Lewis Farm. They do work for the Land Conservation Trust, which has nothing to do with us. They do a good job and he's very conscientious.

We've had some good projects lately with those stewards. Then we were just making a land swap with the Water District for the water tank up off of Robin Hill. We gave them permission to use some of our land ten years ago.

Now the state wants them to own their land. So we're making a land swap with them. They've given us a piece of dry land, a good piece of land up in that area of Robin Hill.

We gave them the land that we let them use.

Interviewer - The higher ground?

Bob Greenwood - Yes, next to their tower. In fact, part of their tower was on conservation land. I turned it over to them and it has to go to the legislation.

We've signed all the papers, but it hasn't officially gone through yet. We've had several people want to give us some land, but usually what they want to give you is all swap. They want to get rid of it.

Interviewer - Can't sell it?

Bob Greenwood - No. We don't particularly care to take it because nobody can do anything with it. Right now they've got to pay taxes.

Now, if they wanted to get rid of it, I guess they could just not pay the taxes and the town might take it, or maybe they might force them to pay the taxes. But we prefer not to take just swap. If it had some dry land with it, or if it was a button, some conservation land.

Interviewer - It makes a difference.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, but we didn't think there was any sense in accepting. Like, now there's a fellow who has 13 acres he wants to give us, but there's no dry land. You know, it's always going to be swap.

He can't do anything with it. And we had a guy off Akron Road in South Chelmsford who lives in Westford. Incidentally, his name is Greenwood, but no relation.

And he came to me and said, I've got a big piece of land I'll give you, about 14 acres. And I said, where is it? And he told me, he said, that's nice land.

I said, I know the land. And unless you can get it surveyed and show me where there's some dry land worth taking, I don't think the commission will want it. So I told the commission, and they said no.

But he never did. He never could show me where he had any dry land. He said he had some.

Interviewer - It's near the Cranberry Bog land. There's a lot of swampy areas in there.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. No, it's right just this side of the town, Chelmsford-Westford line, up on Akron Road. And I know him.

If there was any good land there, he'd be using it. He'd be selling it for a house lot or something. So, you know, those kind of deals are not good for the town.

And we don't normally have too many kinds of projects other than with the stewards because there's not too much we can do with conservation land other than make it accessible for people to use. And they make the trails, and we...

Interviewer - They've got the labor. They've got the CPC now to, when they need some funding, they can go there. Yeah.

And they've got scouts and other volunteers lined up.

Bob Greenwood - We get money from them to, like, up on the line quarry, we need to hot truck that parking area. They've tried gravel and stuff, but trucks pull in there.

Interviewer - Yes, for a lunch break.

Bob Greenwood - And when they pull in there, they dig up the, you know, the set in there, the ground settles, it leaves water holes, makes a mess. And so it really needs to be hot trucked. Of course, then there'll be parking there more.

But, you know, it's a hard thing to control.

Interviewer - I think the rest area on 495 acts like a magnet because it's right next to the...

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - On Milton Road, it's right next to the rest area on 495.

Bob Greenwood - And we did have trouble for a while. The state's fence was down.

Interviewer - So people were going in the woods there?

Bob Greenwood - We had trouble with unsavory guys going, activity going there. And, you know, sometimes kids go up there and walk around. And sometimes the school teachers have been known to take the kids around, you know.

Interviewer - Yeah, and you're...

Bob Greenwood - And that's the old line quarry. And you got to keep these guys out of there. So we bugged the state until they fixed the fence.

Interviewer - So was Bartlett Park already...

Bob Greenwood - No, that wasn't a conservation project. That was a...

Interviewer - Land trust.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - Okay.

Bob Greenwood - And then the land trust, we have the conservation land on Acton Road runs down onto Park Road.

Interviewer - Is that behind the golf course?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. Yeah, that's the one on this side of the golf course. But I remember when that was a going nursery, you know, in the 30s.

They had quite a nursery there. But it made a good piece of land for conservation. We also got a trust fund with it that generates interest that we can use.

So that works good. There was about $30,000 in it. And it's...

We haven't touched the interest for a long time. So there should be quite a bit in there now. I don't know exactly.

We were talking about it.

Interviewer - What's the name of the family that donated that piece?

Bob Greenwood - Gee, you got me. I know the name. I just can't get it out of my head right this minute.

Interviewer - It's not the family that owned the house at 12 Park Road, is it? Park Street or Park Road?

Bob Greenwood - No, they owned the house that was across the street.

Interviewer - Oh, the big house, yeah. And there were a lot of greenhouses next to that big house there.

Bob Greenwood - Across from Acton Road.

Interviewer - Yeah, yeah. That's one of our historic homes. Yeah, I'm trying to think of the guys. Way back, I think it was Andrew Park.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, it wasn't him.

Interviewer - Not in recent history.

Bob Greenwood - Oh, geez. I should know the name without any trouble. Just because you asked me, I can't remember.

Interviewer - That'll do it.

Bob Greenwood - But the Boy Scouts have done a lot for us. Made trails.

Interviewer - I saw the tool shed at the Lewis farm.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah.

Interviewer - That was a nice job.

Bob Greenwood - And the Boy Scouts built up at the land up on Crooker Spring Road. They built bridges up there. They do a good job, those Boy Scouts do.

They come with a plan. They show you what they're going to do. And when they get done, it's just exactly what they said they were going to do.

They do an excellent job. They've done it. In fact, a kid just went through a project up there where the high school runs the track.

Kids go through that reservation. And there was some swampy areas. And they made a wooden bridge through the swamp so that the kids had made it good.

Made it with two by sixes for walking over. And done a good job. One scout gets it for an eagle project.

And he gets the others to work with him and he runs the project.

Interviewer - Project lead, yes.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah. And we try to help them with some money for the lumber and stuff. And they do a good job. They're always coming in to do trails, cut out trails and stuff.

Interviewer - So, let's see, in the ten minutes, or actually we've got 15 minutes, what are your favorite town stories that you like?

Bob Greenwood - Favorite town?

Interviewer - Favorite town stories about the neighborhood or events in town?

Bob Greenwood - Well, we had one episode when I first got on the conservation. Followed over in East Jensen. Bought a piece of land that was polluted to the high heavens.

Interviewer - That his fault, right?

Bob Greenwood - Nope. And he wanted to clean it up. And I had just been on there a few months.

I went over with the then chairman. And he said, oh, we can't let him do this. I said, it looks like it would be a good idea to let him clean it.

No, he's got to leave it alone. There was trees grown up through tires. And loads and loads of roofing shingles dumped near the Crockett River.

So, we went back to a meeting. And I agreed with him. And I voted with the rest of them not to let him do it.

And a guy came to us and he said, well, I don't know why I'm coming back to you with a lawyer. So, we come back. And we had a couple of hearings.

And the more I heard of it, the more I thought my vote was wrong. So, I changed my vote. And the rest of them voted against it again.

And that guy kept coming with his lawyer for about six months. And I kept fighting for him. And it got pretty nasty.

Interviewer - So, you were the odd man out for six months?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, pretty near six months. And it got pretty nasty. And then, one day, we went over there.

And he had done some of the cleaning up. And then he had a start. And everything he cleaned up, he had in a chain-link fence over in Bell Ricker on some land he owned.

And he left it there. And the part that he cleaned up, he had dug a channel. And it was in the papers.

They said he had a canal and all kinds of stuff. And I even got accused of being a conflict of interest because they said I'd done work for the guy and that's why I was voting for him. I had never done any work for him.

And I proved it. But the paper printed the whole story like I was guilty. And at the end, they said it was confirmed by the Board of Health that I never did any work for him.

Interviewer - Well, that wasn't very nice, was it?

Bob Greenwood - No, but that's how reporters always play the game.

Interviewer - They get the attention.

Bob Greenwood - And for six months, I got some of the awfulest threatening telephone calls at 3 o'clock in the morning, 2 o'clock, from somebody that was involved who had something against the guy. And because I was sticking up for him, they were giving me the business.

And to make a long story short, we had a doctor on there.

And one day, we were over there with the Army Corps of Engineers. They got into it. And while we were looking at this canal, a great big fish jumped up.

And this doctor said, geez, he done a hell of a job with that canal. Look at the fish. And then we see more fish.

And he said to me, you know, you're right. I'm going to vote to let him do this. In the meantime, these two engineers from the Army Corps were there to also get involved in it.

They walked around when they seen it. They said to us, what do you people call us into this for? We said we didn't.

The chairman didn't, and another member wanted you people here because it was on the banks of the continent. They said, this guy's done a hell of a job. Let him go.

Well, from then on, the rest of the board then voted to let him finish the job. But it cost him, I think he told me it cost him $25,000 to fight the conservation.

Interviewer - Not even to get the job done, just to fight it.

Bob Greenwood - And he was determined to do it. Since then, he's put a beautiful house on that land. He cleaned the whole thing up. He had the money, but I'm surprised he spent it.

Interviewer - He stuck with it, yeah.

Bob Greenwood - He done a hell of a job, and it's a nice piece of land today. But I seen a pile as big as this house that he moved.

Interviewer - Trash that was in there.

Bob Greenwood - Fossil. The guy that lived there that caused all the pollution sold roofing projects. And what he did was, his customers, he let them dump their waste on the land.

And there was quite a few acres there. And they dumped shingles in the swamp next to the river. Asphalt shingles.

Was an awful mess. And this Piret, in fact, you might know him. Ronnie Piret.

Interviewer - No, I don't know him.

Bob Greenwood - From East Jensen. He's a water commissioner over there. Oh, okay. He's the guy that cleaned it up. And he had to cut all those tires out of the trees. Otherwise, he had to pull the trees up.

Interviewer - That's hard work, cutting a radial tire or a seat belt tire.

Bob Greenwood - It was the awfulest mess you ever seen. I kicked myself for ever voting the first time. But it wasn't that long before I realized.

And then everybody was saying to me, what did you change your vote for? I said, listen, only a damn fool won't change his vote.

Interviewer - It's not like he's asking you to pay for the job, right? He's doing the job himself. Right.

Bob Greenwood - But, you know, if you don't, you'd be a fool if you found out you were wrong. I've done it on the Board of Health. If I voted and discovered I made a mistake, I'd go back and tell them I want to resend my vote.

I didn't care who liked it. If I thought I was wrong, and most times you get proven wrong, you know, I just went back and changed my vote. But that was an awful, I used to, every night, three nights a week, I'd get calls, two or three in the morning, and say, we're going to blow your head off.

All kinds of stories.

Interviewer - Wow, that bad, huh?

Bob Greenwood - Oh, oh, they got mad. They got my wife on the phone. It's dark, rotten talk.

And first I was going to the cops, and then I talked to a cop I knew, and he said, you really ought to tell them they could put a thing on your line.

Then I figured, you know, if these guys were so tough, a couple of times I talked to them, and I found out later they had another guy doing the calls for them. And I found out who the guy was.

Do you remember the cop that got fired in Lowell? They called the, he had a name.

Interviewer - He was a Lowell cop?

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, he was a Lowell cop, and he got fired. I forget what they called him. They had a nickname for him.

He was the guy that was calling me. And after he got fired from the police department, he was working in arrestment nights. And at 1.30, 2 o'clock in the morning, he'd go out to the pay station and give me a call.

Interviewer - And he was doing that as a favor for somebody else.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, yeah.

Interviewer - It wasn't his being. No. He was just doing it.

And I found out. Did he get paid for it? I don't know.

Bob Greenwood - I found out who he was doing it for, which I won't mention their name. It was two people, and both of them were on the Conservation Commission.

Interviewer - With you?

Bob Greenwood - Yep. Oh, I get it. And one guy is dead now, so I don't want to mention his name.

And the other one was a woman, and I won't mention her name.

Interviewer - Wow, you were harassed by your own fellow commissioners.

Bob Greenwood - And I know why they did it. The guy had a piece of land in town, and Miss Ronnie Perret was on the Board of Appeals. And he turned the land down.

He was one of the votes that turned the guy down, and it was all over that, that this guy on conservation owned this land and tried to get something done on it, but he needed a vote from the Board of Appeals, and Miss Perret voted against it. And that's, you know, bad blood there. And so he was going to get him one way or the other.

And that's all it about.

Interviewer - But how did you get involved?

Bob Greenwood - Well, I got involved because I was fighting for Perret with the commission, and he was one of the ones, him and this woman, that I was, they were the big pushers not to have the conservation do this.

Interviewer - Okay, so they were trying to get at him by discouraging you from making the vote.

Bob Greenwood - Yeah, sure, working me over. And, I mean, it got nasty. But when I found out who it was, I went and told him.

I said, I know who's, I done it at a meeting and had it put in the minutes. I told him at the end of the one meeting after I found out, I said, listen, I know who has been making the phone calls. And if they ever do it again, I ever get another phone call, they're going to end up in big trouble.

And I never got a call from that night after that.

Interviewer - So you got to the source. Yeah, in water. That's good. And all the threats.

Bob Greenwood - I know because when I was on the Board of Health a couple of times I had those kind of threats. We're going to get you. And all this baloney.

And it never bothered me, you know. But it bothered me when they would get my wife and talk.

Interviewer - Sure, don't want your family bothered.

Bob Greenwood - If they said something to me, I knew it was you. Most of those people that don't amount to nothing, if they're going to do it, they're not going to talk about it for six months. They're going to do it.

In fact, I was almost sure it was somebody that knew me because I usually sit in that couch in there watching the TV. And the guy said, I can pop you right between the eyes, right through that window while you're watching TV. And so I knew it was somebody I knew.

But I didn't know who until I finally found out. Wow. It didn't bother me.

Only the fact that when they got her on the phone, it's like sometimes they'd call in the daytime. You know, and that stuff. When I was on the Board of Health, I got a call once.

Well, I got a letter first. We had a health inspector and we fired him. And I was the one that wanted to fire him.

He wasn't doing his job. He was drinking on the job. The other two members of the board were out of town all day.

And I was in town. And I would check on him. And he wasn't doing his job.

So I went to a meeting and kept pushing it until I proved to the other two guys what he was doing. And so we fired him. And he sent a letter, stupid things.

He sends a letter here to my son who was only 12 years old with all kinds of things, rotten things. And he says, your old man, they're going to find him down in the brook with his head bashed in. And I got one, and the guy we hired to take his place got a letter similar.

And we gave them to the postal authorities. They didn't find nothing. We told them who it was.

And we knew who it was. He was a retired Navy guy. And she read the letter.

You see a lot of old Navy slang in it. And we told the postal guy. And, you know, they never done nothing.

We never heard anything.

Interviewer - Trying to get him on some kind of federal postal violation.

Bob Greenwood - I tried to get the letter back. I wanted to keep it. He wouldn't give it to me.

You know, he said, no, that's part of, maybe he was right, federal government. It's the government's stuff now. But they never done nothing.

Interviewer - I'm going to give you a break now, Bob. It's been great. I'm glad that the TV is the Chelmsford show, though, because it's being recorded too.

So thank you very much, Bob. Now I can shut this thing down.

Bob Greenwood - Okay, likewise.