Interviewer - So, this is Fred Merriam. I'm here with Gus Fallgren at 31 Byam Road, and today is May 13, 2010.

So, Gus, you were telling me that back in the 30s, your family used to come up to Baptist Pond. So, why don't we start there?

Gus Fallgren - Yeah, we lived in Winchester, and we had relatives that had camps down at the pond there. So, we used to come up in the summertime to go swimming and visiting and blueberry picking. We'd get in a rowboat.

The camp was down at the end towards the beach. And we'd get in a rowboat and row over to the far side where the Belleville camps are now. That was all blueberry country, pick blueberries.

So, that was my first introduction to Chelmsford over the years. And I grew up when World War II came along. I went in the service.

I came out of the service in 1945. I was discharged in California and came cross-country on the train. Got off probably in Framingham, I think it was, and hitchhiked up to Chelmsford.

I had no idea. My folks had moved up here during the war. They bought a house essentially across the street from where the museum is now.

That used to be the hired house for the farm next door here. Oh, next door. Okay.

They paid $400 for it in 1944. Of course, there were a lot of $400 houses in Chelmsford at that time.

Okay, so I hitchhiked up, get to Chelmsford Center about midnight. At least I knew where the center was. And I'm sitting down at the dummy cop.

There used to be a light. You called it a silent policeman. They called it a dummy cop.

It was opposite the old hotel, Central House. I'm sitting there about 12 o'clock, 1 o'clock or something like that, wondering where my folks live.

I had no idea because I hadn't been here since they moved here. Along comes a van, nice fellow. He stopped and says, Hey, soldier, can I help you?

I said, well, maybe. I said, I'm just coming home from the army. My folks have moved here and I have no idea where they live.

He said, what's the name? So I said, Fallgren. He said, oh, Sven.

He used to work for Sven. I know where he lives. So about 2 o'clock in the morning, he drove me up to 27 Byam Road.

I knocked on the door and said, hey, I'm home. So we're home. That's how we came to Chelmsford.

And eventually I got married and I built this house here with my father's help. So that was in 1950. Well, talk about the neighborhood here?

What did you do once you settled in here? Have you moved in with your parents? Did you get a job locally?

Well, yes, I worked at Gomez Radio in Lowell. And I worked for WTSV Radio up in Claremont, Ohio. Went to work for Raytheon.

So were you a station engineer at the radio station up there? Yes, I was a station engineer. And went to work at Raytheon about 1950 and stayed there for 35 years, 34 years.

It was only a temporary job. I wasn't going to stay there. So you were in the Missile Systems Division?

Well, I worked in the Receiving Tube Division to start with. One of the most interesting places in Raytheon that I worked was very interesting, working manufacturing of radio tubes, hearing aid tubes and stuff like that. Was that plant down by Route 128?

That was in Newton, Chapel Street in Newton. And there I went to G-Building in Waltham. And up to Raytheon in Beford when they only had half of the hangar.

And components building up on a hill. So this is the Hanscom Airfield Raytheon facility you're talking about.

Well, one of the interesting things around this area of Byam Road, I think, was a water system that supplied drinking water to the now museum.

There was a well on a windmill tower down behind what is now 26 Byam Road. And there was a pipe that went from there up to a large cedar water tank up behind my father's house at 27 Byam Road. And the water ran through that house down a pipe across the street to the main museum.

So it was like a community water tank? Yeah, it was a community water tank. And the windmill had the power to pipe it across under the street?

Yeah, the windmill pumped the water up to the water, across the street, up to the tank, up the hill, and it came running down through. Well, my father lived there. Well, Teddy Alcorn owned the museum at the time.

He owned everything around here. Did you know how much land that encompassed? No.

Everything down on Brush Hill Road was part of the property, all the way up to Barton Hill Road, then along Byam Road and across the street to where we are now, up along Locusr Road, up Robin Hill Road to Summit Avenue, up to the fire tower, and back down. That was a lot of land. I'll say.

We lost track of where we were. Oh, the funny part of it was, my father lived in that house. He bought it about 1944 and remodeled it and fixed it up, because it was sort of decrepit.

After about two years, he said, I wonder where the water supply is. There's no shutoff, no water bill. And he and Ted, Teddy Alcorn, they started looking around and found out, hey, you know, when the town put water down the street, they piped it into the museum house and squirted it back up the pipe under the road up to my father's house.

So in comes the hacksaw, and off went the pipe, and my father had to put in town water. So, he was getting a freebie there. Yeah, no more free water.

And other sorts of water for, Walter Alcorn's house down on the farmhouse down on 27 there. That used to belong to Ted, too. But his water supply came from a spring that was not too far from the well where the windmill tower was.

There was a pipe that ran from there. It's still there, I'm sure. Ran down through the swamp across 27 into the farmhouse, continuously running from the spring.

The pipe is still there, but I'm sure they got town water down there now. Yes.

There were actually quite a few windmills in town before the city water went in. Oh, yeah. The teens or so [1913].

But in that case, it would be a gravity feed direct from the spring. Yeah, that was gravity feed. Right down there was an old lead pipe.

Lead pipe. Lead pipe. That's what everybody used back then was lead pipes.

What I heard is as long as the water kept running continuously through the pipe, it wouldn't accumulate lead and become a hazard. So, the farmers always used to let them run. That may be true, yeah.

Yeah. So, there's another spring not too far from here, if you go down the end of Locust Road. Behind that white house is where the spring for Chelmsford ginger ale was.

I didn't realize that until I read an article about it. Oh, really? Yeah.

Went down along the tracks and on over to ginger ale plant. Well, it's quite a stream comes down through my land out there. I can douse with rods and also with a stick.

And I can follow the stream where it comes down the hill, crosses between my two big maple trees, crosses Byam Road and winds up down where that well was, where that windmill tower was. That's a pretty good stream. Underground stream?

Underground, yeah. Ted Alcorn, I remember you must have known him. I've known him very well.

So, what was his business or what did he do in town here? Well, he was a gentleman that bought and sold real estate, buy houses and fix them up and so on. That was the case where he bought the museum house farm.

Raised turkeys over there. Oh, geez, did he have turkeys? They used to range all the way across where Barton Hill Road is, up to Barton Hill Road.

And you'd get out in the street here, and the turkeys would come running. So, they were free-range turkeys? Free-range turkeys, yeah.

He used to incubate the eggs. Turkeys were sort of a dumb bird. They didn't really keep their eggs in a nest in a turkey house.

He'd wander around and find turkey eggs all over the fields out there and bring them home and put them in the incubator. Well, Barton Road was a dead road when I came here. They used to oil it, and it was a dead road.

But the only traffic that used to go up and down was Warren Ray. He was a town assistant. He'd go home and set the clock by him, going to work in the morning and coming home at noon and going back down to Town Hall after dinner.

Yeah, that was just about all the traffic we had. Now it's like a superhighway with everybody cutting around the Center. So, what was commuting like back when you worked in the 50s?

Commuting? Yeah. Well, there was no...

It was before Route 3, right? Yeah, it followed Route 4 down to 128, when 128 was in Lexington Center. It was, I guess, Waltham Street, they call it now.

You'd go down to Waltham and work your way over to Newton. So this is before the... Before 128 Highway.

128 used to be a connection to Lexington Center. I think it started there. No, there was not much traffic.

That was in the early 50s, 1950. So you worked... You were a tech at the Raytheon.

Yeah. And so you all... You got into the radio hobby at some point.

I got into that in 1936. Oh, yeah. So you did that before you got into the service.

Oh, yes. Did you do radio work in the service? Yes, as a radio operator.

And my commercial tickets. So did you build your own equipment back then? Everything was homemade up until about 1960 or so.

And I got a good deal of some nice Collins equipment. I was king of the hill with that, Collins. The gold-dust ones, the 75A4 and the KWS-1.

It was great. Until all of a sudden I realized, well, hey, you know somebody you talk to, they say, hey, your signal sounds good. Well, why shouldn't it?

We're store-bought, and the pride wasn't there like it was in the homemade stuff. So...

That's progress, I guess. So you have an antenna here that you said it was on, and the article said it was on a windmill tower. Well, you used to have a windmill tower up there, yes.

Oh, you used to. Where did that windmill tower come from? That came, that windmill tower was down on High Street, down at George Munson's house.

That was where the Reeds, the Reed family, Raymond Reed and Leslie and Kenneth Reed grew up. Do you remember the address? No.

It's the last house on the right before Reed Road. There was a well there and they had a windmill that pumped the water for that house.

So commercial towers were not readily available right after the war when I first started up here. I bought that for $25 and moved it up here. And we had a wind shear after, oh, probably 10, 12 years ago, and it blew down.

Now I have a Roland 25 tower there. So this one's cable guy, guy wire tower? Yeah.

So how did you initially get interested in hair radio back in the 30s? Just something that caught fire with you, or did you meet somebody, or what got you started? Well, the Morse code and the Boy Scouts, and I found an old shortwave Zenith radio, and I used to listen to hams and said hey, you know, that sounds kind of interesting.

Well, I played a little bit with spark coils. I was talking to my friend two houses down. I think we interrupted every radio in our neighborhood with the spark coil.

But it gradually evolved into tubes, and we went from there. So when did you start communicating around the world with your Morse code? Well, right after World War II, all the amateur radio stations had been prohibited from operating during World War II, naturally for security reasons.

We had 10 meters, the first band that we could operate on, and that was a worldwide band. Sunspots were just right. It took very little power to reach any place in the world, and everything was homemade then, homemade receivers, homemade transmitters.

And it just evolved from there. So they released the bands? Eventually they released the other bands.

They were used for other services, military. Okay, so the military captured some bands that had been previously amateur? Yeah.

And then they returned them? And got them back, yeah. So what were some of your first contacts, memorable contacts that you made?

Well, there were really no outstanding contacts, well, except for the one with the transistorized transmitter. That was kind of unique. I talked to a few people around Stateside with a low-powered transistorized transmitter.

Maybe we should backtrack and tell what I mentioned, that Chelmsford is the location of the very first amateur radio transmission received. Transistorized. Received and transmitted using transistors. That's the first documented instance of transistor communication. And the year and the timing on that? 1955.

And these were pre-production? They were engineering samples? They were engineering samples, yes.

And because you worked at Raytheon and Raytheon made the transistors, you had an inside connection? Well, yeah. Actually, the person that designed the circuit was Dick Wright.

He was also a Chelmsford resident. He's a graduate engineer from Worcester Polytech. He designed the circuit, and we built it here and used my antenna and receiver and it worked out.

Yeah, it was pretty good. So you contacted the fellow over in Denmark. That was the first transatlantic contact.

He documented the time of the contact and sent you his QSL card, and it looks like he got your message and was pleased that you were actually using a very low-powered transistor circuit. So I guess that surprised him. So you have the legal documentation and everything that says you went first.

Yeah. So that was pretty neat. And you got written up in several magazines.

You got written up in... I got written up in... In a radio magazine, I guess.

In Radio and Television News. Okay. There's a copy on the wall right over there.

Yeah. I got written up in an Italian magazine, a Russian magazine. I had one from Ceylon.

And when the other guys had a magazine that was written in Japan, I don't have those. I lost the Russian ones at work, so we liberated that. Yeah.

And then Raytheon had a publication too that you sent around internally. Oh, yeah, Raytheon News. And there was an article in...

It's been in several magazines. I can't say it yet. I don't remember the names of them.

Yeah, that's over 50 years ago. That's a while. It's worth mentioning that everybody has a first, a mouse, something like that in their life.

So has ham radio turned into anything related to civil defense or that you were in a network where people get together and communicate in case of emergency, that sort of thing? Well, I haven't been too active in that. I have some awards for working with forest fires and so forth.

Using the fire tower up the hill here? No. No?

I really don't remember actually what I did, but there's a couple of certificates up there that were awarded for working with Maine forest fires, communicating. So you'd get in the car and take a portable rig and... Yeah.

...et cetera.

Yeah. And one year I did some communication up in Alaska for the Ididerod race.

Oh.

That's pretty remote. So you broadcast the results back or the progress back? Well, communication between the racers at the various checkpoints.

Say, will you send me up a new parka? Oh, okay. So this is race safety and internal communications.

Yeah. You had several other hobbies here. One of them was gasoline engines or very early gasoline engine models and also cannons.

Do you want to say how you got interested or what sort of... Well, there's a lot of hobbies. I used to do boat racing, stock outboards.

I was known as a high-point professional driver one year. And sailboat racing. I ran in the nationals in one of the small classes.

Mountain climbing. Before we get to that, do you remember the sailboat class that you were in? Yeah, Cape Cod Mercury.

Okay. How long is that? Pardon?

How long the boat is that? I think it's a 23-footer. It's not a big job.

Day sailor? Yeah. With a keel?

Centerboard. Centerboard, okay. So where would you go for those?

Would it be a club race? Well, I used to run in club races, and they sponsored me and sent me down to the nationals, which we held down on Quincy. Where was your club?

Lowell. On the river? Yeah.

Oh, okay. It's like the Lowell Motorboat Club? No, the...

Was it a different name at that time? The boathouse across the way. I forget what they call it down there now.

Well, it did belong to the Lowell Motorboat Club when I was a stock outboard, yeah.

Oh.

Mountain climbing. We'll get into that. I climbed all the New Hampshire 4,000-footers.

There's 46 of them. Climbed the New England 4,000-footers. There's 63 of them.

I did some climbing out in the Rockies, 14,000-footers. A little climbing in Alaska. I did the Long Trail in Vermont from Canada to Massachusetts.

And what else? Does that connect to the Appalachian Trail at some point? Well, there's a portion of the Long Trail that is also the Appalachian Trail.

The AT comes in up near White River Junction and joins the Long Trail down to the Mass border, and then it continues going south. So did you do that continuously, camping out, or did you have a support team with you? On the Long Trail?

Yeah. Well, we did that in several sections. We would leave a car where we expected it to come out in a few days and drive around to where we sat it or it left off the last time.

So we did that in three or four jumps. So there was more than one of you, so you had two vehicles, one at each end? Yeah.

And up at the Canadian end, when we left it up right at the Canadian border, my little Mustang was pretty well vandalized. Somebody stole a battery, filled a gas tank with sand, and did a lot of damage. Well, we managed to get down to Troy, Vermont, and this was on a Sunday, and a guy was just closing his gas station.

He came up and towed us down, took the gas tank off and cleaned the sand out of that, sold me a battery, and when I went to pay him, the guy rang up some money, charged me for the gas and for the battery, and I said, you're going to charge me for the tow and the labor? Well, don't steal a battery every day, you know. I don't think you're going to find that these days.

So you went home with your car, that was good. Pardon? You went home with the Mustang.

Yeah, yeah. The sailing club that you were talking about, that wasn't the Vesper Club at the time, had that closed by that time? No, I can't think of the name of the club there.

Vesper was the turn of the century around 1900. Yeah. I don't know if I can think of the name of the boathouse.

It was across from the Spear House on the river. Across the river from the Spear House? Basically, it was across the road from the Spear House.

Oh, across the road, okay. It was the Bellegarde Boathouse. Oh, yeah, okay, yeah.

That was it. Okay. Yeah.

Okay, and they still have boat races, and they'll rent small boats, and they have rowing shells and so on there. They probably do. Okay.

This is quite a few years ago. So I remember back in the 70s, they had some outboard and some hydro, they had some pretty, fairly professional races on the Merrimack River. Yeah, they ran them with the stock outboards.

Yeah? Yeah. So did you soup up the outboard?

No, I had a stock engine. Stock engine. So it was all seamanship, skill?

Well, pretty much, yeah. And the good hull you had, right? What did you use for the hull?

I got a box full of trophies up in the attic for the boat racing. Wooden hull? Did you make it yourself?

Yeah. Hydroplane? No, stock outboard.

No, I mean the hull? No. The three-point?

Oh, yeah. What did they call the stock outboard? Oh, the stock outboard is the hull series.

So it was like a V-hull? Or a shallow V? Very shallow V, yeah. Yeah. How many horsepower did they use?

It was a Mercury engine. Supposedly ten horsepower. Oh, ten.

Okay, so they ran quite a few marathons. They ran the Hudson River Marathon from Albany down to New York City. Ran that a couple of times.

Same boat, ten horsepower? Huh? Same boat, yeah.

Ran the Winnipesaukee 50-mile marathon. Beat the national champion up there. Ran a 75-mile race down on the Connecticut River.

Oh, yeah, that was a lot of fun. We had three young couples. We'd go as a group.

So it was a lot of camaraderie, you know, sort of a racing team camp out for the weekend. One boat, or did each couple have a boat? Each one of us had a boat, yeah.

So did the boat carry enough gas for 75 miles? It had an auxiliary tank on the boat with a wobble pump out of an old AT-10 airplane to pump the fuel from the auxiliary tank out of the engine tank. Old electric pump.

Didn't have any electric pumps then. Oh, a crank? A crank, yeah, that was a wobble pump in it.

Okay. It was an AT-10 or BT-10. That was a trainer plane.

Yeah. So, reliable hand operation. Oh, yeah.

So I don't know when you found time to go to work with all these mountain climbing trips and boat races. I don't know. If you stop to think about it.

I don't know how I did the work, but I did. So I think you told me before we turned the recorder on that you had contacted every country in the entire world. I got 364 contacts, entities they call them, not countries.

Some of them are, you count Alaska and Hawaii as separate countries for radio purposes. There are a lot of those around the world. So is that almost everyone that has amateur radio operators?

A lot of them don't have a permanent operator on some of the little islands that they count as entities. So you have some people that do it? No, sometimes the people will, for a hobby, they'll go put on what they call a DX-pedition, or make a group of fellows and go off to one of these rare islands and set up a station just to have fun and hand out contacts and have a good time themselves.

Send out a special card, so it would be a very rare card, because there wouldn't always be somebody there. This is, what is the batch of cards I got? There's one right on top there from Pakistan.

I just got those the other day. Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Dr. Khalid Hussain.

That's interesting. So you got the Lakshadweep Islands in India. That's not exactly a household location, is it?

No, it isn't. It's a military island, and they had to get special permission to run an amateur operation there. I think most of them are pretty common in there.

There's one from the Netherlands. St. Marie Island. Madagascar.

Mm-hmm.

Stavarts, Poland. Well, you learn about geography with these things, huh? Pardon?

You can learn a lot about geography just by figuring out where these places are. You can see the log book here. I keep a record of all the contacts.

I've got them all the way back to the 30s. And since World War II, you don't see many contacts in the States yet. It's mostly just DX foreign countries.

So we got Spain. We got two in Spain. Pretty much common stuff.

French Guiana. One, let's see, this one is another Spain. French Guiana.

Estonia. Yeah. Villu Tari would be proud.

Maybe he knows the person. Yeah, it's not a very big country. He couldn't possibly.

Well, that's pretty neat. I've got them in reverse order for you now. That's all right.

There's no order. It's just the way they happen to come under.

So another hobby you had was kayaking. Tell me a little bit about that. Oh, geez, kayaking.

What do you mean about that? Well, you talked about that once when I visited here. Oh.

Well, I bought a kayak in a yard sale. And we learned to ride that. And one day, my friend Dr. Tucker, the veterinarian, his secretary was a kayaker. And she said, let's go down the Hudson, not the Hudson, the Assabet River out of Hudson. Okay. It was some pretty rough water in a couple of spots.

Next thing you know, I'm upside down. I get the boat right side up and get back in it. And about a half mile further down, I discovered, hey, no glasses.

Yeah. We had a lot of fun running various local rivers here. I sold the thing eventually.

Yeah. We usually wear the croquis to hold the glasses on and flip it over. Yeah.

So it stays with you. And this time again, when I flipped and I got right side up, she said, I'm glad you did that. And I cursed her a little bit.

She said, yeah, no, it's no big deal. Well, she was right. So let's talk about your gas engines.

You had three scale model one lung gas engines. I used to collect them. Water jacket, cooler for the cylinder.

I used to collect and restore old one lungers. I had quite a few until I had a heart attack, and I sold those. But I had some pretty nice engines, some of them weighing up to 600, 700 pounds. Did you put them on a trailer and take them to meets?

We took them to meets all over the place. To meet at Dunstable?

Yeah.

I missed it this year. Ted Larter used to do it, right? Yeah.

Yeah, I used to go all over the place, up Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, down Connecticut and Rhode Island. That was fun. And when I had a heart attack, I got rid of all that heavy iron, started building models.

They can be just as cantankerous as the big ones, and they can run just as nice as the big ones too. But it was fun making them. I can carry them around.

If it starts raining at the shore, I can put them inside the truck. They don't get wet. So you went to the Steam and Wireless Museum down in East Greenwich.

Oh, yeah. That's kind of neat. Have you been there?

Yes. That's neat. Actually, that's a relation.

Oh, really? Bob Merriam. Yeah.

Bob and Nancy. Yeah, that's a neat place. You ever set up down there?

I have a little story.

It's not my tape, but I was down at the Steam and Wireless, and I was in the wireless exhibit, and my call sign was K1ZOL.

And there was a fellow in front of me when we were looking at exhibits, and his hat was the next call letter to mine. So it turns out we were there on the same day at the customs house in Boston taking our exam. So we had adjacent call letters assigned.

Pretty good. Back about 1961 or so. Yeah.

So that was fun to meet a guy so much later. Oh, geez, yeah. Yeah, it is quite a place.

They have a lot of big engines from mills, horizontal engines and so on. One of them they cut a hole in the roof of the building because it was too big to move, and lifted it up by crane, I guess. Oh, yeah?

They have pictures of the restoration. They have volunteers working the place. So that's the kind of place you would love because you're the ham and the engine guy.

Yeah, there was a lot of engines, yeah. And they have steam engines and a lot of different projects that people bring down there. Yeah.

Did you know Tim Larter very well? Well, I know him. I did know him very well.

He had the mill over in the wall that became the, was it one of the Lancet mills? Yeah. And it became the textile museum for a while, and then they settled down.

And now it's a little brewery and restaurant. Is that right? I think so, yeah.

Well, I didn't know that. Yeah, that Dunstable shows. It's always the first one of the year on this area.

It's a nice show. Somehow or other, I missed it this year. Well, I'm not into engines as seriously as I was for a number of years there.

Engines are hard to find. You know, there's not many big engines left around New England yet. They've been pretty well bought up by the Midwestern guys.

Some big, big collectors out in the Midwest. Canandaigua has a big meet now. Every year they have traction engines and all kinds of stuff out there.

That's in New York City. The biggest show around is Kinzers, Pennsylvania. Oh, that's a granddaddy of them all down in Amish country. I've been to that one several times. So what about in town here? What's your involvement with the Historical Society Museum across the road from where we're at right now?

What's my involvement? Yeah, I know you were active a few years back. I was the museum manager for, I don't know, three or four years, something like that.

It was fun. Got a lot of things accomplished. Who was running it when you were working over there?

Was it Richard Lahue? No. Bernie.

Bernie Ready. Bernie Ready, yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Then John Goffin came along and then Carol Merriam. Yeah. Yeah, Bernie's still pretty active.

He runs the Fair every fall in September. So what projects did you work on over there as museum manager? What did we do?

Well, the underneath of the barn, we made the Ralph Parlee addition there. That entails getting about three or four truckloads loads of dirt and ledge from underneath there. And Charlie Parlee graciously donated the gravel.

We've got six inches of stone covered with plastic, and we've got that cement floor that Charlie put in there. That was a big project. We just had our dinner there a couple weeks ago and set up tables, had it all decorated.

That used to just plain be a barn cellar. In fact, that's where the cow poop used to go. Okay.

I guess there was big piles left over. There was none there when the museum got it all taken out. I think they used to store cars and things.

Yeah. It was a dirt floor, and some parts of it were not deep enough to stand up in. It was quite a job excavating that out.

And then, oh, I forget what, when the pipes burst, we had to rebuild quite a bit of it. Is this the second floor bathroom? Yeah.

The water damaged the wall, and a couple of years ago, the wall started to buckle outward from where the bathroom water was. That was the bathroom we removed and made office space up there. Yes, yes.

Yeah, actually, it's a work room. Yeah. And it's plenty of room.

The wide boards and everything with the boards in the other rooms. Yeah. We had to shore up the floor joists in the, I don't know what you call the room, the parlor room there.

They were rotted out. We had to shore that up. Is that on the second floor or the first floor?

No, on the first floor. First floor. Yeah.

Second floor is getting pretty bouncy. Yeah. Well, it's an old building, and there's no end to repairs.

I think it would have. Well, we got a new roof for all five buildings. Oh, yeah.

That was a good deal. It was 80 square, John told me, 80 square. That's a lot of roof. That building used to be a lot different. The barn, half of the barn has been taken off. Actually, how do we describe it?

The section of the country store used to be a lot longer. It was probably 40 feet of that's been taken off. Really? Which sidee? This side here, yeah. Oh.

Yeah. That was taken off. And the potting shed where the gun museum is now, my father added that on for Murray.

Military museum, that is. Yeah, military museum. Was it a greenhouse or was it a shed?

Well, there used to be a greenhouse attached to it. The foundation is still there. Murray put that on.

That was neat. He had orchids and all kinds of things in there. And that, what do you call it, the military museum, that appendage to the building was not there originally.

And also the section that is now an apartment, that whole thing used to be an open porch between the main house and the barn. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah.

When Mr. Murray refurbished it, when Mr. Murray got it from Morton Jeffords, it was just a real decrepit old run-down farmhouse that was ready to fall on the soil just about. Murray put a lot of time and a lot of money into that. Do you remember what year the Murrays bought it?

I really don't. I don't have a reference to that. It must have been, oh, geez.

It was before he built this house. No, it wasn't. Jeffords lived there then.

Jeffords got pissed off at me because I put the mailbox where I did. So he put his mailbox right opposite mine. Jeffords used to be a school superintendent.

Okay.

He was an old Vermonter, a crusty old Vermonter. He used to go up to Vermont deer hunting every season. One year he got two deer with his car.

Accidentally or on purpose? No, accidentally. Oh.

Both on trips to go deer hunting. He happened to hit them. So was he there before Ted Alcorn?

No. Ted Alcorn bought it from, I don't remember the guy's name. He was a cow farmer. [Harry Greene and then Joseph Sweeney, both in 1944]

So was it an active cow farm at that time?

Yeah, it was a cow farm before Ted bought it, yeah. And Ted was into rehabbing houses. Rehabbing houses.

Because you said it was in tough shape when he was ... Oh, it was real tough. So it sounds like he didn't rehab his own house for a while.

No, no. He was just a country bachelor. He was a real nice guy, but he was very unique, one of a kind.

So he sold real estate as well as his own rehab? Well, yes. He'd buy distressed property.

But he wasn't like an agent, like Brad Emerson. No, no, no, no.

He was just a lone operator by himself, wheeler and dealer. His brother, he used to own a farm down in 27 also. His brother Walter acquired it.

Walter committed suicide down there. Walter Alcorn? Yeah.

He had diabetes real bad. And he had a leg amputated in one day. Where was that? Was that down as far as Jones Farm or this side? Well, if you get down the end of the street here and take a right, the first house on the left, right past the nursery. Yeah, there was a nursery down at the bottom of the hill there.

Oh. Didn't know that. The land across, what do they call that now? [George B.B Wright Reservation]

There was a nursery. In fact, that's where that magnolia tree came from. Oh, in your front yard?

Yeah. There were several of those down there. So it was commercial.

You can go in and buy shrubs. Yeah, they raised shrubs and so forth.

The nursery. [Robin Hill Nursery]

That was many years ago. Anyhow, get down there. It's the first farmhouse on the left.

You know, there's a street that goes down there on the left. Well, right across from the nursery. Essentially right across.

By the road. No, essentially [Burning Tree Lane] is right essentially opposite Brush Hill Road which is the next street down as you go west on 27.

Yeah.

It's the next one down from Parker Road. That's where Walter Alcorn lived, yeah.

Okay. They used to stay there when I was a kid. That was an interesting thing.

Speaking of farmers, did you know Walter Lewis very well? Did I know Walter Lewis? He was over on Robin Hill.

Yeah. Not too far from there. We used to get milk from him.

Did you? Yeah. He had a herd of cows down there.

He used to deliver milk. Put it on the front step.

Oh, for here?

Oh, he used to deliver here? Yeah. Okay, yeah, yeah.

And you had one of those metal boxes. Yeah, it would take six bottles or so.

Yeah.

With the cream, little cream bowl on the top. Yeah. What do you call it?

A cardboard cap? Yeah. I think his barn burned about 1970.

They just turned that into a handicap access garden. Yeah. This last year.

Yeah. The Chelmsford Open Space Stewards. They once got the award at the annual dinner at the Historic Society.

Yeah, it's a good outfit. They work hard. I was amazed.

I walked down to Red Wing Farm down on Maple Road.

Yeah.

And the trails, you can walk for quite a long time down there. There's trails, bridges. You can walk through the marsh and over streams and up to the rail trail.

Oh, yeah. Back around the ponds by the farm.

Quite a place. Mm-hmm. So I imagine it was pretty impassable before they got their hands on it.

Yeah, it was just a swamp down back there. Yeah, yeah. So what other characters lived in this neighborhood?

Well, down at the Billy Byam House, that's the first house of the right as you come up Byam Road. It was Ray Case and George Hicks, a couple of old bachelors. George stayed home, took care of the house, and Ray was an actuary in Boston.

A couple of nice guys. They'd been all over the world, and they had gardens down there that just plain don't stand. Some of them still there.

Flower gardens. Flower gardens, yeah. Yeah, they were a couple of nice guys.

And who else? Well, before Belville headed the farm up there, there used to be Jenkins. That was a cow farm up there, too, on the corner of Batten Hill Road and Byam Road.

And Jenkins, his wife was a schoolteacher, and he was a cow farmer, and he had two daughters. So you say William Belville bought one of those farms? Because he also was down at Acton Road and Robin Hill that the Belville family...

Down on that farm? Yeah, that was his father. Oh, Walter.

Okay. Yeah. So which Belville owns the house now that you're talking about?

Well, Walter's dead. The father's dead. Bill is dead. William Belville. Okay, he's the one in the square down there. That was his father or somebody down there.

Yeah, and the one you're talking about is the paving contractor. Yeah. And he just did my driveway a couple of years ago.

Well, he had two sons. Billy Belville and Walter. Walter built that big house up on top of the hill there.

Oh, okay. That land was all Jenkins. On Byham?

Huh? On Byam here? No, on Barton Hill.

On Barton Hill. Okay. Yeah.

I guess I haven't been up Barton Hill before. I'll have to take a run up there sometime. That's the first left up here.

Yes, I've seen it. I just said I've never driven up there. Oh, you haven't? Oh. No, so I'll check it out. I've got a recommendation.

Yeah, that side of the road was Jenkins. He had cows. So when you came here, this part of town was still pretty agricultural.

Oh, it was, pretty definitely, yeah. There's two cows in town. They're up near the McCarty School. That guy just has them mainly for beefers or for a hobby.

Is that Manny?

I think that's the name, yeah. I think that's the name, yeah. I think he had horses there in the triangle.

Yeah, yeah. You think that's it for cows? Yeah, you get two cows there.

And that's it in town, huh? Yeah, I don't know of any other cows in town. There used to be a lot of cows in town.

There used to be a lot of farms. Yeah, so Frank Warren doesn't have any, and Charlie Wojtas doesn't have any. They're mainly turned over the soil for crops.

And Charlie used to have chickens. There were a lot of chicken farms in town. Oh, yeah. On Pine Hill, there was a couple of major chicken farms. World War II, all the people down around Hunt Road, well, all over town, they raised chickens. Raymond Reed probably had 10,000 laying hens.

And Vincent Reed, he probably had five or 10,000 hens. Where was their farm? They were over where the new apartments are.

On the other side of? The other side of 110 there. 495?

The other side of 110. The other side of 110, okay. Yeah.

And right at the intersection of. . .

Off Hunt Road and 110? Right at the intersection of 110 and Hunt Road, the Greek family down there, I can't think of their name, they had, jeez, they probably had about 10,000 hens. And Kenneth Reed up here on Park Road, oh, crap, I don't know, he probably had 5,000 hens.

They all did, didn't they? The military used to buy the chickens. This was a big chicken-raising area.

I think Denise Mackerel lived right across the street from 110 and Hunt. I think she grew up there. I think the Greek family you were talking about, I think Denise Mackerel, she works at Enterprise Bank and she's on the Chelmsford Business Association.

Oh, yeah? I think she grew up at that house you were just talking about. Yeah.

Herbert Reed used to live on the other side there. That was one of the Reeds. He was the chemist down at Chelmsford Ginger Ale.

Oh, Herbert Reed. Herbert Reed, yeah. That's a little factoid.

He had an automobile accident at the end of Warren Avenue and Route 4. He ran off the road somehow there and hit a tree and killed himself there. That was an accident.

Warren Avenue is pretty straight. Yeah, he was driving on Route 4. There's a big tree in the corner.

That's probably the one he hit. Yeah. Yeah, he was the chemist down at the Chelmsford Ginger Ale.

Did you ever go there or work there when you were younger? No. No?

No.

So were you sad to see the plant go when it tore it down? It didn't mean nothing to me. When I first moved here, it was all sort of covered in ivy.

They had the wall built across. You didn't really see the plant. So it wasn't until later when I saw the pictures that I could tell what it looked like.

Speaking of that area, you know the hotel there? The Central House? Yeah, Central House.

Did you ever notice up on the two chimneys on either side of that they've got cast iron owls up there? No, I didn't notice that they were cast iron. Is that to keep the birds off?

To keep the pigeons off. Okay. I guess they've been there forever.

I've been meaning to get down there with a camera and a telephoto lens and get a picture of the owls on top of the chimney. I know sometimes at marinas they put them on posts, wharf piers. Oh, I bought a plastic one for my blueberry bushes up there.

It didn't work. It didn't work, huh? Yeah, it didn't work.

I don't know why I said that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, when blueberries are ripe there, birds are there. But those are apparently to keep the pigeons off down there. They must work.

They're still up there. Well, who wants to take them down after they put them up? Yeah, I wonder if Brad Emerson put those up or if they were there before he got it.

I think they were there before he got it.

Yeah.

I think I've seen some old pictures of that thing. You know, some of your old books. And you can just barely see something on top of the chimney, and it's them.

They look to be about that high. Mm-hmm. Maybe they sold them at some point for that purpose.

Probably did. Yeah. So what else?

Did you go up the fire tower when you were younger and climb up the dunes? Yeah, they used to be able to go up the fire tower. I can't remember the guy's name that used to sit up there.

Nice old fellow. He lived down on Concord Road. He used to come up on his bicycle, an old fellow, sit up there during the forest fire season.

You can see all over the place from up there. That tower was not on state land, the tower that's there now. I don't know how it eventually ironed out.

But during the 1938 hurricane, the tower that was up there blew down, so they built another tower. Well, instead of having it here, they put it over here, and it wasn't their property. That was part of the dispute when Ted Alcorn owned the land there.

Oh, he owned the hill? Oh, he owned that by the way, all the way up there. So that was Ted's land they put the tower on?

Or was it Ted's land? Well, we were on the land at the time, yeah. Actually, we have a good picture of the two towers together.

They built a temporary tower after the hurricane blew the original one down. Of course, we have pictures of the original one. Then we got the temporary and the new tower, which is at a different location together.

And Lester Ball, who was an officer at the Historic Society, he was one of the people that manned that for a period of time. He did? Yeah, we got pictures of him up there with the chart, the big circular chart, and another picture of him leaning out the window up on the tower.

Oh, yeah. Somebody took him down below. Yeah, that old guy that lived down there on Concord Road, I can't think of the name, he used to come up on a bicycle, long, gray hair, old guy, real gentleman.

Well, Lester had a tour there, so that was him. Yeah, I know Lester, yeah. Yeah, they had a nice view from up there.

You could see all over the place. There used to be a lot of fire towers all through the White Mountains. They've been taken down.

There's one up on Red Hill, up by, like, Winnipesaukee.

Winnipesaukeee. That's still there?

As far as I know, I walked up a few years ago over the valley. Yeah, they've been up that one. There's one in Pelham.

Yeah. There used to be one up on Mount Osceola. I slept up in it while I'm climbing up there.

And quite a few others, yeah. It's Jeremy Hill in Pelham is the name of that one. Yeah.

I guess we were working on a history book that Eleanor Parkhurst wrote, and they performed a very valuable service before communications, before the radio communications. Oh, yeah. It got better.

Actually, they could radio from there and summon help in plotting the position. They were the only ones that could see some of these fires that happened out in the middle of the woods. Oh, yes.

Yeah, they'd point that adlidade at it and across, and some of the guys would want to drop and say, hey, you know, I'm so many degrees and we're across. That's where the fire was within a few hundred feet. They've fenced in the base of the tower up there a few years back.

The state police have radio equipment up there that's connected to these call boxes along 495.

Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

Call boxes have been in since 495, since after 495 was put in, I think, way back. I think they went out of service for a while, and then they resurrected. I don't know if they're in there or not.

There's a building at the bottom of the tower. You'd go up there and drop rocks through the roof of the tower and probably damage the radio equipment. So they fenced it in with a chain link.

You can't get up there now. Well, you couldn't a few years ago. Yeah, it's a shame.

I remember in the 70s when we first came to town, we took a ride up and we went up. I think there was somebody in the tower where we walked around and got a full view. It's nice up there.

It used to be great to go up there on Fourth of July and look at the fireworks all over the place. You can see them all the way into Boston. People fly their private planes around to see the fireworks like that.

Did you? No, I haven't. But usually when there's fireworks, you see a few planes flying around, checking it out.

Jeez, speaking of flying the planes, we used to have quite an air force down at Bedford that Raytheon did. Where you worked at the Bedford? Yeah, I used to get up there once in a while.

One time we were flying around. I said, let's fly up over my house. Okay.

We'll just look for the fire tower. Well, you can't see that fire tower from the air. We had the chance to fly 27 miles to Byam Road to find out my house from the air.

Because it looks more two-dimensional. When you look at it sideways, the hills really stand out. But from the air, it's just another green space.

Yeah, you don't see the tower from the air. Well, once we located here, of course we could see the tower. Yeah, it's a square thing with all the trees.

I worked for Raytheon over in Tewksbury part-time. When I'd go between the caf and the office, you'd get a nice clear view of Boston on one side and a nice clear view of the tower on the other side of Robin Hill. From where?

From Tewksbury. Oh, really? Yeah.

Every day? Yeah. We see the Prudential and the tall buildings down in Boston.

We see the TV antennas in Needham and Robin Hill in Chelmsford. It's the most prominent hill as you're looking west. So you didn't work in Bedford?

No, I went to Bedford a lot working with people at the components building you mentioned and the hangar back since the 70s. But I was mainly in Andover. I was one of the first people in the Andover plant on Route 93.

Oh, okay. And then they moved me over to Tewksbury. There's five of us that went up to the Shawsheen plant and opened that thing up.

It was a rotten, dirty old mill. I was one of the guys who closed it because when they set up the new plant on 93, which isn't so new now, I was one of the first people to move out of Shawsheen and move over to the new plant.

So 41 years later, I'm still walking around with the same building that I was in when it opened. Oh, yeah? Yeah.

Yeah, it used to park right up inside the U when we first went up there. Then they had moved parking out back. Oh, yeah, because of the parking lot out back there, yeah.

That was used for Hawk missile production since 1957 or so. I remember when I was a kid, we used to drive 133 to get up to my grandparents. You could see missile launchers and stuff out in the front.

Oh, yeah.

They worked out in the front.

They had hydroform there. That was quite a thing. Do you remember that machine?

No. It was three stories tall. You used to punch out the accumulators, accumulator halves.

It was like a derby hat. It was quarter-inch steel. You put the plate in there, pressed them down like a derby hat.

They'd weld the two sections together. So that was in one of the buildings? That was in the building that's closest to the street. It's all Brickstone Plaza now or Brickstone Properties. Yeah, it was nicely restored. That's quite a place to see that grow from a rotten, dingy, old mill.

All linoleum on the floors and the old-fashioned lights and oh cripes. So what about town? Do you remember town here in Chelmsford?

Do you remember going to Town Hall for business or events or anything? In fact, up until about 1965, it was a really crowded municipal office, but it was Town Hall. So did you have to go there to do business?

Do you remember much about that? I was on the Board of Appeals for 25 years. Oh, you were?

Tell me about it. Well, I was on the Board of Appeals. Where was your office?

Well, we were all over the place. We were in the old Town Hall, and we were over in the Center School, and the new Town Hall in the old High School there. Yeah, things changed a lot in those 25 years.

So what kinds of projects did people bring to you? What are some of the most memorable ones? Well, some of them I really shouldn't talk about.

Some of them you had to shoot down? Yeah, some of them I had to shoot down. Well, they made a lot of people happy and a lot of people sad.

What were the main issues or the main reasons why you shut down? Wetlands? Oh, wetlands, yeah.

People built something where they shouldn't build it. There was one fellow, yeah, without saying where or what, there was one fellow that came in one year and wanted to put a porch on the side of his house, too close to somebody's land. Turned him down. Not enough setback. Hmm? Not enough setback.

That's right. He'd come back a year later. What a little difference.

Yeah, we turned him down. The next thing you know, he put the damn porch up there. Wow, so he built the porch, got turned down twice, and then he built it?

Yeah, he built it. And he'd come in, the neighbors complained. Now, this was funny.

It was diagonal to the property line. And everybody was tearing the thing up because, you know, he defied us. I said, well, why don't we just take that corner off and put a door there?

That'll get you a setback. That did it. It's still there.

Why tear something off? He could have built it without violating the setback right up front.

Yeah.

And he flaunted it and built it the way he wanted to build it. The way he wanted it. Well, we took off the corner and put the door to get on the porch on the part he took off.

It looks fine. Everybody's happy.

Hey, we got him.

So there wasn't any financial penalty or anything like that? No. As long as he did what he needed to do to fix it.

Yeah. It was very interesting. Some of the Boston lawyers had come up there, and I guess they figured we were country hicks, you know.

They'd try and put things over on us. Pace up back and forth. There was one big lawyer from Boston that used to come up.

He'd pace back and forth. And now this is what. He'd go back and forth and take a puff on a cigar. Ah, so and so and so. Oh, it was comical. We couldn't laugh at him though.

But he didn't get what he wanted either. So was this all during Bernie Lynch's town manager government? Or was this before that?

Yeah, it was during Bernie Lynch's term, yeah. Before that, I guess the town was run by the selectmen. Yeah.

And it was old Claude Harveyy that appointed me to it. It was an appointed position, old Claude Harvey, the one at Harvey Building and Wrecking, that appointed me to the Board of Appeals. It was an appointed position.

So that was before the town manager. Yeah. And then you went in, when the town charter commission recommendations got implemented, and you went with the town manager system, and you were still on it.

Got carried over? Yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed that.

Put a lot of time into that damn thing. I think we did some good. Remember any of the other folks that were on it with you?

I remember, yeah. Eileen Duffy was a real good member. She knew the bylaws upside down, inside out, and round about.

And Danny Burke, he was the chairman way back when I first started there. He worked for Raytheon, a fine gentleman, really knowledgeable of the law. Yeah, there's been some good people on there.

Remember any others? Yeah, Ronnie Pere from East Chelmsford. He was on there for many, many years.

He was on there for probably 20 years. He was good. And I don't really remember some of the others.

I can see them, but I can't remember the names. What else in town? What other favorite stories do you have or people?

We got into some good stories about people in the neighborhood here over the years. Yeah. How about events, parades, celebrations, concerts, anything in particular that stands out?

Of course, we've had, like I said, Walter Hedlund talked about picking up the 4th of July parade. And he worked with groups that, even up to the present, groups that sponsor that and manage the parade. What was your parade time?

Did you get involved in anything like that? No. Well, I was in the parade a couple of times.

One time I, oh, twice, yeah. One time, we used to have sled dogs, too. Did you know that? In the parade? With wheels? No.

I had sled dogs here. I used to race sled dogs. Oh, I didn't know that, no.

You didn't know that? No, no. For about 20 years I raced sled dogs.

Building in the back? Huh? Building in the back?

Yeah, right outside here. Okay. Behind that fence.

Yeah, I raced sled dogs all over New England and up in Alaska. Okay. Forgot to mention that.

So was that when you got into the communication that you did around? No, that was before that. Before that.

Yeah, that was, let's see, my daughter's been married up there for about 30 years. About 30 years ago I did the communication work. Oh, so she's in Alaska?

Yeah, she still lives up in Alaska. Yeah, one time we were in the parade. I had the dog truck with, you know, the compartments on the side.

I had 10 dogs in the truck and the two sleds up on top of the dog box. And I just drove right to the parade. Another time we, when I was into the old engines.

I had a trailer with a couple of big engines on the trailer, you know, putting away. And a couple of smaller engines on the back of the pickup truck, putting away. Remember what year that was?

No, I don't remember. 60s or 70s or? Well, it had to be about, I don't know, Barbara's been dead 10 years.

It had to be about 15 years ago. Oh, okay. Yeah, you know, the fun part about that, Norn Jones down on Locust Road and I both had engines in the parade.

Well, the parade ended up in a Purity parking lot. There's a stop and shop now. And several old-timers followed us down there.

They wanted to get close to the engines and remind them of the old farm days. They used to use them for powering the saws. Powering everything, yeah.

Anything that needed power in a farm, that's what they used. But they ended up making it all pop, pop, pop. And it sounded great. Very nostalgic. If they weren't under load, the spark didn't fire. They just coast.

You put a load on them and they'd fire more every time. I had actually an uncle out in Victor, New York who ran a saw, and one time I was there, we cut up some wood with that thing, so I'm real familiar with the sound, it's kind of neat and nostalgic sound. It's not as quiet as a steam engine, but it's nostalgic.

I remember, earlier we mentioned Warren Wright, who was the town assessor that lived down here on Robin Hill Road. He had one arm missing. The story goes that he fell into one of those old buzz saws when he was sawing wood.

It didn't stop him, he was the town assessor for many years. I remember getting very angry at that guy one time.

He sent me a tax bill for my racing boat. I said, what the heck are you taxing me on a boat for? He said, well, I've got a rowboat in my barn, I don't use it, but I pay a tax on it.

I said, yeah, you pay a tax on it, sure you do. Yeah, personal property tax for the boat. So you've got a nice sketch of a dog team up there?

Oh, that's, yeah, that's my, somebody took a picture of one of my, me at one of the races and there was a five dog team and did a pen and ink drawing of a picture. Nice. You know the person, number 58?

Yeah, it was Bob Stevens' son from Meredith, New Hampshire. And then you've got a couple of nice dogs over here, portraits of some of your pets. Those are only dogs, some of my dogs, yeah. Yeah, different girls made them for me. I swapped a sled for that drawing. I used to build dog sleds.

That was fun. Oh, along with your, all the spare time you had, you built dog sleds? Yeah, learned about stream banding and, yeah, it was kind of fun.

I built a lot of sleds. I got some sleds still running up in Alaska. That's many years ago.

I don't know where any of the others are. Yeah, the clocks are all homemade. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Kit or scratch? No, they're from scratch.

That one says 1840 there. Oh, I buy the works, of course. I didn't make the works, but I made the cases.

There's a grandmother clock downstairs and a granddaughter clock and there's, I think, three or four clocks in every room. That was one of the hobbies I got into when, you know, I saw one. Hey, that's a lot of fun to make another one.

Another hobby. Yeah.

So what's the latest hobby? Just this. The ham radio.

It's been here since I was a kid and it's still, still very interesting. So how often do you come in and fire up the equipment?

Every day. Every day? Yeah.

You look at the... So do you listen and see, see who's out there and somebody's... It's just, today I didn't do much on that.

I talked to a guy in the Ukraine. Yesterday I talked to a guy in Borneo, a guy in Sardinia and China. The day before that I talked to a guy in the Guernsey Islands.

That's over in a English Channel. Yeah, near Scotland. Lithuania, Italy, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Russia and San Marino.

That was the day before. It's typical. So are you all doing this in English?

Yeah, most of the people around the world speak English. Of course the ham code, the... I like CQ and all that, that's universal.

It's universal, yeah. A lot of the contacts are very short. Hey, your signal is such and such and the radio is such and such, the antenna is such and such.

But every once in a while you get into a conversation and talk about, you know, the area and what you're doing and so forth.

Of course it's a little bit more work when you're talking with your fingers, but...

No, it's a lot easier than talking by voice. Oh yeah, it's easy. So what's your speed up to?

Well, conversational, 50 words a minute.

Really?

I haven't typed... That's faster than most people can type. Yeah, I've copied 40, I think, 48 words a minute on a typewriter.

But conversational, I mean, it's just so much faster, yeah. Because when you and I speak here, I don't take notes and I don't write down. We just talk back and forth.

When you're talking to somebody in code or CW, it's the same way. Hey, my name is Gus, I live in Chelmsford, don't need to write that down. My rig runs a Kilowatt here and the antenna is such and such.

It's snowing out today, it's raining and I've just been shopping or whatever. You know, you don't need to write it down because I don't write down the way I'm talking to you. Just key points so you can send out a QSL card with all the key...

Yeah, I don't send them to everybody. I just send cards to the countries I want. And there's only...

I've got them all on single sideband or voice and CW code. And I've got almost all of them on... I'm lacking about six to have them all on CW and about seven to get them all on sideband.

But combined, you've got them all. But combined, I've got them all. Gotcha.

It's kind of like climbing the 4,000 foot New England and the 4,000 foot New Hampshire or White Mountains. Yeah. It's just a different way.

Categorizing. Pardon? That's a slightly different category, but it's the same principles.

Yeah. So it's like a collection, collecting countries. Well, correct me if I'm wrong, I must have 10,000, 12,000 cards from around the world.

These are just loaded with cards. See? I get...

All well organized, you can... All loaded, loaded, yeah, yeah. But then in the closet there, I get...

You know, I get five cabinets full in the closet. Yeah, it's a good hobby. All the rugs are homemade.

My wife made all the rugs. Oh. I used to make all the...

Most of the furniture on... That's a Raytheon desk. But most of the furniture on the desks and everything downstairs is homemade.

It's a homemade house. So you've got a woodworking shop and a metalworking shop? Yeah.

Oh, let's go on, let's see.

Yeah. Yeah, homemade, of course. Well, of course.

There's another lamp back there with a... Oh, big tube, big transcender tube. Yeah, 833.

They came out of the hangar down in Bedford. Had the tube there. Well, as an old guy, a Raytheon myself, I inherited a large vacuum tube.

And so when I retired a couple years ago, I passed it along to another old timer. And he just retired recently, but now I'm back to work. So I'm not sure where that tube went, but...

Oh, yeah.

Not too many of us remember using tubes, but I do.

Yeah. So the transistors that you use, those were developmental CK series transistors.

720, CK722. Oh. Yeah.

Okay, so you used CK722. Yeah.

All right, I identify with that because when that Raytheon CK722 came out, I went down to Boston. They had that electronics section down at Scolly Square.

Yeah.

And I bought one of those. And I had been using tubes before that to build little amplifiers and things. And I used that myself way back in the...

I'm sure there's something in there. The late 50s. So about the same time frame when you were communicating across the Atlantic, I was fiddling with a similar transistor.

I'm going to put the light on over there. You're going to see something that you won't see many of. This is back in the...

It's down there someplace. That's a point contact transistor. That's one of the very first ones.

You can see the hole in the side? Yeah. Look in there.

You see the contacts? I see it, right. That's germanium.

Yeah, early germanium. Kind of like the cat's whisker almost. Yeah, and it worked like that.

Well, when I worked over in the tube plant, they were just developing the transistors over there. They'd take the geranium and run it through a hydrogen furnace to purify it. And they would slice it and dice it in small sections.

I think it's probably about an eighth inch square inside there. And they'd mount it in that little brass cylinder. They'd put two contacts down there.

Set screw to clamp it in place. Then they'd put in a test jig and apply voltage to it while they're watching it on a strobe. And the little points there would get hot and dance around on there.

And when it hit the hot spot, they shut off the voltage and hope they stayed there. Turn on the set screw, lock it in place. And they'd drop a glyptol on there to hold it in place and hope it stayed there.

So that was some of the very first experimental transistors there. That's cute. Yeah, it's a socket on it there.

There's a contact, there's a socket. So the case is one contact, and then there's two. Yeah, the emitter and collector.

Yeah, they go to the little fingers that push against the block. Yeah. That's something, huh?

I don't know, can't say I've ever seen anything like that. So, you've got to start some place, and that was it.

So I see an Arctic Circle certificate over here.

What does that indicate? Now, is that from... Oh, that's from Alaska.

That's from taking your own dogs? Or did you ever take your own dogs up there? No.

Oh, okay. No, that was just for flying across the Arctic Circle when we were up there. I go up there, my daughter flies, she works for a good one up there.

She's constantly chartering planes and using planes, the bush planes, for roughly every 10 flights with a certain pilot where she gets a freebie. She had a whole drawer full of freebies. So when I go up there, all I do is fly from village to village to village to village, so I see Alaska that very few people get to see.

So it's like frequent flyer flights? Yeah, essentially, in the little bush planes. You crawl in the back, do a crawl over all the luggage and the groceries and freight and sit up beside the pilot and away you go.

So what hobby should we discuss? You must have three or four hobbies.

Yeah, there must be someplace around there. You didn't talk about the cannon hobby. Well, it's just machine work.

Okay, so you just built a few models, a few working models. Yeah, I happened to have some nice brass and I said, oh, we're going to do this. Gave you an excuse to set off some fireworks.

So those two big ones on the mantle there, they're one-tenth scale of what's on that Constitution. And I get some Black Power reviews. And boy, when I fire one of those things, it makes a noise.

I fired them off beside the house. Yeah, that goes down across the valley here. I've done that on the 4th of July.

I don't think I'd do it anymore. Not with neighbors around. Somebody might call 911.

I was on the Constitution one day and they fired a cannon. They actually have a standard military cannon inside what looks like an antique gun. Oh, really?

They have a serviceable breech-loaded gun for the actual fire. And the others are for decoration, the other ones are for decoration. So that was one of those little things you learn when you take the tour.

Oh, yeah. You know, that information. So do you do any QRP? [low power transmitter]

I know that the transatlantic call that you made was about 10 milliwatts of RF power. Yeah, about that. And that is really tiny.

It's infinitesimal. Do you get into that now at all or do you use the big gun here? Once in a while, I crank this thing down to 5 watts, something like that, just for the heck of it.

So you have an exciter? This is a transceiver.

So this is a power amp that you have? It's just an amplifier for it, yeah. 1500 watts, depending on what that bypass is at.

Yeah.

It's a Frenchman.

Yeah, 5.89. What's that signal?

French. Yeah.

Thanks for the fine report. It's a 5.99 flush now to get that on. So just 5 watts?

Yeah, you call it 50 watts. 50 watts. He's running 15 watts.

Wow. 3 element antenna. Antenna's up 11 meters.

Yeah. I've got no control. What's going on in his amp today?

Well, he's running 15 watts. The antenna's a 3 element beam. The weather's not bad.

So? Boy, I can see that. You can read it as fast as you can talk, just about.

That's amazing. And I noticed, too, you can't see it on the audio tape. Where's the audio tape?

I don't know what we're making here, but the lights dim every time you hit the key. That thing's on 220. This is on 120.

Oh, shut it off.

Is it playing?

No, that. I think it's the big transmitter. Oh, it does have an antenna.

Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. What's that?

Funny thing. It reminded me of when Marty lived over there. I had a homemade.

Everything was homemade, and I was running a kilowatt. And I was running it on 110. You know, what comes in is 220.

Half the house is on one side and half is on the other. Well, Marty kept asking me, he says, do your lights blink? I said, no, they don't blink.

He kept that up. After about a month, he had the light company up there with a recording voltmeter. Of course, this blink is faster than a recording voltmeter can keep up with, so they doubted him.

One day he called me up. He says, are you playing with the radio? He says, the lights stopped blinking.

Are you on the radio? I said, yeah. So his lights were on the side I was drawing a kilowatt off of, and the transformer is 800 feet down there.

It was only a little 1kW pole pig. So we had a big drop on 110. We fixed that by going up to 220.

I love that. So he saw what we were seeing in the room here. It was so funny at the time to me, you know, your lights blink?

No, they didn't blink, because I was on the other side. On the other side of 110 were the lights, and the rig was on the side that he was looking at. That was mystery solved.

Yeah, I enjoyed that. I really did enjoy it. Well, we can wrap it up here, if you'd like.

Well, I can't think of anything else. I don't know if we've covered much of anything, but well, of interest, that is. Have a little fun, talked about a few characters in the neighborhood here.

Yeah. A little bit of hobby talk. A lot of hobby talk.

So, some people might find that interesting.

+Interviewer - So, thank you very much, Gus, for allowing us to come in and chat with you here.