Interviewer - Well, this is Fred Merriam. I'm here with Dennis Ready. And it's April 22, 2010.

And we're here at 16 Parkhurst Road at the Owl's Nest in the living room here. So, Dennis, you have so many different topics we could talk about. Sure.

I don't even know where to begin. Maybe you want to start? Just a little bit about your family and growing up?

Dennis Ready - I grew up here in Chelmsford on 9 Turnpike Road for many, many years. Until just recently, it was the first house on the right on Turnpike Road. A red cape for the last, I don't know, 45 years.

It was a white cape prior to that. I initially went to school at St. Peter's School in Lowell. In the fifth grade, I started going to school in Chelmsford.

I guess I'd like to start by talking about what life was like when I was like a preteen in Chelmsford. There were no cars on the road during the day. 129 was actually banked so that when you were going down on your bicycle, you could really go fast.

And you didn't have to worry about turning because the road was banked. Turnpike Road was dirt from just before the power lines up over the hill to Mill Road. Literally, if you walked into Page's Drugstore and you saw somebody you didn't know, you'd go, who's that?

Because you knew everybody that was around. The only men that were around during the day would be like your local shopkeeper, Strick, who ran Strick's Market where Century 21 Minute Man is now. And maybe a Roger Boyd who owned the Chevrolet dealership.

And he was the chairman of the board of selectmen at the time. And people like that, that you actually knew who they were. My next-door neighbor and that kind of thing.

Interviewer - Was that Dr. Gaieski at the time or was that before him?

Dennis Ready - That would be before Dr. Gaieski . Dr. Gaieski moved into the corner. I want to say late 50s, early 60s.

The Myricks were there before Dr. Gaieski and the Bedells were there before that. The Bedells actually sold that property and moved across the street to what is the town farm.

Interviewer - So they moved from 109 Turnpike to 110 across the road. Exactly. That's exactly right.

Dennis Ready - And when the Bedells lived there, they used to raise Shetland ponies. And as kids, we could go over and ride the ponies any time we wanted. They had two or three ponies there.

My brother Bernard was good friends with their son. And so he lived over there all the time riding on the ponies. As a matter of fact, I had a paper route.

And the person that did my paper route before me did it on horseback. He lived on Mill Road, where Turnpike comes into Mill Road, Cotrumpus. And he used to deliver the newspapers before I took it over.

And I guess my paper route was kind of where I really got involved with Chelmsford. My paper route ran from Turnpike Road, Mill Road, Billerica Road, part of Westford Street, up to like where 495 crosses, Chelmsford Street, Golden Cove. And it was 10 miles long.

So every day, I'd go off to my paper route. When I'd get home, people would have called in and said, would you ask Dennis to pick up my prescriptions at the drugstore? And so I used to have a bunch of things I'd pick up and deliver along with my newspapers.

And this was back in the day when the husbands worked. The wives were home all day. And they didn't have a cop.

There was only one cop in the family, and that went to work with the husband. So the wives were anxious to get the paper and read it before the husbands got home. And sometimes they needed, you know, I had one woman I used to deliver ginger ale to.

And other people, like I said, they used to deliver prescriptions and stuff like that.

Interviewer - So how would you carry a case of ginger ale?

Dennis Ready - Well, we don't need bottles. I had serious baskets on my bicycle, okay, because I had 110 newspapers to carry. Well, one of the interesting things historically, I guess, is that on my paper route was a place called the Rainbow Spa.

And it was a drinking establishment. And it was out on 129, okay, across from Elliott Street. And I used to go in there every day and deliver a newspaper in there.

And when I'd go in, most days, the board of selectmen would be sitting there having a beer. And at that time, there were three men on the board of selectmen. And Roger Boyd was one of them.

Smith was another one. And the third one changed by Edgar George, I think, and some different people. But I'd go in.

They'd immediately call me over to their table, buy me an orange or a Coke. And so they could each read one of my papers while I drank it. Without paying for it?

Right. Because, you know, they, you know, and so they each read one of my papers. And we just put it back, and I'd do it.

But the—so I was a fly on the wall for what was going on in Chelmsford at that time. And so I'm like 12 years old, and I'm listening to everything, every issue that's going on, and who's connected to who and who's fighting who. And so I grew up having quite a bit of knowledge of what was going on in the town.

And on Sundays, I used to sell newspapers at St. Mary's Church. I started that when—I told you I went to St. Peter's School and St. Peter's Church. They always sold all the Boston papers outside the church.

In Chelmsford, you know, you're lucky you could get a Boston paper. So I started selling newspapers at St. Mary's Church. And while the mass was going on, I'd deliver them, like, up North Road or up Westford Street, into the center, that kind of thing.

And one of the people on my paper who was on Fletcher Street was Bino Greenwood. And during the 40s, Bino ran the town. He was the head selectman, and if you wanted anything done in town, you went to Bino.

Well, by the time—now I'm into the 50s, late 50s, and Bino was kind of like I am today.

And on Sunday mornings, everybody used to come to his house to talk about politics or get his support for something, and I used to deliver his newspapers, and I'd get to sit there and listen to all of this kind of thing going on. So I had quite a background in what was happening in the town while I was a little kid.

And so, actually, in the Rainbow—for my Rainbow adventures, I decided someday I'm going to become the chairman of the board of selectmen. So one day I did become the chairman of the board of selectmen. So I'm coming home, and there was a little ego situation going on here.

It was like, boyhood goal reached. So I get home. I walk in the phone ring.

I go, hello. The voice goes, is this Dennis Ready? I go, yes.

Are you the chairman of the board of selectmen? Yes. Are you the a-hole in charge of potholes?

Yes, that's exactly who I am. So one of the things I learned, of course, was who was connected to who. So I got a big kick out of—through the years, I might be sitting at an elks function, and some guy is sitting there bad-mouthing an elected official, and it's the sister of the guy sitting next to him, and he doesn't know it.

And you just laugh over the whole thing. But generally, how I got started in politics was, I used to go to all the elections, go to the town hall, and Charlotte DeWolf was the town clerk at the time, and listen to the results come in and that kind of thing. And so after one election, I went down to Skip's, and I sat with Mary Long, who was the postmistress of the town, and the post office was, at that time, across from Century 21, where Fresh Chow and those things are.

It was in there. Interviewer - Sweetser building. It was Sweetser building.

Dennis Ready - Mrs. Sweetser was on the paper route. I used to deliver paper to Mrs. Sweetser every day. So Mary Long was the postmistress, and Eddie Krasnecki was with us, and he was the owner of the Newsweek.

Because I delivered Newsweeklies along with the Lowell Sons. Actually, I started to deliver Newsweeklies first,

and then I kept bugging the Lowell Son until they gave me a paper route. And so I'm sitting there with, and I'm about 21 at the time, I'm sitting there with Mary Long and Eddie Krasnecki, and they say to me, you know, you're a young man now.

You're really interested in politics and shops. Why don't you run for something? I said, what's a 21-year-old kid going to run for?

They said, run for sinking fund. What sinking fund? So they explained it to me.

Basically, it was a self-insurance that the town had put money into in case the town all burned down or whatever. It was in there for years, and there was a couple hundred thousand dollars in there. And it wasn't of any use anymore because everything was insured.

So I said, we've got to get rid of that. I got out of the town hall, and I said, I'd like papers for the sinking fund commission. So Charlotte gives you the papers.

At that time, I had to get, I think it was 382 signatures. It had to do with the percentage of the number of people that had voted in the previous election. So I go out, and I get the signatures.

And you can imagine, it's not easy to get 382 signatures. But I got them. I turned them in.

The Newsweekly comes out that week, and there I am on the front page with my picture. I'm running against Eustace Fiske. Eustace Fiske lives in the big white house in the Center, that Fiske house.

He's been on a post longer than I've been alive. And he's like everybody's insurance agent. Because, see, I wasn't smart enough to know that I shouldn't have asked for the out-expired two-year term of the guy that moved out of town that they were saying there's an opening on the sinking fund.

So I ran against him. And what was interesting, in those days, the town had just exploded. This is the mid-'60s.

And the population of the town just doubled in like 10 years. And at that time, there was something like 18 candidate sites. Because every neighborhood had a candidate site.

It had Hitching Post 1, Hitching Post 2, and Hitching Post 3. They all had a candidate site. They had Castlewood, and on and on and on.

Farms 1, Farms 2. So all these different neighborhoods had candidate sites. And the way they used to run candidate sites in those days was they'd have every candidate, starting with the board of selectmen, then school committee, planning board, etc., down to the sinking fund commission. Every candidate would give a three-minute speech. And then you could get questions from the audience. So I was the last person to speak.

I always got all the questions. It was eight people running for selectmen, eight people running for school committee, six people running for planning board, went all the way down the line and said, My opponent didn't come to any of these. So I got all the questions.

The first question, what is the sinking fund? What are they doing with the money? Where did it come from?

It went on and on and on. So what happened at the end is that Eustace beat me by 77 votes. There were 11 precincts in the town at the time.

And he won six of them and I won five of them. Wow, that was close. So you could imagine how well I was treated by the elected officials in town after that.

And so after that I became a campaign manager of selectmen. And at one point in time I was actually the campaign manager for the entire board. All five members, I had managed their campaign.

But some of my most fun campaigns were Bonnie Towle. Bonnie came to me and said, Will you manage my campaign? By then, at this time, I was really good at it.

So I was looking for challenges, you know. Bonnie was in her 20s, single, lived with her parents, belonged to no organizations, and no woman had ever been elected selectman in the town. So I said, wow, this is, I can't pass this up.

So then Bonnie got elected selectman. A year before that, two years before that, I was Joe Shanahan's campaign manager. Ran him on stickers, write-in vote.

And we crushed his opponent. So I had, you know, done every challenge I could take on, except elect a woman. And then I did that.

Then the next year I ran out of candidates, so I ran myself. But I guess, you know, in looking back at the town ov Chelmsford growing up in, and I do this at, you know, when the kids from Lowell come out to the historic society for a tour. One of the things I like to tell them is the witch story, okay.

And how I tell it is, I said, if you leave me with anything, I want you to leave me with one thing. Chelmsford's always been right. And he said, in 1696, when witches were being burnt at the stake in Salem, a woman, Sparks, who lived in the Barrett-Byam home, on that property, was arrested and taken to Boston.

And Chelmsford took up a collection, went to Boston, bailed her out and brought her home. That was the right thing to do. We always do the right thing in the long run.

And I really believe that. Chelmsford's a great community if you, a very intelligent community. And if you have the right thing presented in a proper way, the town will buy it.

And like one of the, one of the things I'm the proudest of that I've done is the sewers. I, back in the late 70s, the Sewer Commission didn't want soap. And they turned them down.

And town meeting had turned them down. And it would have cost a whopping like $20 million in 1963 when they turned it down. And I, in the 70s, I'm saying, well, you know, we're going to have to sewer someday, and it's going to cost a fortune, all right?

And we'd better get going on it before the federal and state monies dry out completely. So I got elected as a sewer commissioner. And the following year, I got a gentleman named Bert Siegel elected.

And we then had the majority. There was only three people on the Sewer Commission. We had the majority, and we then started moving towards sewering.

The following year, I got Jack Emerson to join me. We had, by the time Jack came on board, we had, we had signed up, I had gone to town meeting to get the money to get the thing started. And we hired Weston and Samson.

And we started the planning. Jack got on board. And Jack was great as far as moving through the planning stage.

And so we got the entire plan done, and then we started in construction in probably about 86. And I've got the shovel here in the closet of the groundbreaking for the sewer system. Silver plated?

Silver plated, yeah. Chrome, I guess, chrome plated. And one of the things I learned from all that process was that if you have, you know, what we call shovel ready projects, if you get the plans done and you have them on the shelf, when something comes along and you're ready, you can jump on the cot and get it.

So in the beginning, we got a lot of state funding. We got a lot of state grants for zero interest on borrowing money and that kind of thing. And we got some federal funds.

That, of course, all eventually dried up, but we at least got probably about half the project done with some federal and state aid. And so, you know, and now we're, I got invited, couldn't go because of my mother's funeral, but got invited to the groundbreaking of the last segment to have the town be 100% sewer. So, so I, you know, that's, you know, back in the early 80s, late 70s, and they're talking about finishing up in 2012.

That looks like a zip code to me. But I was jealous of Billerica and Tewksbury and places like that that were way ahead of us, like 10 years ahead of us in sewer. And the funny thing is, we caught up to them and then they stopped for a while because they couldn't afford it.

And we actually passed them and we'll be 100% sewer before Billerica or Tewksbury. And they stopped a long time before us. So that, you know, there's different things like that that they think back about.

And the town, when I was a little kid and today, I think the town of Chelmsford is about its people. And we have the smartest people. All you've got to do is ask for their help and they're there.

And so that's what I think, one of the things when I was a selector, one of the things I liked to do was go to the schools and talk to the kids. And I liked creating committees. Because there were so many talented people out there.

Interviewer - Study committees for...

Dennis Ready - Well, all kinds of committees. Like, for example, when Proposition 2.5 came out, the town could no longer afford Christmas lights. So I started a committee called the Holiday Decorating Committee.

And the purpose of that committee was to raise money to take care of decorating the town for the holidays. And, you know, the tree lighting ceremony at Christmastime, and it's usually the first Sunday in December. So that same committee?

That's that same committee. And when you create a committee, it's like having children. You always feel responsible for them, you know?

So I got it started and it was running fine. And then one day, maybe 10 years after I started it, the chairman comes in and says, we need money from the town. And they went, no, no, no, wait a minute.

You got to get us in. They started this committee so that you wouldn't be here looking for money from the town, that you would raise the money. So I got back involved, raised more money to try and get them going again, which they did.

And then they'd take it off from there. And it just got bigger and bigger. So you weren't going to let them fail.

That's right. Because they're like your child. So again, I formed a lot of different committees.

I formed one once called SMAC, School Municipal Administrative Consolidation Committee, and looked into things that we could do, that the town and the school could do together and save money. And we came up with basically quite a few things, the whole census thing, and the school was taking the census and the town was taking the census. So we combined that into one census, saved a lot of money there.

And, you know, automation of a lot of things over the years. Then, of course, cable TV arrived. Cable TV arrived in the early 80s.

I was on a motorcycle at the time. And remember it was Channel 43 at first. And we created a group called the Friends of Channel 43 to raise money for it.

And out of what everybody's calling the Old Town Hall now, we did a telethon. And so I'm emceeing it, and a call comes in and says, I'll give $100 if Dennis Ready will sing the God Bless America. That's fine, so I start singing it.

Another call comes in and says, I'll give $500 if he stops. And that's the last time I've ever sung publicly. Have you got any particular areas you'd like me to talk about?

Interviewer - Well, you started to mention a little bit about the town hall, and I know you were involved in the 1980s restoration because funding was allotted to move the town hall.

Dennis Ready - What happened is, back when I was on the Sewer Commission, we were meeting in the stair well in the back of the, that was our meeting room, the stair well. And the overcrowding was brutal in that town hall. And we had the Emerson house at the time.

Interviewer - I think 1965 was the peak of packing. Because that's when the police department moved out. That was the first reading for pressure.

Dennis Ready - But it kept growing. After the police moved out, we still added a purchasing agent and different things like that. So what happened is, the old high school, or the junior high at that time, and it had been used as a sixth grade prior to that.

But it really was the old high school. It was now the town offices. I went to high school.

It was the original town high school, built in 1917. I went to the, actually, it was 1916, I think it was, I went to the sixth grade there because the McFarlin School, which was on Wilson, was getting overcrowded. And so they borrowed a classroom from the high school.

There was a sidewalk that used to run down from the high school to the McFarlin. And so they borrowed a classroom, and I was in the sixth grade, actually, where the Board of Health is now, where Ernie Day, not Ernie Day, Day's offices, Richard Day. Ernie Day was the treasurer of the town at one time.

But Richard Day, Richard Day's office, I went to the sixth grade there. And then later on, it became, when what is now McCarthy opened up, that was the high school. And what is the town offices today became a junior high.

And the center school had opened up, so the elementary was at the center school and a few other centers, elementaries. But I can remember when it was all sixth grades, and I actually had an office across the street on Wilson Street. My wife was the vice principal of the school.

And I'm in there one day, and it's all sixth graders, and I said to one of them, you know, I went to sixth grade here. And they went, where did you go? What room were you in?

I went, that room right there. They went, you were in the resource room? I said, no, but I probably should have been.

But so anyway, one of the interesting things is when, on the border site, when we moved over to the town offices, as they're known today, because that was my old high school. I went there for three years, and then the fourth year was at what is now McCarthy. But so for three years, I was there in the high school and one year in the sixth grade.

And, you know, so like we're planning the thing, and I'm thinking, I took algebra here, you know, where we were putting the Selectman's room, where the Selectman's meeting room is today, was the study hall. And I still go into that building and still think about, oh, this is where I had U.S. history, this is where I had English, you know, that kind of thing. And so when we were moving from the old town hall to the town offices, I was packing up stuff at the old town hall.

And I ran across the minutes of a meeting of the Board of Selectman where they put together the rules and regulations of the use of the new town hall. So it was, we're back in 1879. Okay?

Minutes of a Selectman's meeting in 1879. There was a Brad Emerson on the board at the time. And the interesting part is that you could rent that town, when they first opened up, you could rent the town hall, the hall upstairs, till 3 o'clock in the morning with a liquor license for $5.

I would say to myself, man, if I ever rented this house till 3 o'clock in the morning with a liquor license, they'd be stringing me up. So the town, the town was a farming community. Okay?

And a grange hall type of community. They liked to potty. It wasn't so much a puritanical community like if you read Reverend Fiske's.

Maybe in 1655 it was, but by the 17th and 1800s, it was a farming community. And that's kind of one of the things I remember about growing up here was on my paper route, on any given day, I might milk a cow. I might feed chickens.

I might slaughter pigs. You know, just all those kinds of things. Because that's...

They were chores that people needed to have done. They were farmers. And like, well, for example, many a night after doing my paper route, I picked apples.

Chehenni's Orchard was where you'd call, you'd call the Golden Triangle today, Turnpike Road, Boerga Road, and Mill Road. That was Chehenni's Orchard. And I used to come in after my paper route and I'd pick drops.

These are all the things that fell on the ground. Well, because all the kids, the kids that were picking the apples got 75 cents a bushel for picking them off the trees going up a ladder. And they dropped a lot of apples.

I got 50 cents a bushel for picking them up off the ground. I could pick 10 times as many apples as they could. And when they were all done, they had to clean the tree.

It was just loaded, you know. And so in four hours, they might have picked eight bushels and I could pick eight bushels after they were done, you know. So there was a lot of interaction, a lot of interaction with all the people.

And when it was time to pick apples, they needed all the help they could get. And it was time to...

Interviewer - Round up the neighborhood kids.

Dennis Ready - Exactly, you know. And so you get to do and see a lot of that kind of stuff. And it really continued until probably I was in high school.

And then by then, I was working at Purity at the time. But the town really exploded in population in the 60s and 70s. It changed completely as far as...

It changed from a farming community. And when I talk about being able to talk to senior citizens and things like that, as a kid, I could talk to these people. And I used to hang around with Henry Erickson.

And Henry had the general store in the center, where Dennis McHugh is now. There was a porch on there. And it was a typical general store, you know, with the cracker barrel and the seats.

And I can remember sitting there talking to Henry. And Henry lived where Michael Sargent's office is now. And Henry used to sit there and tell me about all the things that happened.

In 1928, a guy got off the trolley right here in front of the store and shot a policeman. And, you know, you get all that.

Interviewer - That's where Officer Adams got shot. Right there, yeah.

Dennis Ready - And I get all that history from a guy that lived there, you know. Matter of fact, I started a little business cutting lawns, right? And I got some calling cards made up that said, Dennis Ready, Powell Moore, okay?

And I had them printed at Parkhurst Press. And the Parkhurst Press was upstairs above Dennis McHugh or above the grocery store, the variety store. And, you know, I still have some of those cards.

And I'm thinking, like, the historic value of them is the fact that the Parkhurst Press, you know, printed them. And I live in the Parkhurst estate, okay? And so that the, and that, you know, this house I live in now was built in 1804.

But there's been, the Parkhurst were here from 1656, right when they first settled here. And so this house has got a lot of history to it. It was like, it was a milk dairy farm at one time.

And it was over 200 acres of land.

Interviewer - Which direction did it go?

Dennis Ready - Basically all of what's Drum Hill. Towards Drum Hill. Yeah.

And a little bit across the street, but mostly it went that way. And actually Drum Hill was part of it at one time. And of course before Route 3.

Cut through the hill. I was, you know, when I was delivering papers, Route 3 was built. And it actually changed my paper route in the sense that my last customers were over on Bill Kilm Road, right?

And when they took the houses out and put Route 3 through, it changed how 129 went. I, like suddenly I had to go all the way across Route 3 and then back down the little road, which is now called, I think it's Roche Street. Because the Roches lived there.

They get cut off. Now the beginning of Mill Road was actually part of the River Road at one time. And so that all got changed.

I watched that get changed. I watched Route 495 come through when I was in high school. And those changed the town.

It was all part of, radically changed from a rural farming community to the suburbs that we are today with Route 3 and 495 coming in. At that same time, during that era, the building boom of all the houses going in happened. And if you look at the, the town had a half acre zoning requirement back in the 50s.

And then as the industry poured in, as housing poured in, they kept changing it to three quarter acre and then an acre. But, you know, like most of the development came in with the three quarter acres of bombs one and two and hitching posts and that kind of thing. So, you know, the town was changing very rapidly in those days.

And I enjoyed it in the sense that I was, when I was a young man in high school, all these new women kept moving into town. Okay, so, you know, it's like the new guys didn't discover them. So, you know, we got to discover them all as they came into town.

And so, you know, it's always been a developing, changing community from what I've seen, what I got to see. What's interesting is, is like what we call the Golden Triangle, okay. That was zoned industrial, not to attract industry to town, but to stop developing.

Campanelli and Cady had developed farms one and farms two. And farms three was going to be, was going to be that triangle. So the town re-zoned it industrial.

And then it just kind of sat. And then one day industry, when 495 came through, three was the industry went, that's not a bad location. And bang, it developed the industry and it developed big time.

And it's interesting because like back in the, let's say, 70s, you wouldn't see a selectman cutting a ribbon for any business opening. Town was very, wanted to remain residential. And then even when I was a selectman in the early 80s, you know, you didn't make a big deal on the industry because people were not happy with industry coming into town.

They were not happy because of the traffic that was drowning in it.

Interviewer - Just this week they formed an economic development committee and came up with a logo. Exactly.

Dennis Ready - You know, well, times change. And by the end of the time I was a selectman, you did go, I did cut a lot of ribbons and that kind of thing, you know. And let's see what other things.

I was all, I sat on the Conservation Commission for a while. And that was very interesting. I walked all the brooks and streams in this town.

In fact, that's how I got my wife to let me run for selectman. I said to her, listen, if I run for selectman, then the town engineer will be walking this brook instead of me when I get this done. And so she bought it, put it in.

Still turned into about 40 hours a week. But I had some interesting experiences on conservation. Get to learn a lot about, even though I grew up here and I tromped through the brooks and streams as a kid, I didn't look at them the same way, you know.

I wasn't, as a kid, you know, thinking about...

Interviewer - We're exploring, it's the wild.

Dennis Ready - Right, exactly. And some interesting things happened. I can remember one day sitting on the board.

This engineer comes in. They were proposing the development off Golden Cove. And all those houses that are off Golden Cove.

And there was nothing there except Newfield was there. But that was it. So he's in front of me and he's presenting this thing.

And I go, excuse me, but that brook doesn't run that way. Okay? He goes, yeah, it does.

I go, oh, look, the elevation here is like 110 feet. The elevation there is 106 feet. Water goes downhill.

Goes downhill. He's got it coming uphill, right? And he's going...

I said, hey, I tromped it as a kid. I know which way that brook runs. I fished in it.

So, you know, sure enough, I was right. But they designed it somewhere in Boston and then never even actually walked the land themselves. The funniest thing I ever had happen on the Conservation Commission was this woman is filling in a wetland.

She's got a bulldozer in her back. Yeah. So I knock on the door and she answers the door and I say, hi, I'm Dennis Ready from the Conservation Commission.

And you can't fill in the wetland. She goes, we never fill in a wetland. That's a swamp.

So that was an interesting thing. Like I say, it was... Like, for example, when I was a kid growing up, we didn't have a lot of organized sports.

In fact, I was on the first baseball team, little league teams that were formed. And they actually played behind the Western School. But in the summer, our daily life would be like there was Sandlot ballgames going on at 10 o'clock in the morning, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, and 6 o'clock and 7 o'clock at 2 o'clock.

And the... You basically shut off the field and pick two captains and they each picked the kids and there were 18 kids got to play. And so generally in the morning, the little kids got to play because you're lucky to get 18 people together.

In the afternoon, it was more the 13 or 14-year-olds. And at night, it ran up to 19 years old. So you really got a nice cross-section.

When I was 12 years old, I got to play baseball with 18-year-olds.

Interviewer - So it's almost like graduating when you go to a later game.

Dennis Ready - Exactly. Well, in this day and age, of course, it's really only school that separates you by age. In the organized sports, everybody has to be 7, 8 or 9 in this league and 10, 11, 12 and that kind of thing.

So Boy Scouts is the only organization that kind of keeps a wider age range together. And I think it's good. I mean, that's how you get to know people.

I mean, when I was 19, there was a 12-year-old. I was teaching how to play baseball. And so that kind of...

I saw that kind of disappear during my childhood, so to speak, because organized little league came along and I went and played that. And that was just night games, and we still played some afternoon games. But generally, I had my newspaper route, so I couldn't do that.

You get to know kids from a pretty good distance because they'd come and play ball. And so, like, the Lanes, and Jim Lane is on the planning board today. Well, his father was a good friend of mine growing up, and his grandfather's cow was one of the ones I used to milk periodically.

So they lived up by Elliott Street on Route 129. And so they'd come all the way down to, like, what little league feels today. It was a high school then, so we played behind what's now the town office until we got thrown off or something.

Then we'd go play in a field somewhere. One of the things I just kept thinking about was Halloween. I don't think I ever went trick-or-treating.

When I was at the trick-or-treating age, the school used to run a Halloween party, and that's what we did on Halloween. We went to the Halloween party, okay, at what is now the senior center on Wilson Street, which was the elementary school. That's where they held it, the cafeteria.

Oh, I've got to tell you one thing. I told you there was a sidewalk that came down the hill from the high school to the elementary school. Well, on rainy days, you'd go out to the playground, and the kids used to build dams.

The water would be coming down the hill, and they'd try and dam it up. The eighth graders would have the lowest dam, the biggest, seventh graders next, all the way up to the first grader. Then when the bell rang, the first graders would break their dam and see if they could break the second grader's dam with the water from their dam.

It went on and on and on. When the eighth graders broke their dam, it flooded the cafeteria. One of the...

On Chelmsford Street, where the softball field is, well, that was kind of swampy back then, in those days. It was like the back end of the playground, but it wasn't. It was pretty wet.

Interviewer - It's okay because it was a swamp, so they could fill it in. That's right.

Dennis Ready - Well, back then, yeah, they used to fill in things like that. The town probably had been the worst offender of anything like that. When you think, the town has never followed its own rules.

I'll give you the latest example. When they built the library, expanding the library, did they set back 45 feet from the road? No, they tore half the road up so they could construct the building.

They had to put it back, and that building abuts the road. But it's the town. They do what they want.

There's just enough room for a sidewalk there. Right. It's funny how issues change over the years.

One of the big issues in the late 70s was drainage. Farms 1 was constantly flooding out.

Interviewer - It's funny you mention that. We lived in Farms 1. I was just looking at some of my old pictures.

I have some pictures of down the road when it was about a foot deep and a kid riding his bike through it. Then there was a group. There was a backhoe, and he was trying to dredge the brook.

It was frozen, covered with snow and ice. Then I got another picture of a fire truck, or maybe that was a newspaper picture, a fire truck getting hauled out. He got trapped in there, hauled out by a dozer.

Same brook.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. We had a lot of flooding problems. We started allocating $100,000 a year towards drainage, which doesn't sound like a lot, but he kept picking at it.

Eventually, it's kind of gone away as a major problem.

Interviewer - That brook was willow trees. People planted willows next to it.

Dennis Ready - Well, see, part of the thing is willows were a major problem because when the town was exploding, they were just mowing down every tree and building houses. Well, these people want, the people who bought the houses, they wanted trees that grew fast. Willows grow fast.

So that's why there's so many willows got planted. And they like water, too. They do like water, too.

And part of the reason, like, for example, Farms 1 was all slabs was it was wet. You couldn't put a cellar in there. And, you know, I'll give you another story about Conservation Commission.

I got duped on. Finnegan came in to develop driftwood and those streets off of Lock Road. And, of course, the rule of conservation was zero increase in the amount of flow that leaves property and the speed at which it leaves the property.

So when you were done building, you had to at least do a zero, zero. So they came in with a new concept. And that was infiltration ditches on each side of the road.

So they went down like 10 feet, put in crush rock, so the water would get absorbed. And so all the paving that they did, the streets that they put in, wouldn't cause the water to increase the amount of water that left the property at the speed at which it left. You know, that sounded feasible.

Like an invisible soil. Right. So we let it go in.

What happened, though, was the water would go into the infiltration ditches under the road. Frost thieves would come up and wreck the road. Well, we, the town, then had to start putting curbings in.

Okay. Which increased the rate of flow out there and, you know, caused problems downstream. And, you know, that's why I'm a big proponent of having some experience on boards.

Like, right now, the board of site management has, like, nobody with any experience. The longest member's been on two years. And that hurts in some ways, you know.

And the town manager's failing them. You need people to remember back when things happened and said, hey, wait a minute. Let's look at this a little differently.

And, you know, I mean, I served with some people. I served with Claude Harvey. Claude Harvey was on boards for 50 years.

And Claude would save us periodically from doing something stupid, you know. He'd go, oh, we're going to do this. And you go, no, you don't want to do that.

He's lying. He tells a story. You go, okay.

So, you know, it's interesting. And I served on the board of site management for 12 years. Watching the town.

Like, I was on the board when we went to the current form of government, which is town manager, town meeting members. It was called the Charter Commission? Did that study?

Yeah, it was the Charter Commission. And it was interesting that I, like, how different the board of site management was from when I first joined it to when I left. When I left, it was much like it is today, okay.

But when I first joined it, the meetings, we, the board of site management ran the town. There was no town manager, okay. You had an administrative assistant who did the bidding of the board, but had no power.

Norm Peterman? Well, Norm Peterman, yeah. Norm Peterman was on when I first got on.

In fact, they ran into Norm Peterman two weeks ago. He's temporarily filling in in Kingsborough. But, like, before Norm was Haynes, Evelyn Haynes, and Arthur Colman was before her.

And, you know, they used to kind of run the town, but only, but didn't have the power to run it, okay. And it was obvious in my, as I sat on the board, that, you know, you had to get the selectment out of the day-to-day running of the things, okay. And one of the, I said, I used to get called on when I was chairman.

So-and-so down here thinks he's ahead of the DPW. Okay, let's go down and throw a selectment out, because you can't run this. It's not your job.

Get out, okay. But the only time you've got any power is when you're sitting on the, at a board meeting. And so, so we needed, we needed that change, okay.

But no, you know, change doesn't take place easily. And, and, and like even the charter thing, as I sat down and looked at it, I said, no, there's like 50 things wrong with it, all right. But it's better than what we've got now, and we can always modify those things.

And we have, okay. I mean, like the pendulum always swings back and forth. Like one of the things they did was, suddenly the selectmen couldn't appoint anybody, okay.

And I always felt selectmen shouldn't have the ability to appoint committees that are advising them, okay. They can't do that now. We've changed that since.

I saw that from day one. There were some other, other flaws in the initial charter. For example, state law says a precinct can only hold 4,000 individuals, men, women, and children.

We have nine precincts, okay. That means if this town goes to 36,001 people... You've got another precinct.

Yeah, but you can't just add a precinct. There's no language in the charter to handle it, okay. It says, the town will be divided up into nine precincts, okay.

Well, the state says no it won't, okay. Or the board of selectmen actually, the board of selectmen... Two conflicting rules.

Right, the board of selectmen could change it anytime they want. But what happens is if you put a 10th precinct there, you blow the charter out of the water. So we've fixed that too.

So, you know, there's little things like that, that sometimes you find that you've got to support something that you know is flawed, but it's better than what you have and you can fix it later, okay. And politically, you know, it sounds weird, but when you've got a group that spent months and months putting this together and love it, okay, you don't want to be criticizing because it's barely passed. I mean, it only passed by like 70 votes.

And, you know, Chelmsford's always been a town, you know, like I say, I grew up here and there's a pride in this community and it's always been that way. That when you say to someone where you're from and they say Chelmsford, they say it with their chest expanding versus when they say Borrega, it's kind of contracting, you know. Because, you know, and the funny thing is the strength of this community is its people, right, and the quality of life.

And so obviously from this room, you look around this room, I have plenty of Chelmsford memorabilia in the case over there. Some models. That chair came from the...

350th. 350th. There's only about 14 of those, I think.

We have one. Do you? Yeah.

So, you know, I belong to the Chelmsford High School Alumni Association.

Interviewer - I bet you're a Hall of Famer.

Dennis Ready - I am. Yes. I am in the Hall of Fame.

My brother Bernard is.

Interviewer - We were there for his induction.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. And I wasn't. I was in the hospital, I think, at the time.

But, you know, it's just a great town. I think some of the things that was interesting, like we were talking the other night, at your house actually, about Ruby and Rose's Bakery, right? Right in the center where the old millhouse is called on, it was a bakery.

Ruby and Rose ran it. And when I was a kid, I could go in there, and I think it was for a dime, but for a dime I could get a donut, okay? And it came fresh off, right out of the oven, a nice fresh donut, and they would let me put my own jelly in it, okay?

And I could center the nozzle of that jelly dispenser right in the middle of that donut, and I could put about three pounds of jelly in that donut, okay? And I'll never, I mean, as long as I live, I will never forget the taste of a three-pound jelly donut, okay? Freshly baked out of the oven.

And, you know, they were there for years and years and years. And, you know, it's like, I'm old enough to remember what the center looked like back when Purity was where the gift shop is, where my friend McCormick's house was where Care Cleaners is today. That's called the Ark?

No, the next house, where the gas station is, was where the Ark was, okay? And Ruby and Rose used to live in the Ark. And actually, my aunt lived in the Ark for a while.

It was broken up into apartments, and she lived in one of the apartments. She's only three years older than me. So right after she got married, she moved into the Ark.

And, you know, because I remember when the Scoboria house was next to it, it used to be called the Pink House, before the expansion of the library. Watched that get cut in half and moved up the street. So a lot of houses, when 495 went through, okay, Chelmsford Street had houses all the way down Chelmsford Street from the center to Lowell, okay?

And so a lot of those houses got moved out of there when 495 went through. And they got moved to different places, like Manahan Street that we're talking about, at this town meeting, putting in veterans housing. A lot of those houses came from Golden Cove and Chelmsford Street.

At the intersection of Chelmsford Street and Golden Cove, if you were coming towards Chelmsford and you hit that intersection, and you're right on the other side, Hogan had a nursery, you know, retail nursery store. Across the street right now, there's a Red Brick House. There used to be another Red Brick House right beside it, but it's pretty identical to it.

And, you know, where they, across from, next to Duncan Dunn, there's a Red Brick apartment building. Okay, well, there was buildings all the way from that right down to Golden Cove, and all of those houses got moved around town. When the industry went into 129, a lot of those houses got moved.

One of them is behind here, behind my house, that came from like where Apollo went in, in that area. I forget what the name of the company is in there right now. But, you know, it's kind of fun when you're sitting around talking and you're talking about places that don't exist anymore, and you're referring to them, you know, like you say, well, go down to Skip's, or go over to Purity, you know, and these places.

And some of them go back quite a ways, and if you haven't been in town your whole life, you don't, absolutely right.

Interviewer - Your reference points have changed.

Dennis Ready - Right, like the student-maker dealership. The Chevy, the Chevy dealership. The Chevy dealership was Boyd Chevrolet.

Interviewer - Well, when we moved in town, he was on Route 110, and he used to store his cars where the softball fields are now. That's right.

Dennis Ready - And he, every year, when the new cars came out, he used to give out hot dogs and coffee and hot chocolate and everything, and the whole town would come out and look at the new cars. I mean, everybody was there, kids included. My father bought a few Chevys off him in that time, right, Frank?

And in the mid-50s, he was Mr. Chompster.

Interviewer - He was very active on the Terry Centennial.

Dennis Ready - Yep, he was. He was the chairman of the voters' election at the time. He was only a three-man board then.

His sister, Shirley Boyd, actually won the contest of drawing the logo, I want to say, for the 300th. But my father actually got, it was my father's drawing that got put on the cover because his was too lacy-like, and they couldn't print it. And my father had entered it, and they picked his to be the actual one they printed.

And I watched him, the parade. It was with the Boy Scouts. Troop 212, and we had a Corked Bridge, okay?

And we rode on a float with the Corked Bridge we built. And the parades back in those days, we always, after every parade, you'd go back behind the town hall and get a hoodzie, okay, and some soda. And the soda was generally donated by Chompster Ginger Ale.

And the Chompster Ginger Ale was a place I could go in and get a free ginger ale any time I wanted. You knew people.

Interviewer - You had connections.

Dennis Ready - No. It's like going to Budweiser or Merrimack today. You can go in, take a tour, get a beer.

Chompster Ginger Ale, if you came in and toured their place, you got a ginger ale. And my brother was instrumental in helping to save the name, at least, that's called Ginger Ale Park and the part of the buildings down front.

Interviewer - I think it was the arch over the building that was on the Littleton Road. It was over the front door.

Dennis Ready - I don't know what, it's like the Keystone. Keystone, yeah, a big place, Keystone. So, you know, I can remember, I used to, the only time I went by it was I had some friends living up on Littleton Road that I used to go over and play marbles with.

And back in those days, everybody had a bag of marbles, and you went and played. And basically it was like gambling in the sense that you dug a hole in the ground with your heel, spin around, and then you drew a circle around that and you used to shoot the marbles. And if you got it in the thing, you won the marbles and that kind of thing.

And I even had Aggies, which were clay marbles that dated back, I don't know how far. And didn't think much of it at the time. I wish I had them today.

But in that time, where the gift store is now, was a store called the Ben Franklin. And it was like one of those dollar stores, that kind of store. So that was before Purity?

Yeah, no, Purity had moved out. Oh, that was after Purity. Yeah, Purity had moved up the street to where CBS is now on Boston Road.

That building that CBS is in.

Interviewer - It's in the Purity Plaza parking lot. Right. Next to Friendly's.

Dennis Ready - Right, right.

Interviewer - That was Purity.

Dennis Ready - Oh. And the backstop wasn't built then. Was it Sill Fields in back?

No, it was Swamp. It was, it fell off. And it was much like, it was more like the land on the other side of Harrington's.

Interviewer - Okay, like brushy lowlands.

Dennis Ready - Now, before Purity built there, you used to be able to go in there and get garden snakes by the thousands. They were just all over the place. I mean, we'd go up there hunting garden snakes at times.

Remember, my good friend lived right in the center, McCormick. And so this was across the street from his house. And Page's drugstore was, well, you know where the, on Upholstery Place is?

Mike's, Michael's Upholstery. Yeah, that was Harrington's Beer and Wine. And then the next building, which is now the, the, yeah, the fish restaurant.

Fishbones. Fishbones. Fishbones is like two pieces.

If you're facing it, the left piece started off as Page's drugstore. Oh, okay. Then Page built the second part and moved the drugstore to the second part.

And Lowell 5 went into the first part. I think I remember when Lowell 5 was there. And then Page's then moved up to...

Interviewer - The bigger building where Purity lived. Where Purity lived, yeah. And then it got bought up by CVS.

Actually, Best Buy was there for a while on one side of that building. The older Best Buy. I'm trying to think.

Because I remember shopping there. There was a Ritz camera and Page's on the left side of the building. And on the friendly side, it was a Best Buy a long time ago.

Dennis Ready - Oh, yeah. Lowell 5 was on the front and that was on the back.

Interviewer - Yeah, okay, yes.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, right. It was only on the friendly side. They had jewelry, electronics, cameras.

Yeah, yeah. And, of course, Harrington's started and was in the center. Then moved to where...

Between where Marshalls and Stop and Save is now. And then moved to where it is now.

Interviewer - You know, it's funny you mention the progression of Page's because this afternoon, the Economic Development Committee had asked me to take some pictures in Fishbones and Bainbridge sites. And I took both halves of Fishbones and then I took a long shot of the whole thing. Yeah.

And I was just wondering today, believe it or not, just a couple of hours ago, I was wondering why it looked like it was two storefronts. And you just answered my question. Exactly. Dennis Ready - You didn't even ask the question and you answered it. Yeah, you know, it's funny. For example, if you take Dennis McHugh's building.

Which one's that now? That's on the corner. Oh, McHugh, Parker's store.

Right. Interviewer - It used to be in Erickson's Corner.

Dennis Ready - Right. It's still Erickson's Corner.

Interviewer - By the way, you mentioned Henry Erickson. Yeah. My wife knew him briefly when he was still running the antique store.

But I have a taped interview with him. He's one of the people who's, the illustrious group that you're now joining. Oh, so far.

Dennis Ready - He's interesting. It is interesting. Yeah, because he went back a long way.

And like I say, part of the difference in the times was...

Interviewer - I have one more question over on the tapes. I did an interview with Bob Greenwood. You mentioned Vino Greenwood?

Yeah, Vino, yeah. Vino, it was his... Vino.

Dennis Ready - Okay.

Interviewer - And he was the... He did a lot of sewer work. So when you were doing initial sewer, he was your man.

Right there down by Back Skips. He had pipes. That's right.

Storage.

Dennis Ready - Back Skips? Which Skips? I have a record from Skips, by the way.

Okay. That the Lions Club was selling.

Interviewer - And Bob Morris, not to be confused with Bob Morris, has the bottle in his backyard. His daughter bought it for him.

Dennis Ready - All right.

Interviewer - He's taking good care of it.

Dennis Ready - Good, good. We could have had that at the Circus Society.

Interviewer - Yes, they wanted us to take it.

Dennis Ready - But yeah, like when I was growing up, there was another traveling rhino. Right, that's Wilson's... There used to be auctions there.

Every week there'd be an auction. I remember going there as a little kid, and I remember there was a set of harnesses for like a team of horses or something like that. Got no bids.

And the auctioneer said to me, kid, I'll give you a buck if you take it away. So I ended up with a horse harness that I took away. And I used to go to those auctions all the time.

And...

Interviewer - Do you remember any of the auctioneers? No. Brad Harrison was an auctioneer.

Dennis Ready - No, I don't think he was in town, people. Okay. Brad, I mean, I knew Brad as an adult before I saw him auctioning things.

Phil Curry was another... Phil Curry was a friend of mine. And in fact, one of the things he did, in about 1954, I think it was, maybe 53, my family was on the front page of the Newsweekly going to Easter Sunday Mass.

So there's a family, my mother and father, and three kids, four kids, the four of us, and all dressed up for Easter. And he used to keep that displayed in his place. Because he's selling it at all of those weeklies and things like that.

But I don't know... Well, actually, Phil Curry... Phil Curry grew up on North Road, okay?

Right where 495 Overpass goes. Okay? And they moved his house up off of Dalton Road on Skyland Drive.

And so he was one of the people's displays.

Interviewer - That's interesting because at number 45, I think it was Nancy Clark's house, there was a cottage in back of her house and that was moved to the other side of 495. It's a red house right next to 495. And there was another house that was moved down and around the corner on Dalton Road.

And this is the third house, I guess, that was moved to 495.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, the brides that were there, too. You'd be surprised how many houses got moved around town certainly through Routes 3 and 495 and then just other upgrades like the Scoboria house. And the Fisk House Barn.

Interviewer - Yes, yeah. Yeah, that wasn't moved down the street. That was loaded in a container.

Dennis Ready - Right.

Interviewer - And stored for a year in a dump truck.

Dennis Ready - But, you know, in fact, across the street from this house is a piece of this house that used to be a wing off the inside. It's a house across the street. They just tore it down, Fletcher Street, where the veterinarian's place is.

It's my neighbor across the street. Okay. That other piece of that house they tore down?

He told me that was a piece of the Emerson house. That's exactly right. Yeah.

Interviewer - And I remember seeing it. I remember watching it move. There was something about it.

They wanted to raise it up, make a second story, and something happened and they couldn't use it. So they donated it. They gave it to Dr. Gruber for his offices.

Dennis Ready - And, you know, like where the Lowell 5 is now on Fletcher Street is where Bino Greenwood lived. His house was there. Oh, okay.

I used to tell you I'd go in and he was right down at the end of the other pocket.

Interviewer - Because he used to walk... His business was across Fletcher Street. I believe he used to work for the Emersons all over the fields.

He did a lot of work for the Emersons. Yeah, probably. And the Emerson property went to the other side of Fletcher Street.

Dennis Ready - Yeah.

Interviewer - So maybe he was using that property for his business later years.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. Well, there were... At the end of that property where the buildings are now, where the little peach used to be, you know...

Interviewer - That was all part of the farm.

Dennis Ready - Right. Well, but there were actually houses there when I was a paperboy.

Interviewer - Okay. Well, we got pictures of the Twin Houses just before they were demolished. The what houses?

The Twin Houses. I think it was 21 and 23 Fletcher. Oh, okay.

And then there were two other houses and one of them we have pictures of in Central Square. It was next to the car shop or right in the... Maybe where the car shop is today.

And it's a very distinctive house. It's a very old house. That was one of the other ones.

And you mentioned that Bino lived in one of those... It may be one of those four houses that I have pictures of.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, probably. Yeah. Probably did.

And of course there were houses from Fletcher Street towards the center where the bank is. There was a couple of houses...

Interviewer - House on the corner that got torn down. Huh? House on the corner where the bank is got torn down.

Dennis Ready - It was a white house with a porch on it if I remember it. And I think the fire chief lived there one time. And I'm sure you've seen pictures of the old St. Mary's. Yes. The mission. It was the mission.

And there was a colonial building that was the rectory beside that as well. In fact, I just talked to the new pastor at St. Mary's last week. And I said to him, you really ought to get going and do some fundraising.

St. Mary's really should have a hall. One of my complaints when I was... I was chairman of the Boy Scout troop, the St. Mary's Boy Scouts. And they'd have to keep throwing us out of our meeting place because the CCD had to meet or something else. And I'm saying, you know, if you'd get off your duff and raise some money, you could build a hall and some classrooms and the Boy Scouts would be thrown out on the street all of them.

Interviewer - Looks like St. John's beat them to the punch because they have a new hall over there. Yeah. North Charleston.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. So this past the city... Because St. Mary's...

Technically, it's like the richest parish in the archdiocese. There's like 4,000 families in that parish. And, you know, they have, when I say the richest as far as average income for the parishioners.

The St. Mary's church that's there now was totally paid for before they stuck the first shovel on the ground. That's how fast the money came in.

Interviewer - With that many people, the old church must have been a bit overcrowded.

Dennis Ready - It was. It was. You know, they were doing multi-masses, you know, a lot more masses so they could handle the crowd.

This is good for the paperboy. And I did make a lot of money as a paperboy there. In the sense...

Did you sell them the papers on the way out?

Interviewer - Well, what happens is... They were going home.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, papers were... At that time, newspapers were $0.20. Seats in the church were $0.25. So everybody had quarters. So they'd all come out and give me a quarter for the paper.

Because they had quarters. Exactly.

Interviewer - Good strategy.

Dennis Ready - When the papers went to $0.25, it dried way up. I got rid of it by then. But yeah, it's like...

I can remember the farmhouse that was on Billerica Road before the center school went in there. What was that like? Did it have a big barn?

Was there orchards or fields? It was... The house was actually set back quite a ways, alright?

Like... Like almost... Almost where the school is now.

Yeah, that's pretty far back. Yeah, I mean, like, that's how far back the house was. It had a house and a barn.

And they... And just hay fields. I don't remember anything...

I think they had chickens or something like that. You know, so you didn't get to... You didn't see a lot of animals and stuff floating around there.

The... But it seems like... Century 21 Landmark, that building, that building was built in 1765.

But it was 1811 when it was moved to where it is today. It used to be on Turnpike Road. And I don't know where, but somewhere in the books it said something like 500 rods past the brook.

Got it? Now, I figure the rods like 15 feet or something, so... It was, you know, like...

Quite a ways.

Interviewer - So you take your car probably with your odometer?

Dennis Ready - Maybe. Try to figure it out. The figure was, you know, somewhere...

Interviewer - So was that south? South on Turnpike?

Dennis Ready - Yes, yes. Like, maybe where the Elks original building was. Somewhere like that.

And, you know, the history of that building is very interesting. You see that the Unitarian Church and the Episcopal Church fought over it for years.

Interviewer - I didn't hear about that. I knew the Episcopal Church had their initial meetings. Right.

And then it became their parsonage.

Dennis Ready - Right. But before that, originally it was the Unitarian Church.

Interviewer - Was it a noon house for the Unitarian Church? Is that what its function was? Because they used to have a long service, a long day on Sunday.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, I don't know.

Interviewer - How else are they going to meet then?

Dennis Ready - Yeah, I don't know. I don't think so. I think it was like the minister's house.

And, you know, somehow a dispute came up over it for some reason. I don't know why. But there's some history there that's interesting.

And, you know, along Chapel Street, where Papageno's is and that kind of stuff, that was all houses on my paper route. And Mrs. Sweetser, I told you, used to deliver her paper. So, you know, it's like, I mean, I grew up watching Charleston change constantly.

Interviewer - Mrs. Sweetser lived in one of the houses that she built up with Papageno's MC.

Dennis Ready - No, she lived in the house that Michael Sizer just restored.

Interviewer - Oh, that Erickson lived in later. She was there before Henry Erickson?

Dennis Ready - No, Henry Emerson lived with her.

Interviewer - Oh, you're talking about the Emerson house across the road.

Dennis Ready - Right.

Interviewer - That was Mrs. Sweetser's house. She was in the real estate office for many years.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. What happened is, she donated it to, I want to say, the Historic Society. And the Historic Society sold it to Brad Emerson.

And he opened his office. Interesting. Didn't know that.

And, yeah, I mean, it's like I can remember you know, her coming home and paying me and the paper and the side door that you use today to go in and out of it. And, well, she owned the Sweetser building. But, yeah, so she lived directly across the street from Henry.

And she was, her husband was the treasurer of the town. One of the interesting things is, I used to do a radio show on Sundays called The Housewife. And every week I would come up with a landmine that people would call in and guess the clues I'd give.

And, of course, the clues I'd give would be, you know, I might say built in 1804. Okay? You know, that kind of thing.

But, the thing is, like, who lived there and what they did were most of the clues. In Chelmsford, I got a ton of places to go, in fact. You know, because the people that lived in, like, the bottom of the house, the first lawyer in Chelmsford lived there. You know, you know, John Hancock's grandmother lived there. That kind of thing. So you had all these different interesting things.

When you go to Billerica, their library, and research their historic housing, it's like getting a listing and a real estate on how many fireplaces, how many rooms, how many square feet. Nothing about anybody that lived there. And Chelmsford is just loaded with history.

You know, I mean, from, you know, Simeon Spaulding and he lived in what some people call the gingerbread house, but the, I think it's syndicate house is its actual name. And, so, but there's so many interesting people that lived in these places that it was so easy to give them clues. And, in other towns, not easy at all.

And I don't know whether we had better historians than they did. Well, we had Jane Drury. Jane did a lot.

She did a lot of research. Because what Jane, Jane used to do is, is she'd, when she researched a house, she'd also research the people that owned it, the deeds, and so that's how she connected. She did a lot of interviews too.

She connected.

Interviewer - She had Margaret Mills and some other backup information too. But I think going and talking to people was her strength. She really liked that part of it.

Dennis Ready - She was the person I called when somebody stumped me. They'd call me up. Like, when my wife taught sixth grade at the Biden School, I used to make up trivia questions for the kids to get asked.

And, and so, she'd give them the trivia questions and they'd research and they'd go to the town hall and find out all these things and come back. And I'd go to the town hall and Mary St. Lynn would say to me, you think you know so much about the town? I'd go, yeah.

She'd go, what was Stedman Street's name before it was Stedman Street? I'd go, Lovers Lane. How do you know these stuff?

Well, because I researched it and I made up the questions. So then at the end of the year though, the kids used to get to ask me questions. All right?

And, and one question they asked me that I could not find the answer to, I had to call Jane, was, what were the measurements of the second meeting house? And, I'm going, wow, I haven't got a clue. And it was like, I called Jane.

Jane goes, 30 cubits by 40 cubits by 50 cubits. Okay. And, but the one that really got me was, John Erickson says to me one day, the town seal.

Do you know when that first came into existence and was used? So I'm going, well, it certainly had to be after 1859 because that's when the monument went up. Okay.

So they couldn't have the seal with a monument on it before then. And, and I'm saying, well, it had to be before 55 because we had that, that then I'm sure. So I call up Jane.

I say, Jane, when did the town seal come into existence? And I swear to God, she said off the top of her head, it was Article 22 of the town meeting in 1911. Okay, thanks.

You know, I mean, she had some of that kind of stuff. Down pat. I really enjoyed talking to her all these years.

And, you know, it's those kind of people that saved history for us, you know. But I found what the young kids are more interested in is things like that used to be a Chevrolet, a Chevrolet dealership. That used to be a Studebaker dealership.

That used to be, you know, that kind of thing. They find that amazing. The different uses.

Interviewer - Part of the fun is finding old pictures like Mary St. Hilaire was another one of my victims and some of my interviewees. And she was telling me about an orchard farm that was where the Eastgate Plaza is now. And in the collection over at the Historic Society, lo and behold, I find a picture of that place.

Dennis Ready - Now, the Oxbow, you must have pictures of the old Oxbow.

Interviewer - Yeah, it's an apartment building near the Carriage House. Yeah, yeah. There's Carriage House and an Oxbow.

Is that the other apartment building? I believe we have a picture of that somewhere.

Dennis Ready - you know, it's like when I was growing up, Chelsea was quite rural.

Interviewer - In fact, I think we have a picture of the inside of it. It was sort of a restaurant tea room thing. Yeah.

Restaurant panel walls. I think we have a picture of the inside.

Dennis Ready - I, on the, yeah, I forgot the name of it. 109 Billerica Road.

Interviewer - The town farm? No, across the street.

Dennis Ready - Town Farms 110.

Interviewer - The tavern.

Dennis Ready - The, yeah, it had a, it was a tavern. There were two taverns. And it had a, when I sold it for Dr. Gajewski, it had a three-hole one inside. Inside. Indoor plumbing. And I think they preserved it still then.

So, I was wondering if you had a picture of that.

Interviewer - We had a Halloween party over there and they had it all decorated inside at Deb's house.

Dennis Ready - Ah, really.

Interviewer - I didn't, I took a whole, I took a lot of pictures in there, but I don't remember the three-hole. Who owns it? In fact, it was down in the basement of Deb's tavern.

Dennis Ready - Okay.

Interviewer - She's the head of the Garrison House right now. Right, right. They enjoy that place.

I know, you know. In fact, we were down, running around in the basement and I took pictures all over the house.

Dennis Ready - I did run into her and asked her about the three-hole and she said they saved it. She, it saved it.

Interviewer - She probably wasn't too proud of it. Right. Enough to show it off.

Dennis Ready - That's right. Yeah, it's been, yeah, come do the parade. But, you know, it, in part of history, you think about how different life was and how people did things at different times.

And, you know, like, because growing up, you know, people had one television and it was black and white.

Interviewer - I remember those days. Yeah.

Dennis Ready - And, and I can remember when television didn't even come on until like four, three o'clock in the afternoon. How do you do? We used to come on.

Interviewer - I can remember those days. I was waiting for the test pattern.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, yeah, yeah. There was a test pattern on there all the time. And, and, you know, you look at, you just think about things that have come and gone, in and out of existence.

The, a punch card of IBM computers. And, gone.

Interviewer - When I started work, we still used those things.

Dennis Ready - That's right. You know, I mean, I worked with them a lot. But, you watch all that kind of stuff.

Interviewer - You were in the business, weren't you? Yeah. Data processing.

Dennis Ready - Yeah.

Interviewer - So you must have gone through a lot of trees.

Dennis Ready - I, I, that's right. I, when I started in the computer business, I started working for MITRE. I was at Hanscom UFO Space.

And I worked on a computer called the ANFSQ7A1 Octal Tube Computer. It was built by IBM. It was the size of Chelmsford High School.

And it had 8K of memory. 8,000 locations of memory.

Interviewer - I wonder what the memory was at the time. Huh? I wonder what form the memory had.

Dennis Ready - It was, it was, I want to say, it wasn't core memory, because it started and went into that memory.

Interviewer - It was magnetic or shrink? Right.

Dennis Ready - But it was, it was more a, it was definitely magnetic. Okay. But it was all these rooms of tubes and wires.

And I think they just kept that, like, core memory that came along later basically had wires crossing a donut. And it would save the It would either be positive or negatively charged. This was, they used to have to keep whatever they had, a wire positively charged.

And so if it went down, it was gone. Well, and actually the core memory was the same way. The, but it cost $7 million in 1961 dollars.

And it, I can remember, I, it was a great job to have when you go to school because I'd go in there from four to midnight and sometimes the, the, the shift before me that started the job that was running in like the next day it may finish. Okay. Jobs would run for 30 hours.

Wow. One job. And that's all it ran at the time was one job.

And they called, they didn't call them computers back then. They called them electronic brains. Okay.

They really didn't start calling things computers till like the IBM 1401 came out and that kind of thing. But, but, you know, it was a great industry to fall into, so to speak. I went to, to Lowell Tech.

Okay. As an engineer. And engineers graduating from Lowell Tech at the time were getting paid $6,000 a year.

And I was already making $9,000 a year as a programmer. And when, and as a programmer people would say, they'd say to me, what do you do? I say I'm a programmer.

They'd go, what radio station do you work on? Because they never even heard of it at that time. So, but it's funny, I can remember being out of Chelmsford High School five years teaching a course for Chelmsford High School teachers on, on things like the Hall Earth Code.

Okay. And, you know, it's funny, I did, I taught at U, U Lowell. I taught data processing and, and introduction to data processing and basic programming, COBOL programming, things like that.

And when I used to teach the introduction to data processing, I could explain how a computer worked by saying, all right, let me tell you how a disk works. Take an LP record. You know, now you see all the grooves on it.

You can pick up the needle and you can set it at the beginning of your favorite song because you know which groove that's starting on. That's exactly the way disks work on a computer. Except that what happens is it's not a needle but it's magnetic.

And what they do is they read the first cylinder and it tells them where all the data is and what cylinder. And then if you want such and such a, a file, it goes to that cylinder and reads it. And that was pretty easy.

This was back in the 70s when I was teaching that. Now, the kids would say, what's an LP record? So what happened is the things that I could use to explain this, and kids today don't care how it works, but they remember how to use it.

So that's why you see these kids today on cell phones and texting each other. And man, they're just banging away. And you know what?

They don't care how it works. As long as they, you know, they remember how to work it. The problem with older people is they can't remember how to work it.

And you know, I think change has always been, along with history, that's what we're kind of doing is recording the changes that take place. Because if everything was exactly the way it was in 1665, we wouldn't have to do anything.

Interviewer - Well, that's it. Your memories of growing up when there were no cars and Turnpike Road, no, no, no. Mill Road was dirt road.

Oh, Turnpike. Turnpike was dirt road.

Dennis Ready - Just past Warren Avenue up to Mill Road was dirt. And man, in the winter, you're coming down it's rot season.

Interviewer - Mud season. Mud season on this road.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, but it's all ruddy and muddy. Coming down on your bicycle, more than once I slid all the way down that hill on the side.

Interviewer - So it's no wonder that Turnpike went out of business so long ago.

Dennis Ready - That's right. But you know, Now, they actually, you know, if you look at Turnpike Road on a map, it's straight as an arrow.

Interviewer - I've gone to Google and I've looked, I've followed it from North Chelmsford all the way down. There's one section called Old...

Dennis Ready - Right, Old Middlesex Turnpike, right over here on the left.

Interviewer - Yeah, and then you can see the vestiges in people's backyards. And then you can follow it right down through Route 3. There's some storage buildings, it goes right through there.

Dennis Ready - Exactly, and then across the...

Interviewer - Back on the Contra River side of the bridge, the foundation, I didn't know what it was when I first saw it. And then when I looked at Google, I realized.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, and so, you know, growing up on Turnpike Road, I always wanted, you know, to judge Washington and sleep at the tavern and leave his horse in my yard and that kind of stuff, you know. And that's one of the things about Chelmsford, of course, is we are so rich in history. I mean, we go back to, you know, the farmers fighting in the Revolutionary War.

One of the things I find fascinating is when you start reading, you know, read Waters' history or one of those, and you start realizing, like, and I'll make these numbers up, but they won't be too far off.

Say the population of Chelmsford in 1775 was like 2,800 people, right? Like 700 of them fought in the Revolutionary War, right?

Go, wait a minute, like half of them had to be women and children. Three quarters of them were women and children. It's like every able-bodied man in the town fought in the Revolutionary War.

It's just... That's amazing.

Interviewer - I didn't realize it was that high.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, I mean, you know, when you run across something like a list with the names of the...

Interviewer - Like Pearl Harbor, I guess, you know, everybody was motivated and all.

Dennis Ready - Right, right. You know, and so, you know, for example, it could have been a Chelmsford farmer that fired the shot around the world. It's just as easy as any other.

Interviewer - No, it was George Spalding that fired before he was supposed to. At Bunker Hill. At Bunker Hill, yeah.

Yep.

Dennis Ready - A lot of Bunker Hill stories. A lot of guys got wounded there and, you know, that you can read the history about. One of the things that I told the other night, but the Historic Society, I think it was formed in like 1930.

That's about right. And in 1990, they were celebrating the 60th anniversary. And I was a select one and spoke at the meeting.

So I'm sitting at the head table, which was up on the stage of the church hall. And they're talking about 18 original members back in 1930. And then I found out 12 of them were sitting beside me.

Wow. 60 years later. 60 years later.

George Parker and that was one of them. I'm going, man. Because I joined the Historic Society when I was like 21 years old.

Interviewer - So being a member of the Historic Society improves your life expectancy.

Dennis Ready - I think it might.

Interviewer - We're in good shape.

Dennis Ready - I think it might. But, yeah, you know, I was just totally amazed at how long they had been there. And, you know, I mean, I remember them from the 60s.

But they had already been in it 30 years at the time, you know. But that's what it takes. It takes people that have a passion, you know.

Take, you know, like how much time your wife puts in on it. That's what it takes to keep these organizations going.

Interviewer - It takes a core group that's willing to do whatever it takes to make it work. And some supporters.

Dennis Ready - Now, you know, one of the things that I've seen over the years that I'm concerned with, I mean, is that over the years recording mechanisms have changed. You know, we talked about those punch cards and things used to be stored on punch cards. And then you had tape.

And then you had tape.

Interviewer - Well, you had hard drives first, and then you had tape.

Dennis Ready - And floppy disks.

Interviewer - Hard drives. There were so many different format changes, and they were all useless. And then 9-track tapes were standard for a while, and they all had a figure, you know, and you'd get to 4-millimeter tapes.

Dennis Ready - And even all the video stuff. When I first started with video, it was reel-to-reel.

Interviewer - Okay. You had your, what is it, one-inch and three-quarters? Right.

Dennis Ready - But this was when, like the libraries, you could borrow cameras and stuff like that in the library. It was like the tape was only a quarter of an inch wide, but it was reel-to-reel. And now, of course, if you've got, I have some of those floating around somewhere, they're no good anymore.

They're all cartridges.

Interviewer - Right.

Dennis Ready - And so everything keeps changing. Yes. And so, like, even the stuff you're doing now, we're going to have to...

Interviewer - Well, take the audio tapes, for example. Upgraded. VLU had taken the Bicentennial Commission organized the 1975 tapings.

Yeah. So when VLU got those tapes that were archived at the library, they all fell apart. And I experienced the same thing with some tapes that we had in the commission files.

And what happens is the little clear tape was taped with the brown tape. It just disintegrated, dried up. So I ended up repairing them with scotch tape, which probably won't last very long.

But now I have a digital recording, and I'm doing it in MP3 format because it's a lot more economical than WAV or any of the others. And I'm hoping that MP3 will survive a good long time. If not, I'm sure there'll be a converter.

Dennis Ready - Right. One of the problems that we have is we've got to look at ways to convert these things while everything's available in converters and this kind of thing.

Interviewer - Yeah. VLU had actually done some DVDs and found that even DVDs could degrade a bit. Yeah.

Dennis Ready - I bought at an auction. The auction was at the North School, and the library sold these cameras and recorders that I had done stuff on before. So I bought one of those, and I donated it to VLU to hope that he could convert some stuff down the road.

I don't know if he ever did. I mean, that's a long time ago I did that, but I gave it to him, and it was a long, long time ago that the North School was there. Now, talking about things I got involved in, the North School burned down when I was a student.

Interviewer - My son was a student. Was he? Yeah.

He actually salvaged some things out of his desk. He had a little professor calculator that survived the fire. Really?

Because there was no roof or anything, but some of the stuff in the desk survived.

Dennis Ready - But initially, I basically was involved with planning the senior center, taking the land and dividing it up between the housing authority and the senior center and actually recreation, which recreation has now been turned over to the housing authority, and they're continuing to build more places in there. But that was it. It took, like, 22 articles over, like, four years to get that all squared away.

Back in the days...

Interviewer - Meanwhile, the shell of North School sat there. The chimney in the auditorium was about all that was left. That's right.

Dennis Ready - That's right, and then they actually had to come down. But we built the new ones to look like the auditorium in the senior center and it looks like the auditorium did in the... Similar shape.

Yeah, the beams across the top and that kind of thing.

Interviewer - Now that you mention it, there is a similarity.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. I mean, that wasn't accidental. That was on purpose.

Interviewer - It makes a lot of sense to have the senior housing next to the senior center.

Dennis Ready - Yeah.

Interviewer - Because it's just a short walk and they can get to lunches and go do activities.

Dennis Ready - Yeah. You know, we went through the downsizing, got rid of a ton of schools. The Highwood School became housing.

Corsi School became housing, but regular housing. The old senior citizen center became housing.

Interviewer - Is that on Mill Road?

Dennis Ready - Yes, right at the beginning of Mill Road. The East School became a school. It was Boy Scouts first, and then they sold it to MEC.

Interviewer - East School, what's MEC again? What's MEC? Merrimack Education Center, do they own that school now?

Yes, they do. Okay.

Dennis Ready - They own a few other buildings at times.

Interviewer - Yes, the Millstream. What? The Millstream.

Right, the only one next to it. Lloyd Greene's over on Mill Road. They had a flood a few weeks ago, and Trish called or emailed from town office and wondered if they could go over.

So I took a couple cameras over in the pouring rain and got some great shots. Really? The water literally rose up over all the banks over there and did an end run right across the lawn.

And there was like a waterfall down into the driveway right across the front lawn at Lloyd's house. The whole front lawn was where the river was flowing across. Of course, the spillways were all flowing too.

Right. That's quite a place. It is.

Apparently, that's going to be town on.

Dennis Ready - Yes, he's going to put together an organization to run it after he's gone, I guess. He brought me some maple syrup he made one time to pry me into helping him out. There's a generator in there.

Two. That generates electricity. That's involved with the town.

Interviewer - Turns out my wife's mother's sister had dated Lloyd Greene way back when they lived in the Boston area. Oh, really, when he was in Iraq? Her aunt came out from California.

And we surprised Lloyd with a visit from his ex-girlfriend. He never heard from her. And so he gave us a grand tour.

He showed us the water wheel. It's connected to one generator. And then he had a German turbine running another generator.

So that was interesting. I was there at the ribbon cutting. Oh, yeah.

He's got a little monument area out there to the dedicated people that worked on the project.

Dennis Ready - That was on my paper.

Interviewer - Do you remember that, back when it was Russell Mill, when it was a cell of lumber? Was it a derelict building before he took it over? I do.

We have some pictures of it. It was a big, long building that ran across the whole dam just about. And you can see water pouring out from underneath it.

And somewhere in the upside, there was an ice house, too. I think we have some pictures of an ice house with a ramp going up. And ice cutting.

There's several pictures of ice cutters where you can clearly see the house at 100, is it 101? Up on the hill. Right.

That's part of the MEC also.

Dennis Ready - I remember when Russell Mill was the, I want to say, south row rod in the gun club. Is this the White House? No, it's up farther.

Now, Russell Mill Swimming Tennis? Yes. That used to be the rod in the gun club.

Interviewer - A lot of shooting going on back then? Yeah.

Dennis Ready - When I was a kid, I told you Turnpike Road was dirt going up over Rocky Hill. Rocky Hill was loaded with rattlesnakes. People don't think of rattlesnakes around here anymore.

Interviewer - I think of them on the mountains somewhere.

Dennis Ready - But there was plenty of rattlesnakes living in there.

Interviewer - So you had garden snakes in the center and rattlesnakes on Turnpike. Exactly.

Dennis Ready - All kinds of fun for the kids. They stayed away from the rattlesnakes. In fact, one time, the woman next door to us calls up, says, asks if my father can come over.

She's got a problem with a snake. So I went over with him. And her bulkhead's open.

And at the bottom of the bulkhead is a rattlesnake. But she's thrown so much stuff on him and boiling water and rocks. Like the snake's looking up going, kill me.

Please kill me. He's gone. So my father did go down and whack him with a shovel.

And another thing I used to see a lot around here that I've never seen anymore is quail. Along Golden Cove Road, there were fields where our house was today. And you'd walk through that field and just flocks and flocks of pheasants would take off.

You see turkeys walking around now that I never saw before. Had five of them on my lawn yesterday. But when I grew up, I never saw any pheasants, never saw any deer.

Now we see deer every season. You see deer and turkeys, but you don't see pheasants and quail and that kind of stuff. So I've seen that kind of change too.

One of the things I tell people is that Chelmsford's a great place to raise children. And the reason it is is that to raise good kids, you've got to keep them busy doing good things. And Chelmsford has plenty of good things for them to do.

And I think when I was a kid, they didn't have plenty of good things for us to do. But when you're so rural, there wasn't any bad things for us to do. I suppose I was doing good things when I was collecting eggs, milking cows, feeding chickens, whatever.

Somebody would rope me in to help them out doing. But you learned a lot from that stuff. I kept going to mention that one of the things about Chelmsford when I was a kid is I could talk to 80-year-olds and 70-year-olds.

It was allowed. It was okay. I could sit on Erickson's porch and talk to him.

Bill and Andy's, you know what Bill and Andy's is? Well, Andy and Bill actually owned the orchard that I referred to.

Interviewer - I met one of them at your brother's induction into the Hall of Fame.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, in January, wasn't it? And his partner was Bill Nakey. And Bill's daughter Betty was in my class.

But we used to hang around the gas station. In fact, I'll tell you a story, a Halloween story. We were hanging around the gas station.

And Andy is going, Oh boy, I hope they don't wax my windows this year. I hope they don't wax my windows. He's going, on, on, on.

So, that night we have to get out of there. We waxed his windows. I mean, we put a quarter inch of wax on his entire window.

All right? Big picture. The next morning, of course, we're all done.

Andy comes out and goes, He walks over to the gas pump. He takes a rag, squirts some gas on it. Goes over and takes that wax off so fast, you couldn't believe it.

And he's just laughing. We spent four hours putting it on him. It took him three minutes to take it off.

But that's how you learn things. Adults used to get you to do stupid things. That's how you learn.

And so, you know, it's like, you can talk to all these different people. Now, poor kids can't. There's some 75-year-old guy talking to some 12-year-old girl.

They're all taking them away. And that's too bad. They miss out on a lot of things.

We have to do some of these things now like this that used to be done one-on-one. Wow. Have we used up our time?

Not yet. Okay. Any other areas you'd like to talk about?

Anything you'd like to talk about?

Interviewer - Well, I had a couple of questions while we were talking. I know that McFarland High School, this high school portion of it, was built in the 1916-17 time frame. When was the other, the elementary school, was that a decade later, years later?

Dennis Ready - Yeah, I'm trying to think. Susan McFarland, who was named after her, she was... She was at the center, I believe.

Right. For many, many years. Right. She was in the system for 50 years. And I want to say... So...

For some reason, I want to say like 1923.

Interviewer - Was the new building named for her and not the high school, and then the high school later took the name?

Dennis Ready - No, right. The high school... What was the high school became McFarland as it became a middle school.

Interviewer - So it used to be McFarland was on Wilson Street.

Dennis Ready - Yes.

Interviewer - And the high school was a high school. Correct. Gotcha.

Okay, now that answers that question.

Dennis Ready - And at one time, there was actually a building that connected them, a library. Oh, I didn't know that. There was a...

When it was... When it became a junior high, the whole thing became a junior high. And so then they attached the two buildings together.

And the building that was between them ran from... If you would... If you went down the center side of the buildings in the stairwell, which would be like the assessor's office side.

Okay. If you went down that stairwell, when you come up, when you come to the auditorium, that doorway there was actually connected. It was a hallway.

A library was there. And then it connected to the McFarland school and to what was the entranceway to the cafeteria when I was there. And so that's when everybody started referring to it as McFarland.

And then when we turned the... The old McFarland piece over to the housing authority, they tore out the library and turned the other part into the town offices. We got quite a bit of money from the state on refurbishing it, mostly because of energy efficiency in the windows and this kind of thing.

They paid for all those kind of things. So it worked out to be an excellent deal for the town. And we got to help the housing authority out a lot.

We got empty buildings that we didn't know what to do with off our hands and got some housing credits. So that worked out well. When we were downsizing later, I didn't want to sell the center school because I felt that we probably needed it again.

So we leased it out. We initially leased it to Wang as a daycare. And then another entity, which is now up in North Chelmsford, took it over.

But when we needed it back, we took it back.

Interviewer - And did a refurbishment on it?

Dennis Ready - Right. Which probably cost about a third as what it would to build a new school. You had the land, you had the location, you had the building.

Granted, it's amazing how things change as far as the rules go. The original center school had a ramp that got you from the first floor to the second floor. The ramp was probably 16 feet wide.

So it was like a big hallway. You can picture thousands of kids running up and down. It wasn't thousands, but many.

But that had to be changed because of the current code.

Interviewer - I think I remember the ramp because we square danced. The Alpine Squares, we used that building.

Dennis Ready - I remember that ramp. One of the problems that you have as a community is that every time you do something, you've got to go by the current codes. And they change.

Handicap Accessible is a major one. For example, right now we're talking about when I was on the committee, when we refurbished the old town hall, we put it back to as close as we could get it to the way it was in 1879. And that took a lot of research on what the chandeliers looked like and we had them remade exactly the same chandeliers, that kind of thing.

But we had to put in some handicap accessibility that certainly wasn't there when it was built. And so that's why in the back stairway, there's that... The ramp on the right side.

Oh, going into the building, right. And then in the stairwell itself in the back, there's a, I guess a wheelchair lift, is the only way I can describe it, that goes up the stairwell. And so it's hard to preserve things historically.

Interviewer - There was a comment about that on today's Newsweekly, and I mean, Independent. See, I'm relapsing too much. That wheelchair access ramp was unreliable.

I think Susan mentioned it. She was making the case that we need the elevator access. That wasn't really suitable for it.

Dennis Ready - And so now to refurbish it again, you've got to put it in... They didn't make us put an elevator in that.

Interviewer - Well, that makes a lot of sense, because that addition on the end that was put on for the police wasn't that well laid out, not that good. I think where the wheelchair ramp goes in the back, they had to close that door off, and you opened it up again.

They built the new entrance into that little addition in the back, where it ended up being an insurance office.

So now that whole end addition comes up, and the new plan has stair and elevator access in the addition, so that takes care of a lot of... It takes out the stairway with the...

Dennis Ready - Right. And it won't affect the appearance of it historically. It looks better.

It looks better, yeah. I think... But it's like...

Interviewer - The main entrance is started in the rear now, so where the people actually park. And one of the things on our list, I was on that Town Miles Utilization Study Committee, was restoration of the parking, get rid of the slabs from the old highway department. Actually, there were horse sheds.

Right.

Dennis Ready - There were horse sheds, then there was a police firing range.

Interviewer - Yeah. Now it's just... The highway department had a new shed, and the police auxiliary took over the old shed.

Right, that's right. So then there was slabs left. It was tough parking in there.

You wondered if you were going to get a flat. Right. Next thing you know, next time I went down there, bang, the town engineers had gone in and redone it, so it's already finished.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Well, you know, I went there the other day for some function, and the parking lot was full.

I mean, it was way down the back, where I could find a parking spot, which was good. So Susan's doing pretty well with the financing and the operating expenses. She's putting a lot of time in there.

But it is running itself.

Interviewer - So at the meeting next Thursday, when people are starting to get redundant and having a hard time, you're going to move the question, right? Absolutely.

Dennis Ready - As soon as I sense it's going to pass, which actually I sense it is now already.

Interviewer - Oh, that's good. Good news. By the time people hear this tape, that building restoration could be old.

Dennis Ready - That's true. That's true. You know, it is interesting.

Like, one of the things that we were just talking about earlier is the flooding. Now, there's a lot of series of storms. Different places flooded than in other storms.

You know, for years we had problems with the water rising up over Kingsborough Road and that area, Turnpike Road over the bridge there, the center, the water would actually go up.

Interviewer - Beaver Brook. I remember the newspaper pictures of Beaver Brook flowing up the center. Yeah.

And believe it or not, Fletcher Street. I saw Fletcher Street when it was about a foot deep. And that included the basement of the church, St. Mary's. The water, you know, there was no basement. Right. It was part of the pond.

Dennis Ready - Gotcha. Yeah, and so you notice different storms for different reasons affect things differently, okay? But I think in general we have the flow pretty well taken care of.

I can remember one hurricane. I was on the Conservation Commission and I'm riding around looking at the dams in town, see how they're doing and they're holding up. And Walter Hedlund still was the emergency director back then. He used to carry 15 radios.

Interviewer - Walter was another interview.

Dennis Ready - He should make a good one. Did he talk about the war, World War II? We did talk about his war experience.

We talked about his town experience, yeah. But Walter was a neighbor of mine. He lived on Hilton Street, okay?

Interviewer - Not far from town office now, right?

Dennis Ready - That's right.

Interviewer - Down in that neighborhood.

Dennis Ready - But it's like my father's land backed up into his property. So he was one of the neighbors who used to hang around. Well, I didn't hang around.

He was an adult at the time. But Walter's always been heavily involved. One of the interesting things is I was on the Conservation Commission when we put together the first flood map, okay?

And so we went around interviewing people. And we basically interviewed them on where did the water come up to in the great flood, okay, in like 1938, was it?

Interviewer - It was a hurricane.

Dennis Ready - 36 was the flood. 36. The flood of 36.

And literally, you know, there were people that showed us, like, the water was up to here. They'd have a post with a mark on it, okay, up and off of Kingsborough Road and up in that area. I mean, you know, and we used those people's interviews to figure out where the high water marks were.

And then in some of the floods later on, we were right on the money. We were right on the money. You know, when all of Kingsborough Road got flooded over and everything, you know, we knew exactly where it was going to flood.

And then the Army engineers had changed a lot of things and made that much better. But that was an interesting project they worked on.

Interviewer - I'm going to ask you a question that I'm not sure you're going to be able to answer. I asked Bob Greenwood in his interview to tell a story that he thought was interesting or funny. He told me a story.

He was on the commission at the same time you were?

Dennis Ready - Yes.

Interviewer - He just retired? He was on 24, 25 years?

Dennis Ready - No, actually, I was on before him.

Interviewer - Oh, you were on before?

Dennis Ready - Yeah, I was on. This was the last time I'm talking about it.

Interviewer - So you were finished before he got onto it? Yeah. Okay.

So you couldn't answer the question. The question was concerning a piece of property on the Concord River, and a person wanted to clean up. There was kind of a dumping situation.

A person wanted to clean it up.

Dennis Ready - Off of Big End and Goral Street?

Interviewer - Yeah, I think it was.

Dennis Ready - I was down there once. Did you? Yeah, as a selectman.

Oh. You have to, when you're a selectman, one of the things you have to do is called preamble the borders. And so the oldest community has to talk to the youngest community, younger community, and set up a time.

You have to do this every five years. You've got to go find the boundary marks and mark them. And so Billerica and Chelmsford was founded at exactly the same time.

And so either one can notify the other. So I'm with the chairman of the Board of Selectmen from Billerica and I, in a canoe on the Concord River trying to find the boundary marker. And I had to get out into the swamp, and I'm up to my chest in water trying to mark this border, because the border's in the swamp.

Were there steel pikes in there? No, it's a granite post. Granite post.

And so I know the area you're talking about well. Okay. So anyway, what about it?

Interviewer - Well, Bob was odd man out. He supported the owner who wanted to clean it out, and he wanted to build a house on a portion of it and kind of just, in general, clean up his yard. And he didn't get support from his fellow commissioners.

In fact, there were some real hard feelings, and he was actually starting to get some threats. And it got even worse. He was getting some threats from strange people that said they could see, and threats against his wife and his kids, too.

Really? Yeah. And so he, after a while, after months went by, he figured out he wouldn't tell me, and that's what I was going to ask you.

It turned out it was instigated by one of his fellow commissioners, or two, perhaps. Yeah. And the person doing the threatening was a hired, laid-off fireperson, fireman from Lowell, was hired to go after Bob and try to scare him out of making that decision.

Dennis Ready - I'm not going to do it on tape, but after the tape's over, I'll give you a guess on what I think it is. Okay, well, let me turn the tape off. We'll keep it a mystery.

But she did remind me of, oh, you know, one time, John Carson, Arnold Lovering, and Bill Murphy voted to take away the liquor license, or not give a liquor license to the Fisk House restaurant, and they received threats. They actually had somebody try to blow up John Carson's car, you know, sticking a rag in the thing and lighting it on fire. They got all kinds of death threats.

What really surprised me was John Carson taped him, okay? On the phone? Yeah.

So he calls the FBI and plays it for them, and they said, it's illegal to tape people. We may have to charge you. That was the biggest surprise I got in the sense that I'm playing the man.

You know, as a slight one, I figured, like, there was times when I thought I was going to get a pair of cement shoes, and I had a, the owner of the mobile home park was a scary dude, at least to House Chelmsfordites.

Interviewer - He's not there now, though.

Dennis Ready - Yeah, he's still there. Oops. But he says to me, who do I pay to get this project done?

I said, your engineer. He goes, what do you mean? I go, just pay your engineer.

Design it correctly. We'll approve it. If it's done right, you have no problem in this town.

I said, your problem is, you'd rather pay somebody $200,000 than have your engineer do it right for $100,000.

Interviewer - He'd rather do an end run with a lawyer.

Dennis Ready - Just design it correctly. You'll be okay. But those two incidents are the only time I know of that anybody kind of got threatened a little bit.

This town is squeaky clean. Too many good people. It is.

Interviewer - I was surprised to hear that story from Bono. And we knew John well. He ran my wife's campaign for school committee.

Yeah.

Dennis Ready - So now you're waiting to turn this off so you can head home. I can't wait. I think our time is up.