Interviewer - So, let me just start off with, today is May 7, 2010, and I'm here at Harrington Liquors with John Harrington in the boardroom at the shop.

So, why don't you start off, John. When did your family come to town?

John Harrington - Okay, Fred, my family goes back to the turn of, not the last century, the century, you know, 1909.

Over 100 years ago. Yeah, a little over 100 years ago, we're from Ireland, my grandparents came in. They originally moved into Lowell for a short period of time, and then they moved out to 155 Boston Road.

My family has lived right on Boston Road since that time. I live right now at 149 Boston Road. I built a house there in 1977.

My folks built a house at 145 Boston Road. So, if you take the numbers, 155, my folks built a house at 145, and I built in between them. So, we've been on that street well over 100 years.

And my family is myself and my brother. We're the last two, most of our family has since passed on, on both sides. My father grew up and was born in East Chelmsford.

And I think he's one of the very few I heard as a young fellow that I believe he was born in Chelmsford. Now, that was unusual. That was probably by accident.

They couldn't get to the hospital fast enough. That being Lowell?

Yes.

All of us in Chelmsford were probably born in Lowell. Even though somebody might push a button and say, well, I was born in Chelmsford. But those are very, very few, and that's because they couldn't make it to Lowell.

And I think my father might have been one, or maybe one of his brothers, I'm not sure. But I remember hearing that as a young fellow. But with that being said, I grew up, again, all in Chelmsford, on Boston Road.

I went to the local schools. I started off in the Westlands School for a couple weeks, and I transferred to the McFarlin School from grade one through three. And then in the fourth grade, in 1955, they had built the Center School.

And that was the latest school ever at the time. And I think they changed it with a new addition to it, a new remodeling job. They had, in the ceilings, domes so you could see the sunlight would come in for light.

And that was a big thing back then. But the problem with that is, I can remember as a young fellow, when the sun would be bright and you're sitting there, you'd be cooking with the sunlight coming in. So the teachers would always have to move our desks out of the lights there when the sunlight came in.

And from the Center School, we stayed there until the sixth grade. And then we went to the East School for the seventh grade. And then we transferred over to, which is now the Town Offices.

That was our eighth grade. And then they had built the McFarlin, excuse me, the McCarthy School. And from the ninth grade through high school, through the senior year, I graduated out of the McCarthy School.

So my whole, that's my career as far as schools here in Chelmsford. I went to about every school in this area. And then from there, as a young fellow, I ended up going to college, business school, then college.

Then Uncle Sam had me for a few years. I joined the Marines and went to Vietnam. I spent some time there.

And finally, my tour was over. I came back, went into the Reserves for a few years, into the Marines, which was something that was enjoyable back then. In fact, the Marine Corps was very enjoyable.

I enjoyed that time of my life. But as time went on, I had to get out of the Reserves. I became a police officer. So I didn't have time to do both. And during this whole time, I might add that I always worked at my father's liquor store. And my father and mother started this store in 1947.

And they had a couple locations right in Chelmsford Center. And from Chelmsford Center, we moved up between the old Purity Shop and Center and Marshalls, now it's Stop&Shop and Marshalls. And in 1983, I built this location where we're sitting right now, giving this interview.

So we've been in the liquor business in town and business for 60 years. So going backwards a little bit, I'm jumping around, but I always worked the store as a young fellow in the early 60s, 13 or 14. I used to do bottle returns and wash the windows and work Friday nights and Saturday nights stocking the coolers.

And in between that, I went to college, of course. And then I went into the service. And when I became a police officer, I did that for a number of years.

But I always worked the store. A couple questions. Where were you a police officer?

Oh, in Chelmsford. I had a great shift. It was a one to nine, one in the morning to nine.

And it was a good shift. I did that for over eight years, about eight years. And it was very enjoyable.

Great bunch of guys. In fact, I still go to the retirement parties for them. Most of my guys that we went on together are retired now.

Just the last one was Frank Kelly. He was on when I was on. And guys like Willie Linstead and Dow and Ray McCusker, who ended up being a chief, we all went on at about the same time in the early 70s.

So it was a good bunch of guys. You were always based out of the police station on North Road where the school department is today. Right.

Because that was built about 65 years ago.

Yeah, that was built. That was originally built for in 67. And it was remodeled in 74.

And we come in in the early 70s, about 74, as new officers and police officers, I should say. And unfortunately, that station was a lousy station to begin with. It wasn't built correctly.

It was a small town that thought they were doing, it was light years ahead of what they had. The old police station. Backside of the town hall?

Absolutely. With no lockups, with nothing. So it was great for them when they moved from the old town hall.

But in a very short period of time. And the town of Chelmsford had changed back in the 60s and early 70s. It was growing with Farms 1 and Farms 2.

We were growing and building schools. This community was hopping back then. So that station that was built in 67, remodeled in 74, the roof leaked as long as I can remember.

It was a poorly designed station. So the layout and the construction both were? Very poorly done.

It was just a, however, for some of the older police officers, the ones that were there in the 50s, it was to them, that was the greatest thing. The station you have now, and I wouldn't say part of it, but I saw the plans and was with guys like Chief Caron, Chief McCusker, showing the plans and the ideas they had on the new station. That is a real police station.

That is done correctly. That's a 50-year building, definitely. I mean, there's growth in that building.

That building's well done. Everything is set up proper in that building. So the town's got an asset with the new police department.

But as I say, as a police officer, I enjoyed that job. I had great partners. And it was, in Chelmsford, again, late nights was a little different.

As I said, my shift started at 1 in the morning. Did you drive a cruiser? Oh, yeah.

Check all the businesses around? Our job would definitely be checking buildings and take care of accidents in the morning. When I say 1 in the morning, this shift was a swing shift, which means we took care of the accidents all over the town the first thing in the morning.

The 12 to 8 guys were getting off, so there'd be one hour of floating there. Car 3, which was my car and my partner's car, we had partners back then for a number of years, and then we switched to one-man cruisers. But for a number of years that I was on, I had a partner, John Mack, who ended up being a captain on the police department.

Our job would be to cover that one hour. That's why they had that shift. They haven't had that shift for years.

It was a great shift. Not a lot of guys liked it because going to work at 1 in the morning, there's a certain animal that works nights. You see them on police departments.

Some guys can do it, some can't. They can't sleep during the day. Their whole chemistry can't do it.

But the late-night crews, there's a good crew there. In all departments, there's a certain element that can do that type of a shift. And I enjoyed it.

It worked out great for me because I could still get out in the morning at 9 and come and run the store. So I still could work the store until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, go home, get some sleep, and then come back to the store and then go into my shift. So it worked out very well for me.

And as I said, I did that for a number of years. And the only reason I made a decision to get out of the police department to give my notice was I had decided to build this place that we're in now, and my lease was ending over between Purity and Marshalls, and they were not going to renew. So I had to make a decision.

Stay in the liquor business that my family started, which I took over when my father passed on in the early 70s, or sell it and stay a police officer. So that was a pretty big decision. And then sometimes I wondered, did I make the right decision?

When I see my friends retired at 80% of their salary, some of them, they've done very, very well. But it's good to be your own boss too, as my father was before me. You're running your own business.

So the decision I made was to stay with the business, build this new location, and move on. And that's what I've been doing since I got off the police department, always stayed with the business. So there hasn't been any changes on that.

Now I'm probably looking in a few years to step down and retire and pass it on to my two oldest, which are my two oldest stepchildren that are running the business right now. Can we backtrack to 47, you said? Your father built the store in the center.

Can you describe the building and some of the businesses that surrounded it that you remember? Yeah. Back in 47, I was only a young fellow then, but I remember there was two locations.

Well, there was three locations in the center. One of them is no longer there. It was taken over by an addition from one building to another.

That was, I believe, 22 Central Square. And that's on the side of where Hanley's gift shop is, that side of the center. Then he moved to the very end.

Was that on the Cushing Street side? Yes, Cushing Street. And you're saying that there was a change.

Right. It was kind of like a, I vaguely remember, it was like a small building, a part of a building, and it was taken over by another building. So that ended.

So he tore down a piece and expanded it. Right. So the building is just completely gone.

Right. But then he moved a few doors down where Cushing Street is, right on the very end. Okay.

And I'm trying to think what's in there now. I think there's a mural painted on the wall on Cushing Street side.

It could be, yes. So he was there for about four years, my family, and I remember that as a young fellow. Then the big move was we moved across the street where now you see the upholstery shop, that yellow building.

Michael's Upholstery? Yes. My brother still owns that.

That was given to him when my father passed on, or I should say my mother passed on. So my brother still owns that building. And that store was there up until 72.

That's where we ran the liquor store out of there. And it was a good location, but there was a lot of growth in town. You know, the traffic was horrendous.

It was parallel parking at one time across the street. It was parallel parking, I think, on both sides. I don't remember it on our side.

When I say our side, where the yellow building is, which is 37 Central Square. In fact, the numbers are all goofed up there. If you look, there's odd and even numbers in that center.

On both sides?

Yeah. But that goes way back. But across the street from the yellow building, there was parallel parking.

And that ended in the early 70s. So parking became more and more of a problem in the center. And then we were having some growth problems.

What are we going to do? Parking's a problem. And then Stark and Purity, I should say, was building their new building, and they're building a new Marshalls.

The original store was right in town. It used to be a Godin's store, or it was next to Godin's? Oh, you mean Purity's?

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Originally in the 40s, Purity was right in Chelmsford Center. Absolutely. And you had Page's Drugstore was there.

And Page's Drugstore was in our package store, where my brother owns right now, before my father moved over there. That was a Page's Drugstore. That he moved.

Moved to the right to your building? Yeah, he moved over to the right. So there were some movements down there with businesses, and as time went on, a lot of us, well, Leo Kahn, of course, built his big grocery store in 55, Purity, where you have now, it's pretty well vacant.

CVS is there now. And then in the early 70s. Let me just get oriented.

The CVS is at, where is that? Is that down Route 110? No, it's right over here, right next to Friendly's.

Right next to Friendly's. Got it. Okay, so Purity was in there at one time.

That was his original building. Oh, okay. He built that in 55.

I believe it was 55. I think when I came to town, there was a Best Buy in the back of it, and a bank in the front of it. Yeah.

And then Page's might have been around the other side. Yes. Okay.

They had all those. But that originally, that whole building, not the whole building, but that building was mostly Page's, and there was a shoe store there and a cleaner's there. And the camera was there, too, for a while.

A camera, yeah. Yeah, there was a camera shop there. But that was always, for a number of years, almost 20 years, that was a draw as far as people would come from all over to go to Purity.

I mean, I can remember. That was the big grocery store? Oh, yeah.

I can remember on Friday nights, I'd be working at my father's package store in the center, and they would have approximately four cops doing traffic, letting people out of Purity. And back then, there wasn't one way. I mean, you could go all different ways.

Boston Road was a two-way road. I mean, it wasn't one way like it is now from the library on down. It was two ways.

So they would have police officers letting traffic in and out and so forth, and traffic was just horrendous for a few hours until it kind of broke out. It kind of slowed down around, you know, 7:38. In those days, Purity closed at 9 o'clock at night.

So Friday nights, the center was packed, and it was a lot of walkers. It was a very active center. But then as time went on, it started to die, as I said earlier.

Other places, well, other places started to develop. Eastgate Plaza? Yeah, Eastgate would be one, absolutely.

They drew away from the center. And then you had JM Fields Plaza, the Drum Hill. Yeah.

So those started to draw somewhat away from the center. And Westford started to do some growth. They didn't have the shop and they didn't have the Market Basket at the time, but there was some growth around because we used to draw from Westford and all over coming to the center.

We were the hub of business. Drum Hill then started to pick up and grab some of that, just that JM Fields and so forth. People would come to the grocery store, and then they'd go to the liquor store because it was just a short walk across the parking lot.

So that's where our anchor was for a number of years. And then in the early 70s, 72, my father knew Leo Kahn. Leo said, Hey, you know, I got a little building up here if you're interested.

And that little building was between the Purity and Marshalls. Do you recall? Do you remember that, Fred?

I do, but that was all one big long building, wasn't it? No. It was two separated, really?

It seemed like one building.

It did seem like one long building, but if you drove in back where the receiving was, we had 3,680 square feet. That was a separate. Well, what they did, they built two buildings and they left that little building in the, well, they built that little building.

All that building had, well, my father moved to, to build that was a front wall and a back wall. The side walls was really Purity's wall.

Oh, okay, so it connected. Right.

Two buildings together. They connected, but there wasn't a connection inside. You couldn't walk from one building to the other.

You had to walk outside. That's why it seemed like one building. Yeah, so a lot of people thought it was one building.

It wasn't. And it was a small building, but much bigger for us because we left a building in the center, which is 800 square feet, and we went to a building of 3,680 feet. So you know those numbers because now we're paying rent, and I remember the old building.

And then what did you move to here in 83? We moved here in 83. How many square feet?

Well, you're talking here 8,000 upstairs and 8,000 downstairs to storage. So we have another big increase. A big addition, a big increase, and we're kind of matched out here a little bit.

I could use more space. I did some plans to put an addition on this building, and I have them. I passed all the permits in the town and so forth, but I kind of backed out of it, and I'm glad I did the economy tank.

So I would have had a million-and-a-half-dollar nut to crack. But all the plans are right here, ready to roll. I went through conservation, went through all the boards.

For somebody to do it again, they would have to meet some of the new standards, but it's doable. At that time, I was going to put a 5,000-square-foot addition with a 5,000-foot cellar extension. So we're going to add another 10,000 square feet.

But again, I'm glad I didn't as I sit here because the economy has tanked. So it's the right size for today. Yeah.

As you look at my operation, I don't like clutter. So any time I see a little bit jammed here with a little bit too much inventory is around Christmas time. I was here last Christmas.

I enjoyed that train show. I heard about it for years. Well, we make room for the train.

Really something.

That's something we've done. So that squeezes a few aisles over. Yeah, it squeezes a lot of inventory on the beer side out, but it's a big draw for the store.

We've been doing that since 1985. Parents bring their kids and pick up a few bottles on the way through. And the grandparents.

So tell me the story of the train set. How did that start? Well, the train set started approximately around 1985.

There was a deal with if I bought five cases, I'm going to say CC or seven or ten cases, something very minor, they gave as an incentive a little HO train set. And they suggested you set it up. And they would, me and the distributor, just set out a display guy and put the boxes around, cut cases and so forth, and you could run this little HO and set this little train set.

So I brought it in. I set up a card table. Half the size of this conference table.

Maybe a third of the size of the conference table where we're sitting. And I ran it. And I noticed not only little kids, but grown-ups were looking at it and talking a little bit.

Gee, I used to have something like that and I used to have this. So we played and we used it during the holiday, but it broke down. So I said, well, the next year I said, gee, so maybe I'll use my American Flyer.

A lot of kids my age got American Flyer trains for Christmas, and I had one up in the attic. So I brought that down, and the next year I made the table a little bit bigger and I set up my American Flyer. And I got some comments on that.

One fellow, especially a customer, he loved trains and he said, gee, you need that to be greased and so forth. So he was kind of tinkering with it, and he said it broke down a couple times. It just couldn't do the running the way it was.

Yeah. So he says, you know, you can buy these commercial-type trains down in Malden, I think it is, at Charlie Rose. I think it's Malden.

Yeah. And it's a big train place, and the engines are about two feet long, and they're a commercial engine. They're LGBs.

They're made in Germany. So I said, geez, maybe I might have something crooked here. So I extended the table.

I had a table built, plywood and stuff, and we built it a little bit bigger, and we get more and more people asking and so forth. And then another year we built it more, and a little bit larger. Then we decided that we better move it to the other side of the store because it was causing too much of a traffic jam.

People couldn't get in the front door down that first aisle. It was just, it was stunning. So that's where the truck is right now?

Yeah, that aisle was jammed out. I had the table in the middle, and the aisles were too small. Especially when the holidays were getting close, so Christmas Eve, you couldn't move.

My guys couldn't start, people looking at the train. So that was kind of a tough year. It was a good train set.

I mean, it was a good display. So the next year, we built a few more tables. It ended up to be about 53 feet long.

We put it on the other side of the store, took out the beer wall. When I say the beer wall, we have pallets of beer or a lot of beer. At that time, it was pallets.

We moved those out. We put the train set there for the holidays. Now, that's worked pretty good because on that side of the store, it's not as congested.

And people, if they need cases of beer, we can run and give them a case of beer. On the other side where it was, people were looking for their wine and so forth. So it made it kind of tough on the other side.

But again, when we put it over the beer side, it has worked out very good for us. As I said, it's 53 feet long by six, and we run three engines. We have a village, automobiles, and we have, I think, 11...

Looks like you've been collecting for a while there.

Yeah, and it's quite a... It takes about 100 hours up and down. We've timed it.

We have it to a science because it's like putting together a puzzle. You have to tear it down. You have to put it up.

And it's only... Our running time is... I only have it running for five weeks, and it's down and out because we need...

So you have all the store folks working on it, or do you have volunteers? No, I have a maintenance guy that's been with me for a lot of years. He does a lot of it.

I have a former employee that comes back every year to work it. He's my key man. The fellow that originally was working it, this Buddy Mahan, he moved up to Aspen here.

So I was lucky to have somebody to take over because we can't do it ourselves here. We're just... That's a busy season.

Yeah, so we... My maintenance guy is great. We bring in a crew first thing in the morning the day we're going to start running it.

We have to get the plexiglass up, and we have to fine-tune it. And we have it now where kids can press a button. It will start up, and it will stop by itself.

It's on time, and so it's... This past running season, it was knock of wood. We only had one derailment, so that makes it nice.

We have a derailment that's just... It's amazing. You just got to climb in there.

Yeah, we have to climb up there. Once you climb up on that table, you've got all these street lights and automobiles, and you have telephone poles with wires between them and stuff, so it's kind of tricky. It has good eyes and good balance.

Well, yeah. And so it's... But it's something that...

This place will be long gone and dust, but people will always remember that train set. They'll, you know, the kids... Kind of like the Christmas village at Filene's.

Yeah. Yeah, they'll always remember. They won't remember the name of the store or anything else, but they'll remember that train set.

Some kid will be an old man someday and will say, I can remember when. Mm-hmm. So that would be the history of this store.

But that... Where we go from there, who knows? So tell me the story of the 50s truck, pickup truck up there.

Oh, well, that... When we opened the store... Well, I had a Corvette in here, too.

Oh. I just sold that a few years ago, but I brought in the truck and I brought in the Corvette back when we opened the store in 83, March of 83. And the reason I brought those in is because I saw a store that had a truck in it at one time.

I think around Fitchburg, they had an old truck. So I picked up this old truck and it's all been redone. It's a pretty nice truck.

In fact, when I picked it up, it was a friend of mine's and he lent it to me. So I brought it into the store and parked it there and I also brought in a 62 Corvette and I parked it on the other side. And the two main reasons I brought those vehicles in to take up space because I just didn't have the capital to stock the store.

So we were playing little games. We're having, you know, a lot of facings of product, you know, and putting the truck and the automobile in there to take up space and so forth. So that's how they get into the store.

And then as time went on, I used the truck a lot because we put displays in it. And finally, I said to the fellow that had loaned me the truck, I said, you know, I have so many people ask me who owned, you know, is it my truck? And I keep saying, no, it's Paul McGovern's truck.

Oh, you got it from Paul.

Yeah, I got it from Paul. And I said to Paul, I said, hey, you want to sell me this? He says, no.

I said, okay. That just clicked on you. I heard something go on that.

Is it still running?

It's doing good.

Okay. Hasn't failed me yet. So McGovern doesn't like selling anything.

He is now at his age. But back then, I said, well, then I want it out of here. I'm buying my own truck.

He said, all right, I'll sell it to you. But I want First Divies to buy it back. So he sold me the truck.

He's first in line if you want to sell it. Yeah, but he won't want it back. And it's going to be hard to move that one out because since then, I've built counters and other stuff.

The cheese machine is there. The ATM is there. Could I get it out of here?

Yeah. So how did you do it? Take out a window panel?

No. When I brought the trucks in, the truck and the car back, in receiving, I have a false wall. If you look down there, the beer wall, as you go further down, that's a false wall.

That wall can swing out. I can swing that out, and I can bring the vehicles right out in my receiving, put a ramp truck out there and ramp the truck, the vehicles on there. And I did that to the Corvette.

I used to take, by the way, I used to take the Corvette out every year when I put up the train set. Oh. And then that became a pain, taking it out, storing it, and then sometimes it'd be hard to get the Corvette back because of the weather and so forth.

So then what I was doing is we'd take the Corvette and we'd take all the wheels off of it and drop it on the floor so I could put the train set over it. And once a year, we have a video that's on local cable that show how we would set up the train set.

It would always show, again, how we did the Corvette.

But a few years ago, Fred, I decided, you know, what do I need this Corvette in here for? And I could use that space. That Corvette took, you know, a couple hundred cases of beer or more.

So I decided to sell it, and I sold the Corvette. So, I mean, I just passed the word out there. Somebody snapped it right up because it had sat inside here since 82, and it was redone in the late 70s, so it was in perfect condition.

So somebody got themselves a nice car. As far as the truck is concerned, the truck would be harder to get out. Same scenario.

It would go out receiving, but I'd have to move different counters and end pieces to swing it around in front of the counters in front of the store and make that loop. I could do it, but it would be hard. No reason to.

No, there isn't. I won't do it. Maybe my oldest boy and his sister would want to do it and want the space.

But we use it, as you see. We put display pieces in it. We have different themes that we put in it.

Right now, it's a summer theme that we have in the back of the truck. So we do use it. I think I got a decent picture of it.

Yes, you did. You see the two mannequins sitting in it and so forth. So we get use out of it.

Who did you say the mannequin was? I thought it looked like you. I could sit in that truck.

The mannequin is John McCain, who ran for president. The other fellow is President Bill Clinton. It's one of the masks we bought a long, long time ago.

Well, not a long time. A few years ago. I used to have...

What other mask I had there? I might have had Ford's mask. President Ford?

President Ford, yes, at one time. Every now and then, we get a mask and we stick a different mask out there on them. But the truck, again, as I'm saying, that will stay.

The train set, as long as I'm here, will still be active. But when I leave, I don't know if they'll have the will to put it up or the time or the people to do it. Keep the team together.

Yes, it's a lot of work to do. So that might go when I go. The train set can stay.

It's the business's train set. So it would go with the business. It's not mine.

And the same, really, with the truck, until the business bought the truck. So that would go with the business. But other than that...

What other questions do you have? Anything? You mentioned Leo Kahn.

I've heard his name. Do you know any of the other businesses or plazas around Chelmsford that he was involved in? Oh, he owned a lot of places.

He started in Chelmsford. I'm thinking the Route 3 Cinema. Was that one of his projects?

No, but he started Staples. He started that. He's in his 90s.

Unfortunately, he has Alzheimers right now. I talked to him about three or four years ago. Unfortunately, he was starting to slip.

He was a very nice guy. He was well-respected in town. I can remember, like I said, as a young fellow, him bagging groceries when he had his store in Chelmsford Center.

And again, when he built his big plaza in 1955, that was one heck of a store. And that's how he began. And then he built quite a massive business.

He ended up, it was Purity. And then he bought Supreme Markets. They called it Purity Supreme.

And then he started Staples. So let me just get that straight. In 1955, was it the building next to Friendly's?

Yeah. Okay. And then what year was the big building down on the other side of the parking lot?

In the back there? Yeah, right next door here. That was around, that was about 72.

And he built the Marshalls?

Yes.

He expanded the Purity Company. A lot of Marshalls was in his shopping centers. And then he had a bunch of them around.

You know, he had, over in Barreco, he had a bunch of shopping centers, a bunch of Purities. And he bought early on Supreme Markets. So they called it Purity Supreme.

He merged those. And he grew quite big. So between he and the DeMoula's family, they pretty much had all the grocery stores in the surrounding area.

Well, they had a little bit of history. They had, they got together. I don't know what the relationship was as to Peter and competition, but they got wind of where the Radisson is now.

They got wind of either A&P or Stop and Shop looking to buy that land and put a building in there. And DeMoulas and Leo Kahn got together and they bought the land just to kill it. So they worked together on some stuff.

DeMoula's was down that end of town. They sewed up that end, part of Lowell, and Purity Supreme had this side. Now it's kind of surprising.

Stop and Shop wants to go down across Market Basket, which is the DeMoula's store. Years ago, nobody would go across from there. Years ago, there used to be an A&P there, I believe, back before the theater was there.

So that's where Stop and Shop started. I didn't realize that it was A&P that they tore down and built the theater in its place. Right.

I think. I'm not even sure if they tore it down. Maybe they recycled it?

Yeah. And I'm saying A&P. I could be wrong.

That was a lot of years ago. First national, A&P, Stop and Shop.

I'm trying to think if we got Green Stamps out of that one. If it was Green Stamps, it was Stop and Shop. You know, sometimes when you look through some of the old advertising books, and I have one upstairs, but it isn't in there, you see some of the old businesses, the old stores.

I might add, we're one of the oldest businesses continuing to run a business in this town. My family would be. I think the Marchands are still active.

I don't know if continually active. You have Community Tree, which started in 43. Hogan is still there.

Miles Hogan, who I went to school with. His father started that in 1943. You have North Chelmsford Hardware.

The Quinns? The Quinns. Jim Jim.

Louise and Jimmy and his folks started that around 47. That might be one of the oil companies on Stedman Street. I'm not sure which would be a Marchand.

They split up a lot. But those are the three businesses, us being one, that are probably the oldest businesses in this town that I can put my hand on and figure out. I can't think of anything else.

A lot of others have come and gone. Yeah, come and gone, been sold or gobbled up or so forth. Pages was a longtime business in this community.

And, you know, they got gobbled up a number of years ago. The independent drug stores, independent package stores, sooner or later we're going to be gobbled up. It's just we beat the bullet the last time on that wine initiative that we fought, guys like me, because I'm very much involved with the Mass Package Store Association.

Massachusetts is one of the last states that has a lot of control on liquor licenses. And the rules we go by in this state is we can only own three package stores by law. Any one entity?

Right, right. Three in a state, one in a town. You can have two in a city, three in a state.

So that's to prevent McDonald-ization, franchising.

Right.

Originally, after Prohibition, it was to keep it controlled, keep it mom and pop, just operations. And that's how it has always been. So you can't now, some ways around it, three with one corporation.

If, like, the Martinetes or, let's say my family, if I've got four children, each one of them could have three, but they can't be all together. They might be the same name, like Cappys or something, or Shamrock. Shamrocks did that.

There's some loopholes in it where you could have more, but you just can't have something like a Stop and Shop having a ton of them. I never knew that. Yeah, and it's the law, and the law that we've followed for years, and that's how it works.

So, again, Massachusetts is one of the last states that have stuff like that. All the states have different, quirky laws. The problem with this state is our competition is New Hampshire.

Guys like me on the border here, we're always fighting with them. Not fighting with them, but they were paying to us. We have the Bottle Bill.

We just got hit with this new sales tax. We have excise tax. It's a problem there.

Because people have to weigh the time and gas to get up to New Hampshire versus the excise tax. Right. I mean, what happens when they change the laws or change the fees and excise taxes and sales taxes, what they cause guys like me is they take away the big sales, the holiday sales, and we still have the regulars.

Because then it becomes worth driving up the road. To fill up your trunk. Yeah, and it's even worse.

I talk to some guys. They come up from the Cape, and they say they're up here visiting, or they live down there now in the back. And I say, geez, everybody always says, oh, you're going up that way.

Could you just go up a little bit further, pick up the booze, and so forth? Because sometimes it's a good savings. I can beat them on my wine because I get the selection, and I can.

I usually can beat them on wine. There's no problem there. But I can't beat them on beer because we have a deposit.

And that's a thorn on our side. And the excise taxes, right now, $0.40 on the dollar, that's what you pay for taxes. Now we're at your sales tax.

So there's a lot of taxes that they're tagging on. New Hampshire's a little bit different tax structure. They don't have a bottle bill.

They don't have a sales tax. So those are my competition here. They've always been a pain, but more so.

That's why we opened up Sundays. New Hampshire was always open Sundays. They were killing you on Sundays, right?

So we ended up opening up on Sundays. Now, is that because you're within 10 miles of the border, or is it all through Massachusetts? No, it's all through the state.

It was 10 miles of border. And what happened there is a lot of us just, hey, Sunday was kind of nice to be closed. It was kind of nice in the old days.

Sunday was a day that most businesses were closed. Those days are gone. They'll never come back.

What happened to this industry was, I want to say almost 20 years ago, I think Dukakis was governor. Senator Pat McGovern from Lawrence slipped in an amendment under the government's budget for us to open up on Sundays a 10-mile buffer zone, and he signed it. My association wasn't aware of it.

We probably would have fought it, because the membership back then really didn't want to open up on Sundays, especially the ones that are further into the state, the guys down the Cape, the guys in Springfield, down in Boston. They don't want to open up on Sunday. In New Hampshire, it didn't matter to them.

New Hampshire's far enough away. But then there was that 10-mile buffer zone, and now we have a new border. Yep, 10 miles in, but two stores on the same street, and one's open, one's not.

And then for years, my association was inflexed. Some of us wanted to be open, some didn't. We wanted the association to fight to close the loophole, to close everybody.

Now the guys that open up on Sundays want to stay open, some of them. And so what my association did, I think was smart, said, Hey, listen, half our membership wants this, half want this. What we'll do is we'll let everybody know what's happening in the legislative end of it, and you guys make your calls to your reps and tell them what are your feelings when things start to develop.

And surprisingly enough, Fred, the whole state didn't open up. They opened up in 2005, I believe. We were open for years, and the rest of the state was not.

So it was still optional. They had the right to, but they just... Well, no, in 2005, I believe it was January 2005, here's what they did for a little bit.

They passed legislation for the holidays that the whole state could open up. They did that prior to 2005. And then finally in 2005, they passed legislation saying, Hey, the whole state can open up Sundays.

But there are restrictions. We can't open up before 12 o'clock, which is fine. And then the cities and towns decide what time you close.

We here in Chelmsford, I represented the liquor stores in front of the selectment at the time, and we said, Hey, listen, we want to stay open until 11 o'clock Sunday nights, and individually we'll decide what time we close. Now, I just changed my hours. I'm moving back to 6 o'clock at night, so I'm open up on Sundays from 12 to 6.

Now, if it gets to a holiday, we'll say, for example, if Christmas Eve falls on a Sunday, I'll stay open until 11 o'clock, because in town here the law is I can stay open until 11, so can my colleagues. So the hard limit's 11.

Right.

You can set the time based on personality. Right, because before we went to the selectmen, we had a meeting with some of the stores, and, well, I want to be open until 7. I want to be open at 9.

I want to stay open until 9. I want to say, well, wait a minute. Why don't we just say to 11, and you make your decision what time you stay open until.

So that's what we decided. So that's what happened on the Sunday issue. And, again, like I said earlier, it was nice when Sundays were when you were closed, and everybody was closed.

You'd have gas stations open, maybe drugstores, maybe ice cream stands, but, you know, Marshalls would be closed. Definitely the grocery stores would be closed and all that stuff. I mean, the majority of the business, it would be like Christmas Day.

That's what would be only open, you know, some of the small little convenience stores and stuff. And, again, those days are long, long gone. But what else you got for us?

Well, you mentioned some interesting facts about the center with the parallel parking and the heavy traffic going two-way on all the streets through town. What are your recollections on when Route 3 came along and then again when Route 495 came along?

Oh, good point, yeah.

I can remember building Route 3. And, again, when Route 3 was not there, 3A was the road. And that went right through North Chelmsford.

That was quite a road. And there'd be traffic coming through here. But 3A, and I can remember years ago there used to be a clothing store right there, which would be Robert Hall's.

Yes. Yeah, Robert Hall's was there. And it was quite, and there was some pouring joints.

And that was built based on the heavy traffic going through that. Nothing goes by there now. No, and that's why it closed.

I mean, there was a lot of traffic.

Yeah, they had a furniture store there for a while. Then you had the Meadow Lounge. And then further down on North Road you had the lion's Den.

These are slug joints. And over... Yeah, the Lion's Den.

That was here when I arrived in the 70s. The Lion's Den burned down. Yeah.

That was a nice place. I mean, when I say nice, it had a lot of potential. There's no doubt.

It had a lot of history. They had the Rainbow, too, was another one. Where was that?

129. The Rainbow was there. That was like the Lion's Den and the Meadow Lounge.

You know, I think Dennis Ready mentioned that was on his paper route. He used to stop there because of the selectment. To get a soda and stuff.

Oh, yeah. They gave him a soda so they could read the papers for free. Yeah.

Yeah, Dennis. But there was a lot of activity in those clubs. A lot of history, a lot of activity.

And, again, there was a lot of traffic blowing through back then. So 3A actually was a bottleneck to North Chelmsford because 3A went up through Lowell. Yeah.

And Route 4, so Route 4 only took part of the traffic headed north, but everybody had to go up 3A through North Chelmsford. I get the picture. So you're right.

It just was that bottleneck. And there was a lot of traffic through there. A lot of businesses got hurt when all of a sudden Route 3 opened up.

And 495, a little bit different. I can remember that. That doesn't seem long at all, but I can remember driving when it was partially opened.

If you look at some of the bridge abutments, that was back in 59. Again, I was driving, close to driving then. I would drive with my father on the highway because it would be closed.

I was a young fellow. But what 495 did, it did grab. It took down some houses on Chelmsford Street.

That was a big thing. Took out the Perham Farm and Cider Mill. Yeah.

And the fire department torched it. Took out it. And I'm looking on this side of it.

But it helped some businesses. It definitely helped Skip's. That's right.

Because they were right on the intersection. Then on the other side... Skip's was there before, wasn't it?

Yeah. That was there. So that helped them tremendously.

It also helped Howard Johnson's came in because of it. And there used to be a little Strick's Market. They took his house.

That was a big battle. He wouldn't move. Is that where the Howard Johnson's went in?

Yeah. Right, yes. Right in there.

But the highway took out Strick's. So Howard Johnson's went a little bit to the left of Strick's. But he had to move out.

And I can remember he wouldn't move. He was an old German. And I don't know how they got him out, but that was a big controversy.

He wouldn't move and the state took it. But 495 definitely opened up Jemstown as far as going to the beach. For guys like me, it was, in our age group, we used to have to go, it would take us a while to get to Hampton Beach and so forth.

Because we had to go 133, we had to go through Andover, parts of Lawrence, all different, not all different ways, but back ways to get to the beach. And then once 495 opened up, it was just a straight shot. For a few years, anyway, until it got all jammed up with beach traffic.

Early on, it was hardly anybody on 495.

That's right.

I remember myself in the late 60s, I lived in Nashua driving to Boston on Route 3. It seemed like Route 3 was highly underutilized. But then by the 70s and 80s, commuting on Route 3 was pretty miserable with the two lanes.

And 495, when they opened it up, it took a while for people to discover that. But now, usually headed east in the evening, it's pretty well plugged up. Yeah, it's jammed, there's no doubt.

And there's construction going on right now, too. For the bridges and so forth. Yeah, they'll back it up.

They seem to always be repairing the bridges. They needed it. No, they take all the money.

They spend all the money before they fix the bridges. Route 3 was great, because they took them out and did them all over again, because they widened the roads. That highway's good for a long time.

But the highways definitely helped Chelmsford, put Chelmsford on the map. As far as 129, all the industrial buildings were built because of Route 3 and 495. They're hurting right now because of the economy, but hopefully they'll bounce back.

The town's looking to do some mixed usage down there. They want to maybe put a restaurant or gas station or so forth. To support the businesses.

Yeah, we just sent out to the business association a questionnaire to our members, what's their thoughts on it, because the town tried to do this about 20 years ago and the business association wasn't a big fan of it. But right now it seems the questionnaire's coming back doesn't seem a problem. So I know the town had asked us, the economic development committee had asked us to weigh in on it, what's our thoughts on it.

So we'll tell them what our membership's saying. There's a hotel at Drum Hill. I wonder how that's doing for serving the local businesses.

The one up there that's there now? Yeah, there's one up at Drum Hill off Route 4. Right, there used to be one there before, Drum Hill Hotel.

Motel.

Yeah, that was kind of a unique hotel. That has history.

Tell me about that.

That has a lot of history. Now that's gone. The other hotel, I don't know if they're trying to sell or what.

I'm not sure what's happening with that. That's a long-term stay in there, isn't it, that hotel? More so, you move in there for months on end.

I don't hear too much about it. It isn't like the two that we have on this side of town, the Radisson and the Chelmsford Inn down here, which is the old. The Inn's pretty short-term, right?

That's people passing through.

Yeah, short-term.

Plus some permanent housing. Well, also the Chelmsford Inn has that, too. Oh, does it?

Which is kind of, they put them in there. The problem with that is we've got to educate them, too. That seems to be a rub with some people because they go into our school systems and so forth.

Well, aren't the residents, didn't they start out as residents? You mean in Chelmsford? Yeah.

Or do you think they're from out of town? No, yeah.

They're coming in from out of town. The state's putting them in. Okay.

So there's been a few problems with them down there. But, hey, it's filling up the hotels, I guess. Both Radisson Inn, Chelmsford Inn, has certain blocked-off rooms for their clientele.

The state picks up the tab for it. Okay, so it's not a local project, I guess. No.

Again, those two hotels were built because of the highway. There's a lot of traffic on 495. But there's a lot of hotels on 495, too, if you go back Westford and further down.

Years ago there wasn't. There wasn't. It was the old Howard Johnson's, which is now the Chelmsford Inn, owned by the same family, the Kelly family.

They've been there since, well, they opened up, I think, in 61. So Kathy Kelly, her folks opened it up. So she still runs the hotel.

They just sold the restaurant to Moonstones. They always had the restaurant. Is that a good restaurant?

Have you been there? Well, Moonstones is good. It's a little upper end.

They've got to lower their food, meaning maybe bring it down a notch. The economy isn't to the point where you can have that higher-end cost. You've got guys like Fishbones in Chelmsford Center, which have moved into the old Page.

That's where the Page building is. They're doing very well. There's no doubt.

They've got decent parking around back. Yeah, they have a lot of parking back. And, you know, a lot of people can park right here at the shopping center and walk down or sit upstairs.

Now they can do that now. I don't know how long that's going to last because CVS is going to build a new building there. They're going to tear down the old CVS and they're going to build a new building.

So I don't know if they'll be that generous letting the parking continue there. But right now they have enough parking. Parking's always been a problem in the Center.

That's why we moved our package store out of the Center and went into the, at the time, Purity Shopping Center. The main reason was parking. Lots of it there.

Now in this location, Fred, when I built this and moved in here in 1983, I have ample parking. The only time I get a little bit jammed is Christmas Eve, a few days before Christmas Eve and especially Christmas Eve. And I have parking out back and across the street.

So there's a lot across the street. Yeah, and they're closed Christmas Eve. I stay open 7, 8, 9 o'clock at night depending on the business.

So there's parking. So that helps me here. That's one thing about this building.

This building will always do well, whether a liquor store is here or not. It's a pretty good location. They make a great restaurant.

There's a lot of things that this building could do. It's built like a fort. I mean, it's well built.

I built it. I mean, not personally, but I was here when they made this deal, and I cleared the lot with my brother. We brought in, cleared the lot, and I trucked in, I think, a couple hundred truckloads of fill or maybe more to build it up.

So you were here before Leo Kahn put in the Purity Marshals? No, he was there. Oh, he was already there?

Yeah. I was wondering what was on the site before. What was here?

Was it farmland or a swampland? Yeah, well, years ago this was all farmland right here, just like where I lived up in Boston Road. This whole town was farmland.

Where I lived in Boston Road, that was all farmland. Now down here was farmland, and it grew up. Remember that brook that runs through, right through and back here, through the Chelmsford Center?

Beaver Brook. Beaver Brook. Again, it was all farmland.

And as time went on, you know, it just grew up and so forth. And this land was very low. It were Purity built.

They had to bring in tons of fill to fill it. It was swampland. So it could have been the floodplain for the Beaver Brook?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, definitely it was.

Back during the wet times. Yeah. So now it's pretty well filled in, except for over that way, towards Billerica Road.

That's why you get some flooding, there's no doubt, because there's been a lot of filling over the years. And Conservation watches everything now. But back then, there wasn't conservation.

You could have done that and said, Well, I couldn't build this. In 2003, I couldn't have built this building right here. Probably could have built it maybe about 30 feet closer to the roadway, 30, 40, 50 feet closer.

I could have built this building. But in 83, I just, when I moved in here, I had to go through Conservation. Conservation wasn't tough enough back then.

And I had to build this lot way up because I had to put in a septic system. There wasn't sewer. Oh, yes.

So that dictated what I had to do here. And I had to bring in, as I said, a lot of fill to build this up. Now I'm on sewer.

As I say, this building is very well built. We're right on the water line here. But I'm lucky I don't get any water because we have it all, the floor prepared right, crushed or we have it all piped and we have a sump pump if we need it.

That's right. We're down here in the cellar. We're knocking wood.

Even with that massive rains we had a couple of months ago, we were dry here. Occasionally, the roof might bleed, but, you know, that's about it. So we're in good shape here.

This Beaver Brook at one time in the 70s, that was the most polluted brook. Like most rivers and waterways in Massachusetts, that thing was like a septic system. You could smell the raw sewage right going through Chelmsford Center.

Yeah, that's how bad it was. Now it's nice and clean. Yeah.

So back then it was like puke white. It was so bad. I can remember customers complaining coming into our father's store in the hot July day saying, hey, who's septic system?

No, it's the brook right next to us. So that's how it was. Leaking systems upstream?

Yeah, it was leaking systems. I wouldn't say leaking. People were just dumping into it.

That's how you did it years ago. Just put a pipe into the brook and let the brook be the septic system. That's how they did it years ago.

And they finally cured that problem as time went on. But it took a lot of years. And the Clean Water Act, I think, in the early 70s, was great federal legislation.

That cleaned up all the rivers 90%. I mean, there's still some work to be done, but it's quite an improvement. In the 70s, we had the big flood when the center flooded, including the building that you were in.

Yeah, that flooded. That was right. That was in the 70s.

I think it was 76 or 78. And it was in 55 the center went down again too. But in the mid-70s, a piece of plywood on an old door or something got jammed in the culvert behind on Cushing Street and blew the water out to come down Cushing Street.

Okay.

And it flooded the center, and the release to that was going down the alleyway between my father's building and Page's building, that alleyway. That's where the water would be. That was the parking access route?

Yeah. Well, that was an alley. That's where the water would make its way.

When it built up high enough in the center, it would work its way down and get back into the stream. But Page's was, of course, flooded out. My father was flooded out that building.

I can remember as a young fellow, we'd have pumps down cellar, and we'd have, for the refrigeration, we'd have the motors and stuff down there. We'd be down there with, not generators, but we'd hire gas pumps to pump out the water and stay all night to put gas in them to keep the cellar without flooding. Once it flooded, we'd lose the refrigeration.

Now, the center was always a, and probably still would be a problem if you have major rains because that little brook coming down, it only can hold so much, and it floods over. This last rain, they were watching it very close. I mean, it flooded beyond the center.

The parking lot behind the old bank, that always floods out. In the middle behind over there will flood, but that's there to flood. So when you have a blockage, that's when the center gets hit.

It just has no place to go. But that was, there was a few times the center flooded. As I said, 55 was one, but that was Hurricane Carol that come through.

Yeah, big one. Yeah, and then we lost electricity. And once you lose electricity too, your sump pumps are gone.

That's where the problem is. And that happened in the 70s. Electricity went out, and so we lost the sump pumps, and my father's cellar got flooded out.

He wasn't there at the time. We had moved up to Purity, but the building was still his. So do you or your family have any pictures of downtown from the older days?

In historic society, we have some that are very old, but I'm thinking in terms of the middle. My brother has got all the scrapbooks from my folks. I should look at them.

When they passed on that, he got those. Well, there's two things. We're doing a history book for the Historic Commission.

It was written by Eleanor Parkhurst for 76 Bicentennial. And the other thing, the Historic District would like some old pictures just to use as a baseline to refer to when they're looking for something. Let me check with my brother, see if I can see what's in there.

I know there's some old pictures. I don't know. I know there's some of the farmhouse and family photos from my mother's younger and stuff, but I'm trying to think.

I'll have to look. My mother was pretty good with scrapbooks back in those days, so I'm sure there's some old ones. Well, the farmhouse, too, because we might be interested in that.

That farmhouse, you know, was moved. That's the one that was moved. Is that the Hilljock House?

Yeah. That's the one you're talking about?

Yeah.

Okay. We have a lot of documentation on that. That was where I was born.

Well, that's where I grew up as a young fellow. I didn't realize that. Okay.

That was my grandmother's grandfather's house, and that was the farmhouse. And we stayed there until the early 50s when my folks built the house on 145 Boston Road. That's where I grew up, right there.

And then, as I said earlier, I built my house between the old Jock House and my folks' house on 149 Boston Road. And we owned all that land. And now behind me, heading over to Parker Road, we own all that land, what's left of it.

My oldest boy, my wife's oldest boy, Jay, my stepson, he's built a house on that property. It's on Parker Road, which is behind my house. And my daughter's built a house.

And we have one lot of land left on Parker Road that my other daughter might build. Did you go up as far as the Warrens' lot that goes all the way up to Acton Road? What about the Warrens'?

They've got 80-some acres. Oh, they've got a tremendous amount. All the way up to Acton Road there.

Yeah. I was wondering if your land goes up as far as that. Our land stops at Bryan Road.

We parallel Bryan Road. When you're going up Boston Road, when you see all the barkmulch on the right.

You're front yard there?

Yeah, all the way. I start there all the way up to my driveway, going all the way back to Parker Road. I go beyond my driveway because I do the neighbors there because it matches.

My driveway is straight back. You've got like this. It's like a box.

Parker Road's here. Boston Road's here. We own in there.

Okay. We used to own across the street, numerous acres across the street. And down at Pendleton Drive, we used to own that.

That was all farmland back in the 40s and 50s and 60s. My folks sold a lot of that in the 60s. Did they farm it when they originally moved there?

My grandparents farmed it. And my father's family farmed land over in East Chelmsford when they were growing up. In fact, my father, and I've got records of it upstairs, his mother, which would be my grandmother, was probably the first woman to get killed in Chelmsford by a motorcycle.

She stepped off of a bus in Gorham Street in East Chelmsford, and a motorcycle had cut on the inside to pass it, and she stepped off the bus and was killed. She was only in her 30s. My father was only 8 years old when that happened.

So it was quite a tragedy. It was a little history there. So your dad was right off Gorham Street?

No, that's where she was killed. He was off River Neck Road. River Neck, okay.

The house was just torn down a few years ago, just before the bridge. You get on River Neck Road, you see that high-tech machine shop before the bridge that goes all the way. Route 3.

Yeah. Is that near the Middlesex Canal or past that? No, heading towards the center.

Middlesex is on the other side of the area. On this side, heading towards the center, you've got the machine shop, and you've got Mercury Computer along there. Well, there used to be a house that was torn down.

Mercury bought that property when my aunt passed away. That was the family house. It was in pretty bad shape as time went on, but they bought that off 10 years ago, tore it down.

We have a rash of demolition applications coming into the Historic Commission this season, and it seems like there's a change in the rules for reconstruction and new construction concerning green technologies. Something about next July the rules change, so everybody wants to tear down their old properties and put up the new ones before they have to spend an extra 10 or 20 grand on higher insulation and greener systems. That's what our theory is anyway, but we have a meeting Tuesday, and we're dealing with about five right now.

You mentioned the old family house on River Neck. Yeah, Mercury took that down. They haven't done anything, so the economy slowed them down too.

Any favorite stories? Any town events that you remember as well?

Well, let's see.

My favorite story as a young fellow, the Harveys were a big name here in town. Harvey Lumber? Yeah.

On Boston Road? Yeah, and as a young fellow, to earn money, you could clean bricks for them. They would bring in second-hand bricks because they tore down buildings and so forth, and they would sell these bricks for a penny a brick or two cents a brick,

and we would, as kids, we'd clean the mortar off of them for half a cent, so that was a great job growing up. Another job that they gave us, clean lumber. You'd take the nails out of the lumber, and that was 75 cents an hour, which was big money. So those are things we did as kids, and of course, cutting grass was always, shoveling snow was some of the stuff you earned money.

And again, as I said earlier in our conversation, I was lucky I could work at my father's store as a young fellow, 13, 12, 13, at the store work there doing bottle returns and stocking the chest. But the Harveys, that was a nice job for a kid. So did you know the Harveys, Claude?

He was very active. Yeah, I knew all the Harveys, and I went to school with all of them. The whole clan, there was a whole bunch of them.

Some of them, unfortunately, had passed away, but I knew the father, Claude. I knew his brother, Bill. Both of them were selectmen.

Bill died young. He died in, I think, his forties with a heart attack. Claude was a selectman.

Claude was an exalted ruler at the Elks. In fact, his son Richard became an exalted ruler about eight years ago. Are you in the Elks?

I'm an Elk. I've been an Elk since turning 21. I'm a card carrier.

Occasionally I go up. I've always been a member. That's something you did in town years ago.

That was the place to go. I did a lot of town events at the old Elks Hall, and now the new Elks Hall, too.

The new Elks Hall is great.

I've been to quite a few events with people. Yeah, the old one has a lot of history in the old one, a lot of events. The new one's fantastic.

I wish they kept the old one and refurbished it, but they didn't. Well, it burned, didn't it? Yeah, it burned, but they could have...

Could have saved it. They could have saved it. It could have been saved.

They wanted a new one. Really, they wanted to rent that land and get that money in. The problem with the Elks, quite honestly, is there's just too many fingers in the pie there.

That's always been the problem. Not in the beginning. You had guys like Nick Mazzoni and Jack Scott and some of these Benvenuos.

Some of these white-collar guys, I want to say, they ran a good club. They tend to business and the monies were right and so forth. As time went on, there was just too many things happening.

That's why the club always was in the red. It was just there's too much leakage up there. They needed someone in there to rule the roost and get people out of the till.

That was always a problem with that club for years and years and years because it was a good club. They made a ton of money, but they lost a ton of money. Endlessly, they were keying in somebody for clipping something.

That's a fact. You talk to any club members that have been around, they've been more guys farmed out because they just had their fingers in the till, lottery tickets and cash and product and booze. The new club's pretty good.

They got things pretty secure. What they needed always was a strong manager to run the club. With the trustees keeping their hands off them, let them do their job right.

That was a problem with the club right along. Hopefully, they'll be on that. Well, the Elks reminds me of the drive-in theater, and that reminds me that you went to high school here.

What was the dating scene like back when you were a high schooler? Well, you had a hard time going to the drive-in. Your parents didn't want you going to the drive-in on a date.

But the dating scene was, back in those days, much different. You'd go to the drive-in. You'd go bowling.

We had bowling alleys. You did stuff like that. Which alleys did you go to?

There was one right here in the center, and then there was this one in North Chelmsford that's still there. Well, there's two in the center. There's a little duck pen right up here on Acton Road.

It was there. That was the brick building. Next to Beaver Brook, where was the second one?

Well, Alpine Lane's right down there.

Sure. Are they still there?

No, Alpine's gone because Radisson built it down, and the Radisson Hotel went in there. Okay. And the duck pin lanes, well, there's an office building there where the duck pin lanes were.

And the one up in North Chelmsford's still there. That's duck pens also. Yeah, I believe it is.

I think I was in there once, years and years ago. But those were the places. Anyways, we had carnivals coming in.

There was always stuff to do. Where was the carnival site? McFarlin School, right there.

Where those ball fields are? Yeah, but there was a little bit more room there because there wasn't that big parking lot, so it would be there. Then years and years ago, there used to be down on where, let's see, linens and things moved out.

Do you know that shopping center on Chelmsford? Chelmsford Plaza?

Yeah.

Chelmsford Mall? Yeah. Kohls?

Yeah, Kohls. Yeah, it's Kohls. There used to be stuff down there because there was a big field down there.

They used to have, years ago, parades would end there. They would also have the fireman's muster. They would have that down there.

They don't do, of course, they don't do that stuff. There was also, probably way before your time, a horse racing track? Yeah, I heard about that.

I don't remember that. Did you ever hear anything about the circus stopping by there? They used, I can remember as a young fellow, there used to be something with, they'd bring in a group that played softball and mules, and I thought it was down there, but I'm not sure.

But the circus, I know we had carnivals coming in. But mostly on Chelmsford Street. Right.

Where the ball fields are. Right. Yeah.

That's a shame. So you recall before Kohls was put in that plaza, I forget what it was, Bradley's or something originally? Yeah, it was Bradley's.

But before that, that was all fields down there? Yeah. And it was available for events?

Yeah, there was events down there. I can remember some stuff definitely down there. And I can remember we ended up in 55 was our big, we were 300 years old, the town.

And we all marched, I don't know where we started, but I remember marching down Chelmsford Street and all the houses before 495, and we ended in that field down there, I believe. I was only a young fellow then. So the houses were still there?

Oh, yeah. Before 495? All along there where the bridge goes over 495, the bridge, it was all nice, beautiful houses all along there.

Some got moved and some got torn down? Yeah, some got moved, you're right. Some got torn down, but some did get moved.

Do you know of any specifically where they might have moved? Well, I'll tell you one place they got moved. Miles Hogan's father had a nursery right there diagonally across, well, with the lights are from Moonstones, right across the street.

Stedman? It was Stedman and Chelmsford Street, and he moved that building back to his property in 129, and Hogan's son lives there. I mean, when I say Hogan, Miles Hogan's grandson lives there, the father's grandson.

Where on 129? That house where they moved it from. Okay.

Do you know what it's in relation to on 129? Yeah, you know where Community Tree is?

Yeah.

If you drive in that driveway of Community Tree, it's the house up on the left. Okay. The one on the right is the business, is it?

Well, you've got a White House there, then you have the business here, okay? Right up there is a ranch. And that was originally where the on-ramp to 495 is?

No, it would be right at the corner of Stedman, where Stedman Street stops for the lights to go on to 110. Okay. So then just beyond that, then, is the ramp going up there?

Yeah, just beyond that. So that's where that house was. That's the one I know that was moved. The others, I don't know where they went to.

Yeah, I got elected, I think, let's see.

First of all, I used to be on sign advisory. That was an appointed position. Is that related to the historic district?

Sign advisory? Yeah, I know they have a sign advisory. No, that was appointed by the selectmen.

Paul Hart appointed it. Okay, so it's separate. It's separate.

It's trying to control signs on businesses, so it's a fair playing field. And unfortunately, it's not being enforced too much today, standards, and it should be. If we all have fairness, it's all a fair playing field, everybody should be happy.

Now you're starting to see a lot of lighted signs, which are illegal. You're seeing A-frames. You're seeing banners, and this is a shame, and the enforcement isn't there.

Sign advisory's job, when I was on, I was on for 13 years, we'd get the application in, and we'd say yay and nay to it, and the building inspector would enforce it. And if it was enforced fairly, everybody's happy. And what happens is these signs are not being enforced now, and somebody will spend money for a sign, and they'll have it out for maybe three years or whatever, and all of a sudden the residents get tired of signs, and they start moaning about it, then they start to enforce again, and now businesses are all upset about it.

But if it's done fairly from the beginning, and before permits and licenses are given out, by the second they should be told you can't have that type of sign, you've got to conform to the signed bylaws, it would be a much better community. So does that advisory committee act on the whole town or just the district? No, the whole town.

The whole town. The whole town. For example, the water district is putting out A-frames.

Those are kind of illegal. We get permission. We send a letter to the sign advisory.

Per use, per emergency? Well, we ask permission to put them out to let people know there's a water conservation act being enforced from May 15th to September 15th. Or is it October 15th?

I think it's October 15th. May 15th to October 15th. The town always gives us permission, but we go through the legal red tape to do that.

But besides that, there's a lot of illegal signs out there. That was one committee I was on. And the reason I got off that Fred, when I formed the Chelmsford Business Association, helped to form it, there was four of us that formed this organization back in 89.

After a few years, I realized I was getting a little conflict. I'm an enforcer on signs. I'm trying to enforce signage on businesses.

And I'm also the same guy trying to get a business to be a member of the association. So it just was becoming more of a conflict. And I had to choose what I felt was good for the community as a whole.

And I thought a business association that's active would be very beneficial. And it has been, as you see. We have close to 300 members.

We're active on every facet of this community. Our members are involved or sits on every board in this town, from selectmen to planning board to board of health. We run the July 4th parade.

We're involved with the cleanup. There isn't a thing that moves in this town that we don't have our fingers on or give input to. So it's a good organization.

A lot of talented people and a lot of hard workers. And a lot of them sit right here in our monthly board meetings. They're a good group.

Who are the other three founding members? You had Paul Hart, Charlie Parlee, and Eddie Duffy. And this was in 89.

Now, prior to that, there was a businessmen's association. Now, I belonged to that in the late, let's see, early 70s, maybe, myself. And I can remember Paul Hart was a member of that.

And that was the good old boys stuff. They didn't believe in having that. We used to meet up at the Banqueteer.

And women weren't involved with that. They didn't want women involved. Even though we had women that had businesses in town.

Because I can remember asking the question, why isn't so-and-so a chair of a business? Oh, this is a businessmen's association. Gee, what's that all about?

Well, needless to say, that organization was a dinosaur back then, becoming one. And they merged into the Lowell Chamber. They merged into the Lowell Chamber back then.

And it just faded away. And years later, a lot of us were getting very concerned about taxes and especially classification. That's how you classify business, different on taxes than the residents.

And so we formed an organization. We named it the Chelmsford of Business Association. And definitely, our president right now, we've had a couple of women presidents.

Women sit on the board, and they're a big asset to us. And they're in business. Who's your current president?

Lynn Marsella. Lynn's a good president. Prior to that, we had Ann Marie Rourke.

She was president. I was president for a long time. And then they made me executive director.

So I could run it out of this office. This is what it runs out of. And it's been a good organization.

We do a tremendous amount of stuff. Do you have an award dinner every year? Yeah, we have a dinner. It's a free sit-down dinner for anybody that wants to come to it. They have to let us know first.

First come, first serve. We provide a couple hundred meals for businesses. Each business can bring two members.

First come, first serve, and that's it. And we give an award to the member of the year. I mean, that's done something unique.

Can you recall some of the past recipients? Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's see.

Jeff Hardy. Lynn Marcella, of course. Brian Reedy.

Eddie Duffy. Charlie Parlee. Billy, way back, one of the first ones we awarded was, my goodness, from the Banqueteer, Billy Burns.

He got it because he was always good to us. He let us use the Banqueteer for our meetings with no charge. The name rings a bell.

Where was that located? Banqueteer, where that, you know where the lights are with Hunt Road and Littleton Road is? Going up Littleton Road, there's that hotel apartment building.

The tall ones there, that's where the banqueteer was. That's where there's a little hairdresser. They tore that down?

Yes. Okay. They tore it down.

So that's where we used to meet. That was a nice place, and that was a nice place to have meetings. Not only that, weddings and a lot of functions, like the Elks.

There was a lot of functions there. The banqueteer was there for years. Before that, it was named Dad and the Boys.

It was a slug joint. Before that, when Billy Burns bought it, he turned it into a Banqueteer, a banquet room. So that's where we used to meet.

He was the first one to win that. A fellow, Ray Denae, won it. Kathy Kelly also won it.

Jim Cullen was another one. He's an accountant. Dick Defratis, former selectman.

Stephen Copper, he's an insurance man. He got it. And what it boils down to, you have to give something back to the community, and you have to be very active out there and do the extra things that are required.

So these guys won it. And you have to be a member of the business association. Guys like Paul Hart, he never got it because he retired and he moved away and then he came back, but he's not in business.

There's a few guys that come in. He was a farmer originally when he was here? Yeah, his father was a farmer.

Paul was a farmer. He grew corn and stuff, yeah. He was right next door neighbor basically on Boston Road.

But a couple guys missed out because, and it's a voting thing. It isn't. What we do is we take the past people that have won, we notify them, and they sit down and we go over the applications of who we feel, who sometimes people submit applications, and the people they feel that should get it, and that's who votes on it.

But one of the key things, you have to be a member of the association. Where did we go from? We were talking about business.

Oh, Water District. I've been a commissioner now for over 15 years, and I'm the junior man on the board, so that tells you. A pretty stable board.

Nobody's leaving.

My other two colleagues there have 10 years on me, so between the three of us, we've got, my goodness, we've got 65 years running the district, and if you look back in history, the commissioners stay quite a while. A lot of them stay quite a while on it. Our name is the Chelmsford Water District, so people don't get us mixed up.

We always say, well, we're the Center District, but our real name is the Chelmsford Water District. We have two other districts in town, North and East, and they're much smaller. And there's always this effort to merge everything, and it always seems to fail.

The North doesn't want to merge. Yeah, the East doesn't want to merge, and we're the bad guys who say, hey, we're just, and we have people say, well, why don't you take them over? It isn't our job to take anybody over.

I mean, it's up to the voters of that district, and this is how it works. The voters have to say, the water takers have to say, hey, we want to merge. That's all it takes.

Somebody puts together a financial plan and says that they're going to save a bundle by doing it, and I'm sure the voters are going to go for it. I don't know why they don't own some of the districts. There was a move by a former town manager, Bernie Lynch, to merge the districts.

That was flawed because he wanted town meeting. This was prior to the 95 and the 90s. He wanted town meeting to vote to merge the districts.

Town meeting can't. It's the water takers. We exist by vote of the legislature.

It has to go to the legislature. I mean, it's to do things. The legislature is very much involved in our existence.

This is state legislation? Yeah. For example, we just did a land trade with the town.

Now, in the old days, Fred, unfortunately, the way Chelmsford was like all communities, I know you as a selectman, a handshake, okay, do that, do this. We built a water tower, the biggest water tower in town, six million gallons. Most of it's on town property.

It should be on district property. Part of it's on district property. No big deal.

Build it. Well, years later, DEP says, you know, you guys, not just us, you districts, you people have to, since 9-11, start controlling your own land. You've got to get fences.

You've got to do this. You've got to do that. Just do a land trade?

Yeah. But it's not that easy. It was very involved, more so than we thought.

We start off with a land trade. Conservation has the land. No problem.

Dave McLaughlin, we know the players. This is what we want. Dave, no problem.

We'll trade you X amount of land. So we go through our district. We own a lot of land in this town, the water districts, our district.

We identify some land down on Deer Run, wetlands. Well, conservation deals with wetlands, right? Okay.

We have X amount of acres, more than we want to take from conservation, where the towers are. Yeah, no problem. Everything seems right.

But now we have a new player, Evan Belansky, who just raises a question at a pre-meeting after everything is all ready. Geez, well, why aren't you giving us dry land? Because we're giving you dry land.

Well, Evan, we're not because your conservation deals with wetlands. Oh, okay. Fine.

Now we go to a regular conservation. Now, this was a pre-meeting. Now we go to a regular conservation meeting to have it approved.

Uh-uh. The question has been raised now. Well, why aren't we giving you, hey, we'll give you dry land.

We have dry land. You want dry land? We have it right up there.

So everything stops now. We have to go through all the expense because we're paying the expense on both ends. The town is not paying anything.

And rightly so, we're asking them for something. So the lawyers, deed searches, all that sort of thing. Well, we have to start from scratch again.

Now we identify land right up there by the tower that we have. And it's more land that we're taking. That's always a plus.

It's a little bit more. So finally we go through again. This takes a whole year.

Who makes the money? The lawyers. Right.

The lawyers are making the money. I'm ready to have a cardiac because I'm the one that started this. You know, say, hey, let's clean off this piece of property.

It may be my lifetime, I mean, for crying out loud. So it got through conservation. They're happy.

Dave McLaughlin gave a nice presentation to town meeting. A couple questions asked, but when we show them why it's happening, the land's still going to be preserved. In fact, it's going to be a little bit more preserved because we have to control it a little bit tighter.

And we're giving the town more land than we're asking for, and it matches in with all the other land. So it was a good deal for everybody. Now it's down to the legislature.

It has to go through so many readings. It's a home rule petition. And we're told it should be any time now.

And, again, lawyers are involved. Lawyers calling and this, that, and so forth. And the town manager's been very good.

This is stuff that Paul has pushed ahead, but, again, lawyers, and we pay for the town lawyers to see that everything's copacetic and all this crap. And I would gather to say that this procedure should be done hopefully within a month. It should, and it's been years doing it.

And it's been a friendly situation all the time. It hasn't been a taking of anything, but that's how long something like this takes. And we've run into this a lot over the years.

We've found that properties that we have in a district, and I'm sure the other districts have the same issues, that things have been done. It's gone through town meeting, but it hasn't been registered to the Registry of Deeds, and it's a problem. Or something that we've been doing and we've never got permission was conservation land or something.

But it was the old days, yeah, just do it. Yeah, you're a water district. You're part of us anyway.

We work together. So does this mean you have to go and backfill the document, create a new one with all the... Well, sometimes, yeah.

You have to get it down to the Registry of Deeds, and if there's a problem on an easement, we have to square that away. We have to do our homework. Now, a lot of times it just takes finally filing this stuff and sometimes finding it.

Sometimes we don't even know we have stuff like this. I'll give you a good example. On East Chelmsford, they said to, at the time, Attorney Shanahan, he was doing a...

He was involved with the charter school off there on East Chelmsford, and they said to him, Attorney Shanahan, we want a this size pipe run down to make sure they tie off because they won't have the water pressure. It's going to cost you $76,000. Shanahan says, okay.

And I'm giving you ballpark figures, but this is the base of the story. He goes back to East Chelmsford commissioners. He said, hey, you already have a pipe down there.

They said, we do? He says, yeah, we found it in the plants. Oh, well, we still want the $76,000.

But they didn't know they had this pipe. And I'm sure the stuff in our district, some of the stuff that goes back, you just say, how did that take place? Now, we have rules now that we started.

And the commissioners have been, I think, very proactive on a lot of things. Now we don't allow contractors just to come in and build a subdivision and just dead the pipe, dead ends. They're a pain and a hassle.

If they can loop it, we want them to loop it. And, boy, they cry sometimes. They cry.

If they can't loop it, and at times they can't, it's a butts against another community, or it just can't be done, well, then they have to pay the district. There's a formula. They pay us a bunch of money.

And the reason they do that is, they have to do that, is we own that headache forever. This district's been around since 1913. We have dead-end pipes that we're endlessly, every year, spending thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars flushing them out because the water gets stagnant.

So now we say, hey, you want to build that? It's a subdivision. Now, if it's one house they're building back here, we're not going to loop it.

One house. So you're saying that the pipe goes into the development, it comes out, and it connects again, so the water's always flowing through?

Yeah, it's always running.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, sometimes they can't do it.

And sometimes there's a couple reasons they can't do it. If they abut, say, another community, or it's 495 cuts across and it's a dead-end, or we run into problems where a neighbor says, hey, I'm not giving him an easement. I don't want that subdivision.

I'm not giving an easement. Well, the contractor will pay us. Down the road, we'll go to the neighbor, maybe five years down, ten years, or even three years, see if we can get us to loop it.

And if it's a real crucial problem, down the road we'll even have to take the land to take it as an easement. Now, we haven't had to do that. It's like an eminent domain right.

Yeah, we have the right to do that. And we've done that when we had to build transfer stations and stuff like that. We'll take land.

We will take it. We want to have a friendly taking. We'll talk to you.

Hey, we need a piece of your property to do this and so forth. And here's the fair value. In fact, here's even more of the fair value.

But we need this for the good of the water takers. And usually, except for a couple of times that we had to go through a taking, and just take it, that's it. But on the looping end of it, that has worked pretty good.

And as I say, some of the contractors moan. But we don't force them if they're building one house. If it's one house, and we've had that situation where it's way back there, we'll say, well, put in a two-inch line, and you're on your own.

We wouldn't make water. As long as they're flushing the toilet, the water's running, right? Yeah, but it's these little subdivisions.

You get more and more of that. A couple of houses, and they moan because they say, hey, we're sorry. You're building a couple of houses.

You've got to help us out here. You build them, you get your money, and you walk. And we own them.

So the commission's been good on that. And we've built a couple of filtration plants. We owe about $7 million, $8 million in bond fees.

And I'm sure you're getting a, if you live in our district, you're getting two bond fees, $33, I believe it is, total, in two plants we have. My wife pays the bills, so I don't know. I think we do get water from Center, though, even though we're in West Chelmsford.

Yeah, this is how it works. Wherever you, we have wells in all parts of the town. And the way it works is we pipe it to a well, we own it.

So water districts, they're there, but they get overridden on that aspect. However, once we pipe your house and it's our water, you're our customer. North Chelmsford or East Chelmsford could be across the street, have their own.

I mean, if they do it. We can't go into a district unless we have permission. We couldn't just say, okay, we're going to take care of that subdivision off Riverneck Road because we're going to pipe it.

Now we can't do that. But before, where there wasn't any water and we run our pipes, that's how that works. Cell phone towers.

Yeah. Does the, who benefits, who gets the fees? Is it the water district?

Yeah.

Is that a significant part of the income right now? It's like $100,000, maybe more. Total for the?

Yeah, maybe $150,000. And it helps. There's no doubt.

We put that money towards tower maintenance. And we have cell towers on Mill Road, the tower on Mill Road. They're going to rebuild that as a plan.

EBI has a plan out right now to add some new antennas.

A lot on Mill Road?

A lot of the existing antennas on Mill Road.

Yeah. No, not Mill Road.

No, I'm sorry. Turnpike Road. Different one.

I think it's 203 Turnpike. Turnpike and Mill.

It's near Mill. Yeah. Right.

I think the address is actually on Turnpike.

Yes, it is on Turnpike.

So they're going to be expanding there. Right. But they're going to have to pass.

Mm-hmm. So you'll get a little more. Yeah, anything they do.

Anything. And there's another tower. We were going to put one on Amble Road.

The residents were against that. They were very upset. At first they weren't, but then.

So there's a tank on the top of that hill right now? Yeah. And you wanted to put another additional tank or replace it?

No, we want to put a cell tower there. Oh, a tower on their tank.

Oh, okay.

And they said no. Now, if we can put it on the tank, but this is a freestanding tower that we wanted. So anything on the tank we can put on it.

It's what's on your land. Yeah. But people don't like.

They don't like freestanding towers. Mm-hmm. Depending if they don't see them, there's no problem.

But antennas on tanks. They're pretty invisible.

Yeah.

They don't mind those. The brick chimneys, they're pretty good about that with the antennas and the brick patterns on them. Yeah, you see those up north at the mill.

But we are putting a tower, and we've notified the neighborhood. Lock Road? Yeah.

So that's an old tower, right? It's an old-fashioned high-standing. Right.

That's being torn down. That's going to cost the district a couple million, but we have the money for that without going out for bonding. And hopefully the neighbors, they have been very good.

We've had them in on hearings on this. We have to tell them what our plans are. We know there's some zoning issues because zoning says you can't do anything within 500 feet.

Well, the big problem we have there, Fred, is fire and police antennas on that. Oops. They need that.

Right. And the new tank is a lot lower than the one that's there. Yeah, the new tank is going to be.

It wouldn't support the antennas on the tank, so you've got to have a tower. No, we have to have a tower. And what it is is the new tank is going to be a little bit maintenance-free.

It's going to be cement. It's going to be lower. The other tower, as you know, is metal.

That has to be torn down. I mean, it's a 1950 vintage, so that's going down. Now, could we have left the metal tank there and done something else?

Yeah, by taking people's property and building another tank and left the metal tank there to keep the tower of cell phone lines on it or whatever.

You've got to paint it or anything.

Yeah, so it wasn't feasible. We've talked to the neighbors. They seem pretty good on it.

We don't see any problems. The chief talked to them at a hearing that we had what our plans are. Somebody did question, well, if you put the tower, are you just going to put fire and police on it and you won't put any other systems?

Well, no. You get cell towers. Yeah, we want cell towers.

That's where the money is, right?

I mean, we're being nice. We allow the fire and police on our property for ZIP. We have the towers there.

They've been using our water tank. So if we put a freestanding tower, definitely we want to put back our cell towers and maybe add one or two more, maybe, if we can. And that's money that's not going into our pocket.

That's revenue for the district. And they won't even notice that tower right there because they get that other ugly thing that's been there for years. But we'll see.

I feel comfortable that the neighborhood is going to be pretty good on that because they've been well informed and letters have gone out. We've had meetings with them and told them what's going to happen, why it's happening. The chief has said why he needs it.

The fire chief, why they need that communication. And it's an important facet of the safety of the community. And we just have to replace that old tower.

It's leaking, or it has leaked. We patched it, and it's a hazard and it has to come down. Would we like to keep it?

Yeah, because we don't want to spend the money. We bought as much time out of that thing as we could. What's the lifetime if it's a 1950 village?

We're past the lifetime. 50 years? Yeah, 50 years.

Now, cement towers are different. They'll last for eons. But metal towers, they rust.

And their maintenance is tough. You've got to paint them all the time. And we painted the one on Turnpike Road.

$300,000 every 10 years. That's a lot of money. The one on Locke Road wouldn't be that expensive, but it's too expensive to paint it, which we're not going to paint it because it's beyond its days.

So that's it with Water District, I guess. Well, that brings us to 9 o'clock. You said two hours, so I gave you close to two.

Interviewer - Thank you very much, John. Okay.