Interviewer - This is Fred Merriam here at 14 Dennison Road in North Chelmsford, and I'm here with Peter Picken and Peter Vennard.

And we're going to talk about North Chelmsford and West Chelmsford. So why don't we start off, whoever wants to start, introduce yourself.

Peter Picken and Peter Vennard - And I'm just here to listen [Peter Picken]. I hope you don't think I know that well. Well, you've lived here all your life.

I know. Did your family come to town? And what was it like growing up, the school you went to?

Well, let's see. I think my grandfather and grandmother probably came to town somewhere in the 20s. I'm assuming because I can't guarantee that.

But my father was born right here on Main Street in, I don't know. He was born there? Yeah, yeah, he was born right there.

Your mom was born, I think, 1914.

Yeah, my father would be born in 1916 right there. My mother was born in Fitchburg. But my father was born and they lived right here in a little white house on Main Street in West Chelmsford.

But my father went to the Princeton Street School, elementary school, and he went on to the high school, which, I don't know, the high school must have only been open a year or so because, but he graduated from Chelmsford High School and my mother graduated from Chelmsford High School. Yeah, the pictures are in the class as you walk in. Yeah, that's right.

My mother and father lived in a two-tenement house right next to Peter Pickens' father and grandfather's business, Pickens Printing, in North Chelmsford. That's right. Back in DeAnna's house.

Is this in Vinal Square? It's in Vinal Square, right next to where Pickens Insurance still is. And on the other side was the Paramount Lounge, a restaurant that had been there for many, many years.

It was in those days. And they had a house built in 1940 on Twiss Road, right off of Main Street behind the cemetery. And when I was born, my brother was three years older than me.

He lived in the DeAnna's block. And when I was born, I came right out of St. Joseph's, out of the hospital, right to our new mansion on Twiss Road, which was a little Cape Cod with half finished upstairs and half unfinished, one bathroom and three rooms about five feet by five feet, it seemed. And that's where my brother and I and mother and father, that's where we grew up and spent over 20 years of our lives, right there in North Chelmsford.

Well, actually West Chelmsford. And as I told you before, when I was a kid, from the Triangle Store at Groton Road and Main Street down towards Vinal Square, you went to the Princeton Street School. From that triangle, the other direction, which is west, we went to the Quessy School.

And I started in the Quessy School in 1946, September of 1946, in the first grade. Yeah, thank you. There were eight grades in this school, four rooms, eight grades, each two down, two up, four teachers.

One teacher had the first, second in the same room, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth. The teacher would teach a lesson to the first graders. All right, now you study, read your book, whatever.

Then she'd walk two feet and start teaching the second graders. Then after you went through those two grades, you stayed downstairs and went to the third and fourth grade. Was it distracting having the teacher teach to you?

No. Or did you just tune them up? Well, in those days.

That's how he got so smart. He was one grade ahead all the time. In those days, things were different than they are nowadays.

You just sat there and did what the teacher told you to do. The first and second grade teacher, her name was Alice McEnany. She lived down in Highland Avenue, down near St. John's Church, up off Highland Avenue. Brian's son. Is she? Was she?

I don't know. Brian Hazard? No, that's not right.

No, no, she's not. No, I don't think so. Anyway, she...

I don't know how. These are just anecdotes, obviously. But right where the Lowell Five is now in North Chelmsford, across the street was where Marinel Transportation was.

That was the bus company that serviced the whole town to take kids to school, all over town. But somehow, she got from point A to point B every morning. She got from her house to that bus.

Because when the bus picked me up at Twiss Road every day, she was in the front seat of that bus. That's how she got to work. Where did she live?

She lived down in Highland Avenue somewhere. Down John Street, James Street, down in that area somewhere. There's a whole bunch of McEnany's that lived down there.

I don't know if they were made at the Hank McEnany's. Ray McEnany's? I think it's a different family.

Well, it might be the store people. They were down on Tobin Avenue, down around there. The people that owned McEnany's Store, down by the tracks, where the brick houses and all?

They were up on... It's the same family. They were on Tobin Avenue.

Well, Tobin Avenue wasn't there at this time in life. There wasn't no Tobin Avenue there when I was a little kid. It wasn't there.

They built that up. They built that street afterwards. Is that the name of that street?

I don't know. I don't know what it's named for. That street wasn't there when I was a little kid. Those houses are... No, they haven't. They weren't there from as far as they thought.

You've got to take me there. Well, for this kind of stuff, I do. So, anyway, we would go to...

Went to school up here. And you went, you know, as I said, your teacher taught. And then you sat there and did your lesson.

And she taught the other people and so forth and so on. And I always thought this was very interesting. When you went out to the playground, the boys were on one side of the playground and the girls were on the other.

If you got caught going over on the other side, you had to go in and then you recessed inside. So, if you wanted to talk to somebody, you know, and you could get away with it, that was one thing. But if you went over there and got caught, then you'd have to sit inside during recess time.

That's just the, you know... I didn't know that. Things that...

Well, these are things that come to my mind. That's all. Timmy, how are you?

Oh, yeah. Good? Hi, Tim.

Tim likes to hear these stories. I'm not sure he does. Oh, yes, he does. He's being polite. So, then I went there through grade six. And then they were consolidating schools because they were building the north school, which has burned to the ground since and now is the elderly housing.

So, they put... They closed the Princeton... No, they kept the Princeton Street School open for one year and the Corsi students...

We were bused to Highland Avenue School up on the top of the hill for one year. That's when I was in the seventh grade. For one year.

And we stayed there for one year. I had a great teacher. His name was Larry Silk.

I'll never forget him. He was an excellent, excellent teacher. You know, he was a young guy and he was really good.

I had him in the seventh grade. In those days, you didn't go from science here, math here, English here. One teacher taught you everything.

You just stayed in that room all day.

Was that unusual to have a male teacher back then?

Yes, it was, really. Because he was the first male teacher I had. I had all women teachers.

Yeah, Princeton Street was all women. Yeah. In the north school.

In the north school... Well, there were a couple of male teachers in the north school. Sergeant...

Morin. Yeah, well, Ray Horan. Yeah.

Morin. Morin. I don't know if that was his first name, Ray.

I think so. Mr. Morin. He taught science or something.

I went there in the sixth grade. Well, I went, like I said, to this Highland Avenue school for one year and I had this lad result that that was a great teacher. He was really good.

Then they built the north school and all Princeton Street, Farmer Quessy , and Highland Avenue, those three schools were closed completely. And we all went to the north school. You must have, what grade did you go in?

Eighth grade. I was the first. Because I was sixth.

I was the first. A couple of years behind you. First grade in there.

I was there one year. We graduated, we graduated in one class there. Do you want me to add something to this as we go along?

Not to interrupt you. No, you get right in. Yeah, later.

No, get right in. My father being in the insurance business, he told this story many times afterwards, that the guy came to him that was part of the town insurance thing, Norma, that I went there to Princeton Street School, and probably my sister started there. He said, Bob, you're in the insurance business.

This building is going to burn down. They oil the floors twice a year up there. You get one match and that thing's gone, you're going to lose all the kids.

You've got to do something about this. This is a fire trap. So he got together with the guy that started the first bank, Warren.

Leahy. Leahy. And my father was the chairman of the building committee, and Warren was involved with some other ones, and that's how they got the north school going.

It was supposed to be fire proof, but it did burn down months later. Yes, it did. I don't think they had sprinkler system in it.

I know they didn't have a sprinkler system in it, but it was much safer than what the Princeton Street School had. And that's why that happened, because someone in town, my father and some others, got together and said, we're getting out of this fire trap. We're going to build a new school.

Sorry to interrupt, but we're not that late.

No, no, you're not interrupting.

I'm just chronologically myself a little bit, at least up until I got into high school, you know. At that point, you know, we're kind of getting away from, I mean, I'm sure you can find a thousand people that can tell you stuff about things that went on from. Yeah, I didn't know that Quessy closed and you went down to Highland?

Yeah, for one year. Oh, wow. My wife went there because she lived down on 12th and Avenue.

She might have been there when I was there, you know, but it all could have been, no? No way. She's a lot younger than us, especially you.

She wouldn't have even been in school by then, you're right. But a lot of these schools, they reopened them, like the Quessy School, they reopened that and put a fifth grade or two sixth grades out there at one time while they were building the high school or building McCarthy or something like that. They opened these schools back up again.

What's up at Quessy now? It burned to the ground. Oh, that's right.

What year was that? I don't know what year it was. I think they actually demolished it.

There's a house there, just to say. There's a house there. It got...

Highland School. It's a boy's house. They took it over for a while.

It's still there. Is it housing? I think that's elderly Housing. elderly Housing. That's an update. The East School, I think there's something out there now, too.

The Boy Scouts had that one. That was the one that the Boy Scouts had, but they're probably not there now. We used to go out and play baseball in those little fields out there.

In those days, each elementary grammar school had its own baseball team and basketball team, and you'd go around. We'd play the Westland School or something over here up at the Quessy . I mean, it was just a field.

You'd have a hard time finding where to put any bases or anything. So would they take you over on a school bus? Yeah, they'd take you on a school bus.

Back in those days, they only took the best. I mean, the basketball team has... How many players would you have with a few on the sideline?

Ten? Oh, yeah, not many. Ten.

It would only be the ten best in town that would play.

So it was a school league, actually. Yeah, it was just an inner school.

Up until the eighth grade. Then when you get into high school, of course, then you started right away playing against all the towns around here that they still play against. Most competitive, I played baseball when I was a kid in high school and ended up being co-captain of the Chelmsford High School team.

But the most competition in baseball that I had all the time I played, and it was a lot, was the Little League over on Stedman Street playing on that little sandlot down in the back. There was only four teams, and nobody played unless you were good.

It's a whole different ballgame now.

And it was unbelievable. The most competition, you practiced twice a week, and you played once. And that was it.

And it ended at the end of June. The Little League started in Chelmsford behind the Westland School. In a gravel sand pit.

Did you play in that pit, too? Behind the Westland School. Oh, I never got to play in that.

No, that's before. Then my father, Ab Lupien, who was a coach who owned an apple farm up here, whose son Dick's still alive. You might know who he is.

Well, Ab, I don't know if Ab is his father or not or uncle or whatever, but Ab was my coach. And we played there at first, behind the Westland School. Then they went down to Bull Road, down in the swamp there.

Right off of Stedman Street. Right off of Stedman Street. And Ab had his old Ford tractor down there like your father had.

And we built the field down in there, the kids and the coaches. Did you play there at all? Yeah, I played there for, I think, one year.

I think I played there. And then I came in after. I didn't play there very long.

I think I played there one year. It was a swamp, so if anybody hit a home run and it was a long one, they couldn't find the ball. Sometimes they'd end up with no balls left.

But, yeah, literally he started right behind the old Westland School. When I was there, we had Parker George in charge of the Yankees, the coach of the Yankees, which was me, Ab Lupien, the Red Sox, Benny Crow, the Braves, and the Dodgers. Well, I played on the Dodgers, and I had Ab Lupien as my coach.

That was right. I got that wrong. The Red Sox was Angus.

Al Angus. And they used to scream at one another. And the parents hated my father to come to the game because he would just go nuts, yelling at me and everybody else, and so was everybody yelling at everybody else.

But it was the most competition I ever had in my whole life. We had one game over there just at the Westland, behind the Westland School, and this kid that played for, I think it was the Braves, I don't know, his name was Skip Kenny. Oh, yeah, I remember him.

He went to Keith, but he didn't go to Chancellor's School. But I knew him from the Westland School when we played in the seventh and eighth grade. I was very friendly with him.

He was on another team. So we're playing. On Sunday afternoon, we're playing.

I'm pitching for the Dodgers, and he's pitching for, I believe, the Braves. And it's a real close game, and there's a lot of hollering and yelling, and the bottom line is his father came right out of the stands and had a fist fight with my coach. And my mother and father were in the stands like, this is ridiculous, you know.

It's not just nowadays. It was like that. There was only four teams.

Oh. There were 14 players on each team for the whole town. Him and I stood side by side and said, what is going on here?

You know, this is a, you know, it was awful. So things haven't changed at all. No, no, they haven't.

Well, I think the Little League has changed. Everybody has to play a certain amount of time. I thought that when you get into senior Little League, which they didn't have a junior Little League, but you played your last year at 12 years old.

If you were any good, you should be playing all the time. The kids coming up will have their chance, but they don't do that anymore. And I think it teaches you that, you know, if you want to be able to play and you want to be involved, you've got to practice, and you've got to be good enough.

I mean, not everybody is a natural. But that's why nowadays, you know, they let every kid play all the time because some kids are never going to be any good, but they want to try. So we're at the other side of the coin then, you know.

You can't have a kid sit on the bench. No, the parents don't get all excited. They don't let the family fight in the stands.

Parents still get excited, believe me. So what other kinds of things did you do in school during this time, for fun, outside of school? Well, I don't think you should know that.

You mean, no, no, no. No, when we were little like? Yeah.

Yeah, when we were little like. Well. Did you hang out at restaurants?

No, no, when I was a little kid, we'd come home from school in the wintertime. And the wintertime was easy. Well, Twiss Road used to go right through down to Crooked Spring Road.

There was no Meadowbrook Road. That was before Route 3. This was long before Route 3.

And there was a decent-sized hill there down that goes over. If you sat at the top of the hill, and those days they didn't salt or sand the roads. They plowed them some, but the roads were, in the wintertime, were packed, high-packed snow, you know, packed right down good.

And the sledding was usually pretty good. So most of the winter, every day after school, we would go down and we'd start at the top of this little hill and see if we could get over the canal and get to the railroad tracks. There was kind of a little lapse thing that got to the railroad tracks, and then Buxton's Farm was on the other side.

We didn't know whenever we got over the tracks, but we did that a lot in the wintertime. And I hung around that Buxton's Farm a lot when I was a young kid. They had a lot of cows down there.

When I was in, you know, in the late 40s, I spent a lot of time down there with Billy Buxton. He was in my class in grammar school, and they had a big, big farm down there. A lot of cows.

I lived in the square. Right next to where the print shop is, 12 Middlesex Street. So we spent most of our young life in the woods down back at Southwell Mills, which is, you go down Wadham Lane, down there. I mean, completely different now compared to what it was then. And we built a camp down there. I was 12 years old.

I fell out of a tree and broke my leg. And when we got old enough to go hunting, we hunted those woods. We used to stalk pheasants down there. It was a haven down there. Had a duck blind. Used to hunt on the river.

That's where Williamsburg and the industrial market is. There was a house down in the back there that was called the Haunted House. I saw a picture of that.

There was just a fireplace, chimney left, I guess. When I was there, it was a whole house. Oh, it was a house.

What was it like? Oh, it must have been quite a house when I was up and gone. But, you know, it got abandoned.

Kids wrecked it. Guys used to come off the trains and be hiding in there, and they'd go down in the cellar and we'd get there. And sometimes they'd come jumping out at us and scare the heck out of us and off we'd go.

But that was where we spent most of the time. We'd have shingle fights. Rip the shingles off and throw them on the left one side or the other.

Were the trap houses down there then? Yeah, we'd go there at the Apache Trap Houses. The Apache Trap Houses.

What's that? Just a rod and gun club. They had, down where he's talking, they had skeet houses and trap houses.

Right to the right of Southwell's where you drive down to go to the ramp now the boat ramp used to be. I don't think it's, they don't have anything there anymore. No.

But up here in West Chelmsford, there's a little area with an old pond on Crooked Spring Road. It's a conservation area now. They had their clubhouse there, the same gun club.

And the clubhouse was there. They had a, just a room maybe this size, but he had a giant stone fireplace in it, beautiful stone fireplace. And we used to go, the way we come about, Cub Scouts meeting, one of the Cub Scouts, we used to go down there once in a while and they'd bring us in down there and stuff.

And that little pond there, there was a lot more water there years ago in that little pond. We used to when. I don't know where that is.

It's right down Crooked Spring with Jordan Road comes down the hill there. You know where I'm talking about. But when we were kids, like in June, in school, at recess, at the Quessy School, there was a big field and behind it was a big lot of pine trees.

Well, if we could kind of slide our way into the pine trees without being caught, then we'd run down the path, you'd take all our clothes off and jump in for a swim and then put our clothes on and come back up to school, you know, and walk in the class and Lillian Dexter's looking, you know, like, what do you think I'm stupid? Where have you been? You're not sweating that much.

But we used to love doing that chute down there. But that was part of that same, they were the same people that owned all that stuff down behind where you were, down there behind the number one mill down there. We lived in those bunkers they had.

But, you know, we used to fish in the eddy for carp and we'd stalk the pheasants in the field in the fall so when we got a little older we were able to hunt for them. How about a bad story? Sure.

Uh-oh. Halloween. Halloween, we used to celebrate Halloween for a week, not for one day, and it wasn't trick or treating.

It was all trick or tricking. We used to, my grandfather had a chicken farm right on Main Street and myself, my brother, Phil Marlow, who's still alive, maybe retired as a deputy chief of police in Chelmsford, he lives in Westford. The three of us, we'd go over, he lived right on Main Street too, we'd go over and get some eggs and we'd go in the cemetery and hide behind the graves.

And when the Eastern Mass bus used to come up to the Triangle and make a loop, we'd throw eggs at the bus and then we'd go egg the bus and then we'd go hide further back behind the graves and the police car would come up with a little spotlight, I know you little so-and-so are in there, you better come out. We'd just shiver and we'd hide behind the gravestones and he'd drive away. We'd do that every night, like for three or four nights around Halloween.

There's nothing to be proud of. We didn't really hurt anything, I guess. So we made it out of grade school.

Yeah. Now, high school was another world for me, that's for sure. Well, my grandparents owned Clark's Farm on Tyngsboro Road and that was a big piece of property there.

They had corn and all the different vegetables. It was in North Chelmsford? It was in North Chelmsford.

It was, let's see, well, you know where the little package store is there now and the car wash? By the entrance to Williamsburg, it was on the other side. It was a little further than that.

There was a little package store on the left. The next lot was the main house. And they had all the land and back of that all the way up to Dunstable Road to the hill that goes up to Dunstable Road.

There was some houses on the north side of the field. You go up that road and then they had all the fields where all the apartment buildings are now off of Cross Street.

The economy of development that's up there.

Not to no one.

No, it was the government of the land.

But that was all my grandfather's land. And all the way up through Dunshire Drive up to Dunstable Road on the other end. So it was a lot of land.

That was all his. He rented the land up in Dunshire. I know what you mean.

Cross Street. And there's some big apartment houses there. And so he had the farm there and the vines and the vehicles.

And that was there for years and years and years. I think that might have closed around, I think he sold it off in 1960, I don't know when I was a senior in high school. But all the kids worked there around the area.

So is that where the apartments are now in the Honda Dealer? The land would have been where the Honda Dealer is, right. That was part of it.

That was the main street. Was there a mall store before that? Right up to that.

To that road there, whatever that is, whatever road that is. Whatever. And he sold that whole piece on the north end where the, what's the name of the apartments there?

Riverview, and there was some before that at Cross Street. But from Cross Street up to Robert Hall, $5,000. Imagine what they turned that over to be.

And the Catholic Church bought his property on Tyngsboro Road. They bought the house, they had some sort of something going on there, and then they divided it up and sold it off. And in Dunshire they built homes up in there.

He had rented that land. Yeah, it's amazing. I was looking at the road map today, and I was looking around here, nothing.

When I was a kid, I could just take a map with a whiteout, and I could just whiteout total developments that were not here. This one wasn't here. Everything, Crooked Spring Road was there, and there's a few houses in West Chelmsford, but everything else,

they could just whiteout a house with nothing.

What was the name of this development when they first put it in? I don't know what they called this. I know Tommy Sugden built these houses.

What was the name? Tommy Sugden. Okay.

He built it. Sounds like Sugden Mills down at 11 School Street there on the pond. Same name?

Probably Sugden. No. What they're doing down there now?

Well, no. I know what they're doing down there now, but it used to be the Sugden Mill before Jap Enamelac came in. I don't know about that for sure.

Was that Holmes? No. Or was it Mill?

That was the Mill. What was it called before Jap Enamelac? It was the Sugden Press Bagging Company.

I know. I think it was always Jap Enamelac when I was a kid. Well, that was since 1945, which was the year it was formed.

You were probably just a little kid. Yeah. 1945.

You should know all this history. Did you know it then? No.

No. But you know that little train station there in West Chelmsford? They used to stop there and pick up passengers way, way back.

Years and years ago. So do you remember that? Yeah.

You look just up the road on Grand Street. The bus used to come right by there every day. Trains come by frequently?

Yeah. The whistle at the crossing? Yeah, trains came by there.

Actually, more trains come by there now than did in those days. But passenger trains used to go by there as well. And that little stretch, there's a little stretch of that road that was called the Stony Brook Railroad.

It was privately owned. And the church, Peter and I, the Congregational Church in Washington, my father got the church to buy some shares in that railroad at one time. At one time they owned shares in the Stony Brook Railroad.

I don't know if it's all been sold off now or not, but it only runs like from that spot up to the second intersection up there or something. But it is a quarter of a mile or a half a mile. It was not part of the Boston and Maine Railroad in those days.

It was privately owned, the Stony Brook Railroad. And also that spur that ran up to Fletcher Quarry, I think, was all owned by this private company, the Stony Brook Railroad Company.

I think it's still independent.

Could be. And one of the things I learned is that their big source of income is the fiber optic lines that run along the railroad. But it happens that that line survived because it's a main route when you get from the northeast down to around the outside part.

There's a tremendous amount of traffic on it nowadays. Did you ever ride the passenger train? Was that station still there when you were little?

Yes, but I never rode that one. But I rode the one from Lowell into the Boston Garden to go to the service where the Lowell Connector is now. That's where the train station was in Lowell.

It was a big train station. Not too far from where the Gallagher Terminal is? Basically the same area.

But I remember taking the train to go into Boston Garden to see the service. We'd drive in and go in from there. It was a hotel right there, right across the street from that, to and fro.

But you couldn't take the train from West Chelmsford or even North Chelmsford by then? I don't know. The North Chelmsford stop was a—I don't know if it stopped for passengers, but the North Chelmsford stop down at the end of Church Street, the little piece of Church Street there.

That was a railway freight hub. Okay. Was the passenger station gone by then?

I don't remember it being—but I remember going down there and picking up stuff that you'd order, you know, you'd order railway freight, you could pick up there. If they ordered something from somebody, Sears or something, you'd drive down there and you could pick it up at that little station right there. You remember the little train station where Tiny Gray fell asleep when the train came through?

The little house where he's supposed to put the signal down? No. Where was that?

Right at the brick house, right there. Oh, yeah? There was a little— What happened?

Did he get killed? Yeah, somebody got killed there. Yeah, a guy got killed.

Because there was a little train station there that had a guy in it, and his job was to put the gate down when the train comes through. He was a bus driver at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He was a bus driver. Tiny Gray. Tiny Gray, yeah.

And he fell asleep in there and didn't put the thing down, and somebody got killed there with a car accident on foot. That I don't remember, but I was alive for that. I do remember that.

I also remember when I was a little kid, where I lived— Well, we lived on Twiss Road. There was a little path that went up to— Well, you know when Needham Street starts down on Groton Road, Needham Street goes up the hill there. Now, there's a whole development on the right there that I built.

I worked on every one of those houses to build those in the late 50s that Bob Wilde built. I can't even think of the name of the street. But Needham Street went up, and then it became a path.

We had two routes. Obviously, years ago, before I was born, it went all the way through to Twiss Road. Well, we could take this little path, and we could walk right over there to Needham Street.

When I went to the Princeton Street School in 1952 or 1951, or whatever, when it first opened, I'd walk down that path, and I'd walk over to— And go over. But before that, years before that, a family that lived up in the back named Aubrey's family, he hung himself. The father hung himself.

And we're in— For some reason, I don't know how, where it spread so fast, my brother and I went over, and he was still hanging there when my brother and I went over, his arms down there. He'll never forget that. Hung himself out in the back.

I don't know what the reason was. I don't know. Money or whatever.

I don't know. But for some reason, he was still there when we went over. That's a long time ago.

But it's amazing. I can't remember what I said to somebody yesterday, but I can remember stuff like that, I can remember like nothing. It's just—I don't know.

I can remember things that happened so far back, but I can't remember what I asked him to do yesterday. Whatever it was, he didn't do it. Those are still the bad stories.

Those aren't good stories. So when you went to high school, was it the building that's McCarthy Junior High now, or was it the town office building?

Town office building.

And was the other building next to it already constructed? And how were those two buildings used together? The McFarlin was still— McFarlin School, which is now elderly, was still a grade school.

Were they connected?

Oh, it was still a grade school, so they weren't— I went there in the eighth grade. Okay.

They were still—no. There was a— when I went to the—I had canceled high school. That building was still one through eight, the McFarlin School.

And there was a sidewalk that came up from the high school that went down there because the cafeteria was in the McFarlin School. There was no cafeteria in Chelmsford High School. We walked down that path— All year round?

To go—all year round. All year round. We walked down that path to go to eat downstairs in the McFarlin.

Now, you must have been the last class to graduate from the old high school. 59 was the first class to graduate from McCarthy. And I was the—1960, I went for the very first time a whole year and then graduated.

59 went to the old high school. So you were the first in McCarthy? I was the first class to go there for the whole year.

He was the last one out of the—the one on— What was— Right, I went— I went four years to the old, old, old high school and graduated down in that little gym downstairs. That graduation was right there at that— That was in 1950—June of 1958. Two years later, they graduated from McCarthy.

I went four years to that high school. So you took the Marinel buses during those years? Oh, most all the time.

By senior year, one of the guys had a car. And near the end of the year, I can't remember exactly when he got it, but I think it was more like in the springtime during the baseball season because during football season, we practiced right up till dark.

And then this fellow, Bobby Gagnon, who lived on Eden Street, Father Hare, who lived in Highland Avenue on Church Street, myself, we would get out of practice five o'clock with Joe Nolan, you know, right till dark, right till dark, painted the footballs white near the end of the year.

We'd walk from the high school over in front of the original town hall that is still there now on North Road, and we'd thumb home from there every day during the football season. Somebody'd pick us up and drive us— Father Hare, he'd get out on Church Street, and Bobby and I'd make it a ride into North Chelmsford, and then we'd walk home from there every day during football season. Then in basketball season, they had a bus, provided a bus.

But the girls would practice first, so we'd have to— what we would do was we'd, after school, get out at two o'clock, whatever, we'd go down to Page's Drugstore, which is now the seafood place. Fishbones. Fishbones, right.

There was a soda fountain there. Actually, we'd all sit downtown in a soda fountain there. There was one in North Chelmsford, too.

We must have gone to Frosty's. But we'd go down there and have an ice cream frappe or something, and then we'd go back and practice basketball. Uh-oh.

We're running out of time. All right, so during basketball season, we'd have practice, and it'd get over like at five o'clock, and there was a bus that drove you home. And the bus ended up in North Chelmsford.

But Jimmy Souza, who was the center on our team, he lived in East Chelmsford. So we'd get on the bus at the high school, drive all the way to East Chelmsford to drop this one kid off, then all the way back, all the way up through West Chelmsford. Oh, you know.

And you're on until 6.30? 6.30, 7 o'clock at night. Every night.

Every night. And then when baseball came, this fellow got a car, and I didn't have a car, but very few kids had cars in those days. You know, a few of the kids that worked that didn't play sports, you know, some of them had cars, but very few, very few kids drove a car to school in those days.

You always went on the bus. Everybody went, girls, boys, everybody. Tim never rode the bus to high school in his whole life, from the time he lived here.

I went every day on the bus, every day. And not many kids nowadays ride the buses. How many kids do you have?

The parents take them, or other kids have cars. Look over there, there's a thousand cars over there at that high school. And it cost a fortune to park there.

A thousand? Yeah, you don't park for nothing. You don't park for nothing.

You've got to pay at least $250, maybe $300 to park there. And the place is full.

And you have to pay for all the sports, too.

Yeah, times have changed a lot.

You don't have kids that played sports for high school. I mean, they were like $100 a sport, and if you sat on the bench, then that's when you saw the parents get angry, when you're paying the money for the kids to sit on the bench.

So you didn't have that background?

No.

So what did you do after high school? Well, after high school, I went to college. Spent four years out at Fitchburg State College.

Got a degree in Bachelor of Science in Education. And then I went on and became a teacher for 28 years. Where'd you teach?

North Reading. North Reading High School. High School?

Yeah. I taught graphic arts, and all the time I taught, I worked for him and his father in the printing business in North Kensington as well. So in the summertime, you worked full-time?

Oh, full-time. Well, I managed to work most all the time, both jobs. It's kind of a unique situation.

So how did you get involved initially? Because you were friends in school? Well, we weren't...

No, our parents were friends. Very close friends. Very close friends.

We weren't really, but then... Then... We kind of got involved with...

My five parents were into fishing, and we would get involved in fishing, and we kind of got involved in that together and spent, I don't know, 50 years now hunting and fishing together, something like that. We were pretty close, I think. I don't know what...

The first time we went across the duck hole, I don't know if that was 60... I know it was in the middle of the night, though. I know it was in the middle of the night, but it was somewhere around 1960 when we first started getting close to...

And we've been hunting and fishing ever since, constantly. Well, let's talk about the printing business. What was it like when you started out?

I mean, the equipment, the type of work you did, how did it change? That's a long time. What's it like today?

I don't believe it. That's why I got out of it. You need to invest a million dollars every couple of years to stay with it.

Well, it was just pretty basic. I mean, they sent the type by hand, you know, you have the thing. He was better at it than I was. So you didn't... It was a type set by hand, one letter at a time, just like you see in the cardboard movie. You sent one letter at a time.

Were the letters backwards? Upside down, yes. You sent them as you read them, but they were upside down.

But each font would be a different style of type, script type, block type, you know, whatever. All the letters had a little groove in the top of the piece. So when you put the type in the composing step, you set it as you read it, you put that little groove up, and it was upside down.

That's how... But when you wrote your name, F-R-E-D, you didn't do D-E-R-F, it went forward just as you read it. So you got good at reading the letters upside down but the words were on the right.

The words were always in the right way, yeah. Yeah. How about photographs?

How would you handle them? Is it done separately or through a different... Yes, cameras.

Cameras went out of existence probably about 1980, maybe, somewhere around there. And they came in with a phototype, which was on paper. You worked on a computer.

Put a strip out and you'd paste up the magazine. That's the way it was at first. It wasn't composed or anything like it is now.

It was just an inscription. You did your own paste-up, as you call it. And...

Would you take a picture of that with a lens? Yeah, then you'd put it in the camera and you'd take a picture of it, develop the film, and then lay it out on a masking sheet, strip it out so... It was a negative at that point.

Then you'd burn it on top of an aluminum plate and that's what went on the press. Now it's done on the computer and the imposition is already in place with the photos in there, color or black and white, whatever. And direct to plate.

There's no negatives. Nobody does... If you ask for a negative, nobody even knows what it is today.

It's still an aluminum plate like it was. Yeah. Oh yeah, it's an aluminum plate.

Everything's basically computer. Not too long, there won't be any presses left. But if you took a picture like this 40 years ago and put it in the camera, this picture is a series of dots.

Black dots, white dots, gray dots. All graduated by what they have. So when you put that in the camera, when you put a piece of film in and took a picture of it, it would break those dots, it breaks those dots down and comes back out.

How does it do it?

Does it scan line by line and create a dot for every level? You put a screen in front of it. Over the film, you put a screen and a dot would have a dot in it.

You could do a 133 line, a 150 if you really wanted to be fancy. And you might have to bump it with flashes. I forget the whole process.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. You had a big screen that was like a 133 line. 133 dots to something that went into something.

And that would break that down. So you could print it because printing is a dot. A solid would be considered a dot.

If you did a photo, you have to print dots. If you looked at it on a magnifying glass, you'd just see a series of dots in there. And it's still printed that way today.

Except some of the new machines now are continuous like a photo is. A photo doesn't have a dot in it that you develop like Kodak gives you and so forth. But, you know, you have a film processor on the other side.

Then they develop machines that tell you how to make the halftones. You'd look at them with that, well, densitometer. You'd look at the densitometer so you'd know how long to expose it and this and that.

And of course it got better and better. And finally, that was all gone. That's the way it is today.

But we went from letterpress. We used to get the lino type, which was a piece of lead that had the, every one line was a piece of lead with the letters on it rather than individual. Then I went to the cold type, which was paper with the type on it.

Then when I ended up, we would go and direct a film. You'd get a piece of film that was all set, just lay it down on top of the plate, burn it with an exposed light. Now they don't even do that anymore.

So the process is like exposing film? The negative would come out of the machine up in the upstairs. It would be all set.

It would be, you know, eight pages, as opposed to a saddle-stitched book, 16-page signature. We'd call them eight-page signatures. And then you'd just lay that on top of the plate.

It was all set to go. Frame. Lock it up.

Put the light source on. It would burn through the areas that would expose the plate. And that would be, that's what you put on the press.

Now it doesn't do, it doesn't use a negative anymore. It just exposes it onto the plate and it comes out already. It's far superior than what we did.

Everything lines up, no stretch and no movement. It's a very complicated, the printing business is a very complicated thing. It's all done on being exact.

You know, Peter and I was like forming, everything had to be exact. Otherwise the customer wouldn't accept it. So it had to start out that way all the way to the end.

And if the customer said, yeah, that's okay, and it wasn't, they'd still tell you were wrong and you had to do it over again. So you had to make pretty sure it was right before we printed it. And that still goes on today, doesn't it?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I guess so. That's the major, major problem with printers.

And it's very expensive to buy the equipment today. But we had a lot of fun with it. It was a lot of work.

Constant, fast turnaround. I mean, we grew so much, so fast, they were in the 80s, maybe in the 70s and the 80s, that sometimes we couldn't even, we couldn't even get the work out. We could not, because it was work almost around the clock.

Every machine that was in place could not get it out. Question for you, the building in Vinal Square, was it built specifically for the printing? Yeah.

In 1950? 1950, that's right. They came up from the Southwell Mills.

That building that they were in before isn't there anymore. It was a Crysler building. Yeah, my father and grandfather built that.

And then my father and I put an addition on the back, kind of doubled the size. And now there's one on top, too? And we put it on the top.

And what year was the one on top added?

I don't remember exactly. I don't know. It was before the addition on the back.

Yeah, it was before the back. But my father died in 86, so... That would be in the 70s then.

Yeah. Yeah, it was in the 70s, put the top part on. Was that all for printing?

Yeah. Well, we had the insurance downstairs. We talk about the office downstairs.

We had three printing girls and three insurance girls in one little office. They were all packed right in there like sardines. And then the other office...

Was it totally segregated? No. There were no cubicles in those days.

I mean, could the insurance girl fill in for printing if she was having a slow day? Sometimes. Could answer the phone.

Answer the phone. But it was like... It was the loudest place you ever want to be and all those girls talking at once.

True. Yeah, it's still kind of an open area. Yeah.

Well, it was a lot less congested than it is then. They talk a lot now, but... As long as they're having fun, we don't get the work done.

So what kinds of work did the printing jobs... What kinds of jobs did they have when you started working? What?

Invitations. Yeah. There's a lot of that.

Like these programs you see here for the menstrual shows. They were all printed. They're picking and printing.

All these in here were all done there. So was it like small patches of custom jobs for people or did you have steady commercial work? Oh, yeah.

Well... Yeah, we... We grew tremendously.

But then we do... Then we do a million tag signs for Purity Supreme when they were in business before. They went out of business.

We did a lot of work for them. That was our biggest client at the time. Yeah.

Very fine. We did a lot of work for them through a broker for the ?? things. We had a magazine.

Actually, we still print the place of ?? Red Mill Graphic still prints it. The Standard Insurance Magazine.

We got that in 19... 87? 70.

74? 72. I never forget the first issue.

I'll tell you a small tidbit. The Standard had to be out on Tuesday nights?

No. We had to print it on Wednesday. We had to have it at the mailers' place like 1 or 2 o'clock on Thursday.

Well, I was in labor with Katelin and Peter was working, making sure the Standard went out. So I had to wait. No, it was with Tim.

It was with Tim. I had to wait. I'm in labor with Tim and Peter had to stay and finish the Standard before he could come.

I said, I'll get there, but I have to do the Standard.

Well, that work was always number one. Well. In those days.

Why don't you tell about your firefighting career?

No, that was... Well, why then? Were you a call fireman here in the North?

Yeah. Back when they had the whistle signals? Yes, indeedy.

I worked... I was a... call...

call intermittent firefighter, I was called because I worked. I worked a lot of full-time shifts as well. I was on...

I was on the whistle system for Engine 2 here in North Chelmsford, but I worked. I worked for about five or six years, all... all different shifts.

In the summertime when I was in college, I worked all summer long on all kinds of shifts. I worked... Actually, I worked more in the Senate, in headquarters, than I did in North Chelmsford.

So it was like a third job then? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

And you were working in printing? Yeah, and I was... On call? Oh, yeah. Yeah, the call... the call system was... So they have same call signals from the North whistle at center to kind of... No, they were different. They were...

they were different. When I was on, there was... there was a...

there was a... the call system, there was call firefighters at each... every station.

South, East, North, West, and the Center. There were eight... eight call firefighters based at each station.

The only two stations that were manned were the North station and the Center station. They were manned 24-7. That's where the Princeton Street School was, wasn't it?

When they built the North school, they put the new fire station there. Those two stations were... were manned.

And the others were just call stations. So if there was a fire in West Chelmsford, they'd blow the whistle up here in West Chelmsford and one of the call firefighters would go get the engine and bring it to the fire, wherever the fire might be, if it was in West Chelmsford or if it was North Chelmsford. They...

they could read the... they could read the ticker tape and it would give a punch-out series of numbers and they would know...

They had a card.

But... they'd have a card so then they would blow... like one-two was certain street and so forth, so...

Everybody had that card in town so they could go and see where the fire was. Yeah, we had... Where's the whistle in West Chelmsford?

Look... Joy Street. There's a little building there.

That's where the Engine 3 was. There's the corner of Joy Street and Main Street just before you get to Billy Nolan's house, before you get to the church. That's the garage today.

It's the garage today. So the whistle was on that building? The engine was in there.

Engine 3 was in there. That's where I went to Cub Scout meetings was behind that... There's enough room in the back behind the engine.

That's where we had our Cub Scout meeting when I was a kid. In the 40s or something. So are there any areas you need to ask questions about?

I'm sure you've talked to George Merrill and all those. George must have more information. Well, everybody contributes.

Like George knows about the quarry business. Oh, yeah. When we were growing up, there wasn't anything about Johnson.

It was just nothing. The railroad tracks, the fields were all cornfields. Back at the square there, that was all level.

That was just cornfields there. My grandfather had the farm down on Tyngsboro Road. That was all nothing but open fields.

That was the Clark farm? Yeah. Clark's farm.

Francis Miskell was a call firefighter with me.

Oh, okay.

So was George Dixon. He talked about working in the mill. He worked at the G.C. Moore Mill before they went out of business. He might have. I don't remember that. Which one?

Moore? Moore's, right? Well, they sold it to Dixon.

But before that, it was still Dixon's. They sold it to Dixon's, yeah? Yeah.

Then the Dixon's sold to Gilet's. I worked at Southwell. My father was the number two man at Southwell.

Which one? One, two, or three? Two.

Two, okay.

That was the big one. That used to be Silesia. That was a big number.

There was one down the field. One was down the field. But there was a beehive that whole place.

No. When I worked there, it was 24-7. No, six nights a week.

I worked 11 to 7. Six nights a week, got off Sunday morning at 7 o'clock. They were running three shifts all the way through, regularly very early 60s.

Okay, let's slow down for a sec. It was a combing company. Right.

And I know at Mill 3, which is where the printing operation was for a while, they did rayon, they did some synthetic stuff. They did nylon and rayon in there. That came after the war.

Okay, what did they do at Mill 1? Because that was put in before the war. Way down at Mill 1, they did, I don't really know.

Rocks?

Yeah, they did. I don't know how much combing they did down there. We used to print the top tickets.

We'd go in there. I'm selling the barrels. They're about a foot across and probably four or five feet high.

And they'd put a round piece of wool in there and they'd throw the ticket in there depending on what it was. I don't really remember too much about what they actually made down at Number 1. My grandfather was a tester down there, but he moved up to Number 2 by the time I was working there.

But I don't, they must have done some talk down there. But I know they unloaded all the freight cars down there and there was all the raw wool coming from Australia and New Zealand. That's where all the raw wool came in down there.

They had about five bays on a loading dock down there where the railroads were. Yeah. And my brother worked down there in that gang for a while.

They'd bring in the big bales and they'd put them on a truck and then truck them up to Number 2 and where they scoured them, then carted them, and then combed them. All processes were done at Number 2. They scoured down the field?

No. They scoured up and in Number 2 mill, the big mill. Oh, okay.

Scoured and carted. What was Number 1, the field? Number 1 was the field.

And I'm not really, I went down there, but I don't really know exactly just what they were doing down there. And they also had cashmere up at Number 2 mill for a while. There's some cashmere up on the second floor.

What's cashmere compared to wool? Well, it's a lot finer. Like a cashmere sweater, it's a different, feels a lot different.

Where do the animals there come from? Don't know. I don't know if it's a process that they did to it, or whether it was from a sheep or not, or whether it was from some other animal.

I don't know. But they did a lot of, they had one big room and the stuff was flying all over the place. It was so sin-like and stuff.

Oh, God. So was this after college or? This was while I was going to college and while I was a firefighter and all these other things.

So you did printing, teaching? I had just about started printing. I was just getting into working with him while I was in college.

This was before I was, this was probably, yeah, while I was still just starting teaching and I was doing the firefighting and doing that. I wore a lot of hats for a few years.

Remember, you had to deliver the oil.

Oh, I delivered the oil in between when I wasn't busy doing everything. He made me go with him when he heard the letter. Yeah.

Which happened to be after college. I delivered oil for Gagnon Oil on Middlesex Street. When Campanelli built all the hitching posts and all the, not hitching posts, all the chamfered farms over there, George Gagnon had the contracts for the machinery, the bulldozers and all that kind of equipment, the great big Euclid trucks and everything.

And every night go over there with a tank full of oil and fill up the bulldozers and fill all the stuff up after they had quit every day. A lot of blasting over there. Yeah.

The whole place was being dug up. He made a lot of money, George Gagnon, on that account. Boy, I'll tell you.

All slabs.

When did you do construction?

Oh, that was earlier.

And when, tell them when you were the town moderator.

Oh, I wasn't the town moderator. I don't remember that. No, I wasn't the town moderator.

It's an opening now. Yeah. I thought you said you were the town moderator.

No, I was on the personnel board. I did that for a few years, too. That's got nothing to do with it.

I'm just fascinated with all the jobs you've had. Oh, well, yeah. And you worked at the Glenview.

Oh, God. That was a good one. That was a good job, yeah.

Closed that place seven nights a week for a while, too. That was later in life. But the mill business was very interesting.

I mean, they did a lot right here in North Chelmsford for years until it all went south. They found out labor was what? Yeah, it all went south.

It all went down to Johnsonville, North Carolina or South Carolina. When Phil Southwell sold out the Wellmans, they kept it in for a while.

Do you remember when that happened, when Phil sold out?

I guess that would be in maybe the late 50s or early 60s because when I was working there, we were shipping a lot of stuff right down south. We were doing the combing, but the big tractor trailers were coming up and going right down south, down to Johnsonville with a lot of the wool. We went with our end product wasn't going anywhere around here.

It was going down there to be made into yarn. And then, I don't know, my father died in 1969. It was still in operation then, but they weren't running three ships here in Chelmsford.

So was it Wellman at that point? Yeah, Wellman owned it. At that point, Wellman owned it.

I think they still called it Southwell Combing, but Jack Wellman, the father owned it. His son, Jack, was involved, some. And this other fellow, Gene Crane, who was my father's boss, they brought him up from Rhode Island.

I think he came up from Rhode Island from the mill there when Wellman took over the place because Wellman had bought that one. And I don't know how long after my father died, how long the mill kept going. Not very long, I don't think.

I don't think it was going for many years, very much after. I didn't pay much attention after that. But way back, they were doing real well.

That was a real going place there, boy. Well, see, this is kind of foreign to some of us. What were the types of jobs that you worked at and that you saw people working at?

I worked in shipping. So my job was a simple one. I'd go up to the different rooms.

You'd have a big, a great big truck on wheels with sides on it. And they'd be up in the room. So that's the ball of tar, like yarn, but it wasn't quite yarn yet.

It looks like it, but it's... So it's spun into a... It's spun into a round thing like a ball of tar.

And they'd pile them in this thing, and I'd take them downstairs to a baling machine and put them in a cardboard crate and strap them up, and that's how they shipped them out. But the whole process was they just start with the raw wool off the sheep and they scour it to try to clean it and get as much of the junk out of it they can. Then when they cut it, it starts becoming thread, you know, yarn-like, you know.

And then when they comb it, it kind of spins it, and again, it just gets cleaner and cleaner each time you do it. But they had some... They had a lot of equipment in there, and they'd have to shut down.

They'd have to shut down Sunday morning at like 3 or 4 o'clock to bring a whole crew of oilers and all those kind of people in, you know, to service the equipment every week because the machines were running so much. How were the mills organized? I think there were two long mills, one on either side with a courtyard in between, and it had kind of a round entryway between the two mills.

How were the... It was up high, wasn't it? Well, how were the three floors organized and what sort of...

The main mill, the road... You can drive right through now from Princeton Street to Middlesex. There's a road that goes through there.

Along the other side of the... South of the... The South Mill, right?

It was always like that though, wasn't it? Yeah, but the big mill, all the work was done in the one big mill. The mills on the other side of...

McKittrick's was one of them. That wasn't any printing. Where his father's place was, that turned into Rayon, then Nylon, and that's where his company was.

In that side of what I call the road that went through there, that was all the maintenance and stuff like that. The only production was done in the big piece right down, the big piece down the middle. Was there...

Let's see. So when I look at pictures, I see two long buildings, three stories each. And they're connected at the Middlesex Street end, and there's an archway that you can drive into.

So I'm trying to figure out... You got kind of a North Mill and a South Mill, and in the pictures they look pretty similar. When I look at a picture of Southwell Mill too, it looks almost like they're the same size.

Well... I'm trying to think what you're talking about. There was a place for that archway.

That went into where the shipping went out. But then there was a walkway across there. All of that...

Basically, all of that, that was all just all the same thing. I mean, it was all just production. There wasn't a...

I mean, I could show you, if I had a picture, I could show you that the carding and the scouring were down on the bottom level. And the other levels were all the combs were up on the second and third level. So they used a lot of water?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Right into Stony Brook? Went right into the canal and right into the river. Yeah.

Yeah. Did that water... Was that water that came under Princeton's Boulevard?

Yeah, it came right behind where Bainbridge is, where the canal comes down there. Well, Stony Brook comes down underneath there. The canal was on the other side of the river.

They grabbed Stony Brook water, not the canal water. Oh, okay. Because the canal did go under the street and over to the mills.

Yeah. On the other side of the street. Well, they must have used the water after the scouring.

After the scouring, it would go across. It would go right across into the river. Right.

Yeah. The Moore's Mill had water, too.

Yeah.

See, the Moore's Mill had... The canal came up behind it. There was the old Baldwin Mill building.

I think they opened it. But the canal used to come up, and they had a big valve they could turn, and they used to use a lot of water for scouring from that canal at one time. And I just wondered... The canal used to go under Princeton and over to the...

Did they scour it south also, or did they do it all across the street? No, they scoured it south also. Scoured and combed.

See, Moores... I think they were using the same water. I think they were using the same water.

The U.S Worsted did. And then they... That was called the Silesia Mill.

Yeah. And that got bought by Southwell, so it was really different. Moore's was different.

Moore moved his scouring across the road. But the... I don't know if it's the canal or if it's Stony Brook.

It's right behind where the print shop was. It comes right... It goes underneath the building.

It comes out there by the brick house by the... It still goes underneath the building. Yeah.

But there was no other water for the South... That's the Brook. So they pulled the water.

They had to pull that water. There was no other water anywhere else. Unless they were using the canal water.

I don't think they were. Well, there was a canal. Okay, the reason I know...

I was the last person to be in that canal underneath Princeton Street. But they closed it up when they put in the Princeton Ridge apartment or condo complex there. And at one time, the water used to go over to the Celesius side.

I don't remember where that water would be. Well, the canal came down to where those apartments were from Crystal Lake. And then it actually went underneath...

So they probably had a valve that went to Southwell. And they had a valve that went to Moores. Must have.

Where else could they get the water from? Well, you drive into Bainbridges. Well, you drive in right there.

There's a grate on the right. There was water right there. At an angle.

Right. Right. And when they built the Princeton Ridge, the engineers required that they...

They couldn't have a canal. It was actually like eight-foot chunks of granite that were holding up the... I think now I know what you mean.

So they took the cover off and they filled it in. And a historic commission was invited to go in. So I went inside, walked all the way across, took pictures.

But of course, I think it was in the 80s that when Gilet Brothers bought the mills from Dixon, they shut off the water. At that point, the water was shut off. And then they took the old Baldwin buildings on that side and converted them into condos or apartments.

They brought in ?? before the 80s. Oh, was it before the 80s? Oh, yeah.

Oh, right. But they stopped using the canal in those condos. They shut off the canal.

So I just wondered whether... I don't remember. Maybe they were working there.

If that's the case... I looked across the street and it's so close they didn't use the water anymore. But they still used it at Gilet's.

Probably the pipe going over there. They didn't even scour over there anymore so they didn't use it. Gilet Mills.

Well, you first went there. You said they were still scouring. So it's...

Oh, yeah. That was in the 60s. But I don't remember...

Water might have come in through there. I just don't remember seeing any water. Yeah, I think it might have come in under the parking lot. Well, maybe that's why they didn't... And I went down into the building and ran along the uphill side of the building. And that went on next to McKittrick's and comes out and joins up with Stony Brook right there.

Yeah. But where that entrance is to Gilet's where that valve was there, whatever that... There was a diner there years ago.

Oh, yeah. Joe Donovan, the diner, was there. You had a little hot dog, hamburger, a little joint there for all that.

12 people could fit in a place. That was funny. The Elm diner.

Yeah, yeah. That was right there. It was called what?

Elm. Elm.

Was it?

Yeah. I don't know what...

Joe Donovan. Joe Donovan, yeah.

My father used to take me down there a lot.

Yeah.

So could kids go and eat there? Did you go there?

Yeah, I was a kid, yeah.

I don't think... They didn't serve any beer or anything like that. No, I don't think so.

It was just a breakfast and lunch place. Yeah. And the Paramount was, you know.

They used to have the... Out in front, they had the sort of the bar and booth place where they did lunches out there and breakfast, obviously. Or even suppers, I guess.

Right in the front of the Paramount. This is the brick one, now, where the travel agency is. Yeah, yeah.

I remember going to the Paramount. My parents used to take us there. That was like a big deal for us.

In the front where the grill was?

No, going back to the restaurant part.

Oh, the restaurant part, yeah. The best thing was the grilled coffee rolls were about this big. You'd just slice them, put a bunch of butter on them, grill them on the grill.

Great. The best thing for me there was when this fellow, Wally Ginnigan, who was a shop foreman, him and I would go over there after work dying for a draft beer. Yeah.

This is a tabby up for a dollar. A side pot. A bucket of blood, it was called.

Just around the left side? Yeah, on the back a lot. Okay.

So if you go down there now, there's a, I don't know, a Taekwondo club, I think? Yeah, yeah. That's where the bar was?

It was kind of hooked to the side. Yeah. Right there on the side of the building.

Just a bar. Ten cents for a six-ounce beer. Ten cents.

Yeah, ten cents. Bucket of blood. That's a long time ago.

Or after the, we used to do the newspaper for Sanders. I'd go over to Walter afterwards. Yeah.

Walter didn't like that. Did he work there? He worked there.

He worked there all his life, yeah. At the printing shop.

Yeah.

He helped build the building. Right. 1948, he started, because he retired in 98.

I never told you that. That was the same year that the Paramount, that the Paramount opened in its brick building, 48. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. I don't, I don't, I remember going there. There was a railroad car dyno there before.

Yes. Yeah.

Kind of like a, kind of a tan color. It was, it was still there when you were a kid. It was a driveway where the pick-and-bring is now, or pick-and-insurance.

There was a driveway that went all the way down to the back and went around, came out where it comes over on the other side. Now, do you remember the railroad dyno, railroad car dyno?

Mm.

Was it just what you saw from the front? It looked like the windows? It was in the front.

The front of that. By the windows, and then it had bar stools. Did it have a little structure on the back for a kitchen?

Yeah, and they had a grill there, and then back of that was the, the regular kitchen, because they did have some, a little bit of dining on the other side. It might have just been basically that. It was like a real dyno.

But there was something in back of it. Don't you remember something being back of the, I'm trying to picture that, and I can't. There was something in back of it.

I think there was a kitchen in back of it. Then they started adding on, and they tried to get the rest of it. I think there was, at one time there were four, four supermarkets in North Jetson at one time.

Yeah, there was the A&P, which is where the bowling alley is, up top. The bowling alley was down below. Was that the A&P?

The A&P was on the other side of Wadden Street. All right. The A&P was over the other side, but there was a certain market there.

It was over the bowling alley. Okay, over the bowling alley. John's Market, the book.

John's Market across the street, where the Asians were. The Asian store. Okay, and there was Anderson's Market.

Which is on the old village block. Which is gone now. Okay, and I want you to tell me all about that too, before we go, because it doesn't exist.

Okay, and, well, there was apartments upstairs, and Milt Hadley had a upholstery shop on the south end of the building, and the barber shop was on the north end of the building, and in the center was Anderson's Market. And our parents, or at least my grandmother, she shopped there all the time. She had an account there.

And once a week, he'd send the bill over to the print shop, and my grandfather would make a check out for him. I mean, they had great meat, and everything you could think of in there. My uncle, my uncle, when he'd come out of the service, he got, he had two jobs.

He got a job up at the quarry here, at Fletcher's Quarry, Cutting Stone, and he was a delivery boy for Patty Murphy. Oh yeah, Patty Murphy, yeah. Patty Murphy ran this store from Anderson's.

Anderson's Market. Yeah, but the barber shop there, they had Red, Oxford and Red Santos, they had the barber shop right on the end there. I mean, you sat down in the chair, you knew you were going to be there for at least 40 minutes.

Oh, talk, I'm talking, talk, talk, talk. Oh, they just cooked, cooked, cooked, cooked, cooked, cooked. Cultural treatment.

I said, look how fast, they're going to go fast today, I got to do something. Now, that was not it. They gave you 40 minutes for, I don't know how much they took.

I remember going in as a little kid, my father would take me in there, and, alright, you next. And they put the board on the, on the two bars, you had to sit, the little kid, you had to sit up on the board, you couldn't sit in the chair, you'd be down too low, they couldn't pump it up high enough. So you had to sit in the little board, you'd just sit there, you had no choice, whatever they were going to do to you, they were going to do to you.

If they wanted to scalp you, they could scalp you. More of time, rather than what the haircut was going to be. They had to have you in a seat for a certain amount of time.

Now you go into the barber shop, you're all done in five, five minutes, at most. And it's the same haircut, I guess. I don't know, yeah.

But that, yeah, they had, there was another, the A&P was down the other side, and then Frosty's, there was a drugstore, it was the same, it's such one, they had a soda fountain there too. Yeah? In Frosty's.

And then there was the Collins, the Collins store. How about George Hill, he had the newspaper place. And Collins was just a little skinny place?

Yes, Collins, a little skinny place. Did they sell clothes, they sold ladies' clothes and things like that? They had everything under this one, if you wanted.

He's like a five and nine. If you wanted anything, if you even mentioned it, they'd be calling you up the next day, well we got that, we got it, we got it right here. Where was that relative to the A&P?

Right on that side, or right, no, right there, right under. You know where the pizza place is? Yeah.

You go down a couple steps there? Okay, the steps to drop on the sidewalk. Yeah.

It was right there, it was right there.

It was right there, yeah.

And the fire department was there, Jan Robinson was the chief, John Smith.

Was there a fire?

Well, no, before that, before this, the fire department was, was up above where the First National was, next to the bowling alley. Next to the bowling alley, is that where the parking lot is now? No, right in that building?

In that building. Okay, so they had a door, they had a parking lot. Yeah, they had a door, they had a door, they had a fire engine there, Smokey Joe Ryan was the chief.

Down along the back?

No, right up, right up by the street level. They sat in that engine there on a little tiny kitten, I can remember doing that. Smokey Joe Ryan was the chief there then.

Then they moved down to where you're talking, where Chandler, where Chandler Robinson was the chief, right where the package store is. It was down further? Down a little further than where the Billy Powers package store was.

He was past the supermarket, right past Cohen's. He was on the left side of the E.P. and? Going down, going towards the E.P. Towards Tyngsboro. Towards Tyngsboro, right. Yeah. And was he the last one in that block?

Yes, he was the last one, right, and then the fire station came down. They went down the two steps, it would be Cohen's, then it was the package store. Right.

Then you go back a little bit, it was Lorry's Automotive, and at the end of it, well, at first, there was a fire engine in there. Right. Oh, okay, so at the far left end of that building there was a fire engine.

That's when, when the fire engine left there, it went up to, no, wherever it is now. Went up to when they built that. But when that, when that station was there, there was a man, by one man, one guy, one guy worked there all, you know.

Everybody else was on call. Everybody was on call. There was only one guy in there.

Until the next station, and then you said there were permanent eight people there. I mean, No, no, they, they, they called fire, but there was only one guy there. okay.

When they moved the engine up to, no, there were two people on the day shift, and three people on that engine all the time, when I was a kid, on the second shift and the third shift. There were three permanent people all the time. Yeah, there was a gas station out front.

They pumped gas there. Yeah. There was a lot of gas stations way back.

There was a gas station in front of Rosie's there too. Yeah, Channel Robinson had gas, and his, PT, PT, old PT, he had a, he had a pump right there. Yeah.

Where Javis's, news car lot, that was a gas station. Oh, that was Ferdie Fantosi.

Right.

He was there for years. He was at, where McGovern's went later. Yes, yes, where he was there.

Was he the son-in-law of Lavelle? No. Ferdie Fantosi, or no?

No. No? I don't think so.

Because in 55, Mr. Lavelle died, and his daughters and son-in-law ran it, and I know Ferdie Fantosi owned it when Paul McGovern bought it, but I didn't know if Ferdie Fantosi was Paul's, was a, I don't know. I don't know. I can't, I, I don't think so, but I, I don't know that for sure.

30 cents a gallon, then, high test. 19 cents before that.

Hmm.

They used to buy high tests for like 56 Chevy. And then you had, when you come out of the square, you had Sammy Abadella's gas station, which is down where Howie Ryan is now. His station was right there.

Wasn't there? Past the, going toward Chelmsford Center, across from Cummings's. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Cummings had a gas station. He'd come into the gas station.

There were gas stations around the neighborhood. And across the street was, Sammy Abadella had a gas station. And I think his, him or his family owned the Tyngsboro Drive-in.

See, it was up here, up at the Tyngsboro, Tyngsboro, well, Tyngsboro Nashua line. There were about ten drive-ins they used around in those days. Did that become the parking lot for the Pheasant Lane Mall?

Yeah. Because I see, I remember the street was still there. that was the Tyngsboro.

There was a drive-in there, there was a drive-in in Lowell. Well, I think that's sort of waiting for the Pheasant Mall. Well, the drive-in was there, but no, the driving range, I mean, yeah, the driving range, the drive-in was kind of like across from Forest Marine, and that.

Yeah, yeah, but they used that for that area as our parking lot for the Pheasant Lane Mall. I think the screen was still there. The screen was up there when they first built it, the screen was still up there.

It was up a little high. There's a Lowell drive-in, there's a Chelmsford drive-in on Chelmsford Street, there's a Wamasett drive-in off Route 38, there were drive-ins aided everywhere when we were kids. After all you did was go to the drive-in movies.

Yeah, that was good, I liked that. So, back to Freddy Fantosi for a minute. Was he your generation or a little older?

A little older. Do you remember him at all? Oh yeah, oh yeah.

Who, Freddy? Oh yeah. I think he's still alive, isn't he?

I don't think so. I don't know, Jimmy might be, I don't know, there were a whole bunch of brothers. Freddy's still alive, yeah.

I'm not sure, but he had the gas days, he was a regular guy. We did all our work, I remember, God, when was that that the gas crisis went through? We were just talking about that a little while ago when you can only buy so much gas.

Yeah, we made a mistake when we went up to Moosehead because we thought if we went and came back during the week we'd get more gas. Yeah. But they were giving it away on the weekends and so coming back Monday we were lucky to get back here.

72 or 74, is that what it was?

Yeah, 72.

It was after that because we kept that going on set until 75. I don't know if you could get gas back. I thought it was 80.

But I was teaching in North Reading driving back and forth every day and working across the street so what I would do, I'd, because I'd always had no home

all my life,

I had all my work done there, I'd come back out of North Reading and I'd just pack my car in his pocket and I'd just leave it in with the keys and I'd go over to work and after he had sold as much as he could and stopped the pumps and everything and everybody went away, the next thing I know I'd see my car up in front and he'd be throwing it up with gas and he'd put it back in the other place and took care of me. I'll never forget that.

He took care of me great during that period because I'd be driving a lot. Okay, now I'm going to test your memories here. When did they tear down the village house?

Oh boy. That would only be a guess. I have no clue.

Oh boy. No, but it was there in 55 because it was in the Tercentennial newspaper. Oh yeah.

Oh, that's good. Yeah.

And you guys know about it, so. Oh yeah, in the 60s, I'd say sometime in the 70s because World Auto, the guy that owned World Auto bought that and he had it torn down just at a parking lot there. He was going to do something with it and they were going to put a little wall in the back of the tower and let him do it.

So World Auto was associated with where McGovern's was? It's where Towers is. Oh, okay, but that's on the left side of the old house where the garage is.

Yeah, right across the street from the building where Towers used to be World Auto. They're still in business and they still own that place, but I would say. So they bought the Village House?

Yeah. Now, Paul McGovern bought it from Freddy Fantosi around 1980 in that time frame. I don't think the Village House was there in 1980.

I think it was gone before that. I really, I wish, no, no, and I don't know where I could find that out from. So is the World Auto separate from Paul's operation?

Well, they just rented space there and then they left and Towers took the same spot over. Now, it's over in Bedford. I think it's called Bedford Auto now.

When was, when was, what's his name? Eddie Howard. Wouldn't he have his part of that?

Eddie Howard had his paint, car paint shop right where this World Auto is. That had to be before World Auto. Yeah.

But Dana worked in there with him. Dana Robbins worked with him in there. That's way back.

Right? That's way back I guess so. That village house, that would be a tough one.

Remember Milt Hadley did have this thing on the end and I bet you that's a guy that could tell you. He's still alive. He lives over in Stedman Street if you want to know the real answer.

Because he worked on I'm going to take some notes when we're done because you're going to I'm going to have to draw a few of those notes now. You've got the information? Well, you know the Milt I don't know Milt Hadley.

Milt Hadley? Hadley like H-A-D-L-E-Y? Yeah.

He had a son if I remember correctly. He had a son that's a different family I think. Well, are there any other stories that we missed?

There's probably a million but we can never remember them all. What are your favorites? Oh, I don't know.

I've told you a lot of good ones. Okay. You don't have to ask questions.

No, I've told you a lot of good stories. I don't know. Any good fires while you were a firefighter?

Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm getting out of here.

Can you wait? No. There are these a million times.

What's the one you had to throw some off? How about the Chiefs? Save the Chiefs slide.

Which one? Which Chief? Anybody.

I'll tell you.

Milton Hadley. 111 Stedman Celmsford. He's in the book.

David Stedman was in there, Manuel. What's his phone number?

You want me to write it for you? He has to go.

I'm only going to tell you. Let me show Let me show you this. Yeah, he was across the street from the number two.

That was the nylon mill. Who's that? Milton Hadley had the upholstery shop there.

Yeah, he was right where Jimmie Robinson And we stood on a big skids of paper there. And we'd have to go down Billy Gilet would come over with a mill truck and pick them up. Now were you at Gilet Mills or were you at Southwell?

Southwell. Southwell. The nylon area.

At the top end. That's called the Crysler building. You said that before.

That building was called the Crysler building for some reason. I don't know why. It was a mill owner by the name of Chrysler.

Maybe that's why. But that when I worked at the mill that was what Jimmie Robinson worked. They did nylon or rayon or something in that after the war.

And the milk was in that general area you're talking about I think. The safe that we have at the shop there came from the Silesia Mills. But that was part of that too.

I don't know if that must have been before Southwell. Probably. It was.

The U.S. Forest Head owned Silesia Mills. They went under. And that's when Southwell bought it.

They actually went out of business the year they bought mill too. So they were done. And then the safe was available.

What was the building the print shop was in? That was the Crysler building too. No, I think the print shop was down where it turned into being the mechanics shop.

The Crysler building I think. Part of it maybe. I don't know.

There were a bunch of buildings all together there. That's gone now. That's not there anymore.

Then there was the mechanics where the oilers and all of them had all their stuff. And then there was another building that we stored all the waste in. The noils and the solid, we call them solid burrs, all the stuff, any byproduct that came off that boxcar was used for something.

It was sold to something to do something with. Nothing was thrown away. And then the next big building except the waste water went down the river.

Everything else they saved everything. And that was a big storage area there. And then the other building that faces the brick house, that was a McKittrick.

Now that's a three-story building too. I don't know if that's what you're talking about though, right? But that had to be Southwell's originally.

When I was there it didn't have anything to do with Southwell's. No? Well, G.C. Moore company had a storehouse across the way. They must have had that. And then McKittrick, McKittrick had a storehouse across the way. And they had house And they had a brick house across the way.

And they had a brick house across the way. And they had a brick house And they had a cell room across the I bought one brand new in 1981, 1925, that's still gone dark. Yeah, no longer.

The 36 there, there was, got that in 1986. The 2 gallon? Yeah, that was only a year old.

See, it's a 1936 model. No, it was a 1986 model. Okay, but what's the 36 mean?

36 inches wide. That's how wide the width of the plane is. With the machine in it, but it wouldn't print.

It still got that. I bet it prints just as good as it did when we got it brand new. Yeah.

That's one thing about the Germans, they built machinery that was unbelievable. Oh yeah, it's good stuff.

That was one of the reasons why you put on the addition, right?

Put the binary out there, we just didn't have any more room.

Right, because you were buying that other big monster after that, yeah.

So can you buy books too? Yeah, we have a book binder. You said you were all by hand.

Have you ever published books? Well, we did Kerouac for— Yeah, we did quite a few with Jack Kerouac. I mean, for Professor Javis.

Professor Javis. He wrote a lot of Jack Kerouac books. We used to print those and have a perfect bind, but we'd fold it all and get it all done.

I worked the binder, they hired me for a day.

Only one day?

One day, that's it.

Oh my God. We used to do—well, when he was working for a living at Mass General before he retired, we used to do a lot of work for Judge Adams Parkhurst, didn't we? Yeah.

He was an office printer. He's a guy, if he was still alive, I could tell you a lot about him. I'd be here all week.

Well, I'm kind of walking in his shoes at the Historic Society because he had the office, he had the first computer set up. Oh, he was— I was the one that got rid of his old computer set up. I got a town grant and I got the new archival management system that we're using.

He would really— I'm using his notes and pictures for the history book project. Yeah, yeah. Well, I feel pretty familiar.

I never actually met George. I've heard his voice because of the tapes. He was a great guy.

He knew when he was 10 years old that it would be important that he recorded everything that he did. He took pictures of everything, everything, lots of pictures, like the Flight of 38, all that kind of thing. I mean, he had pictures from all different angles.

But he was only a kid. But he knew that someday it would be important. Sure enough, it was.

I think one of the most— I was over there yesterday. I'm sorry to break in. I was going through one of his notebooks, and I'm looking at the 36 flood pictures that you're talking about.

I was just looking at them. The 38 or 36? 36, 38.

It was Hurricane, yeah. Oh, the 38 Hurricane. I've got some pictures of that, too.

Oh, yeah. He got some fantastic— He knew enough to take all the pictures like that. But with a name like George A.

Parkhurst, his ancestor, George A. Parkhurst, he was involved in town government and everything. So he's George A., original George A., who's buried at Fort Father's Cemetery. So he had some pretty big shoes to fill in town here. Well, he did. But he let you know that he was of blue blood.

He was chairman of the Terrace Hotel Celebrations Committee. But all the traffic, when I was a kid, I was at 12 Middlesex Street, which is right next door to the insurance agency and the print shop. Now, that's where I grew up.

And every bit of traffic that came from anywhere had to go through North Chelmsford. There was no other road. And my sister and I contracted every disease that was known to man.

And I guarantee you that's where it came from, from the people that were driving by in the cars. The germs are in the air. Why?

I mean, I had... Did they stop to eat at the Paramount? I don't know.

Well, a lot of them did, but I mean... The trolley went right up right in front of your house. The trolley tracks...

But that's clean now. I guess they're all gone now. They went right up in front of...

Right up by the highway still, the trolley tracks. Well, yeah, but that never went by when I was there. But the cars on a Friday night and a Sunday night was just the opposite.

It was just solid cars all the way through. I'm thinking that was the fumes of all those cars idling. These are polluting cars back in the 60s and 70s.

So maybe that's had something to do with it. I don't know. Before World War I, there were mumps, chicken pox.

My mother didn't even know some of the names of the things we caught. But that's the only thing I could think of. The people who had come through town that were probably infected and the germs were just floating around.

Nobody else got those things. So I'm immune to almost anything. If you did, I'd say do the evidence to get through.

You could not get across the square or anything like that. You'd take your life in your hands back in those days. And I understand the priority was Princeton because that was a state road, and Middlesex had...

Yeah, Middlesex, they made a detour for a while. You can only go one direction coming up. You had to come up Church Street, down Mount Pleasant Street.

They had to go through Vinal Square. So that would mean they'd have to go by Middlesex. They had to go by Middlesex one direction, going north, and then going south I think they went straight.

Friday, Friday, Friday the traffic went one way, and Sunday the traffic went the other way. I can remember North Road. Do you remember North Road before?

It's what it is now. It's still there. If you come up on the right-hand side, North Road went up the hill there.

Well, there's a vestige of it. There's a neighborhood. Yeah, it's a neighborhood there.

And I went right through the neighborhood. And there wasn't any road or anything. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we used to go over Route 4.

And you also could go down and drive down where Route 3 was. But it was just a single road. And it was a bridge there, but there was a hole on the other side, and it was just grass.

Because when they put the bridge in on Stedman Street, they knew that they were going to have a highway someday. And you used to drive down to Chelmsford Street, 110, and then there was a dirt road down to 129. And that was the end of it.

We were going to hit a stop, yeah. Tunney Avenue, I can tell you all about that. It ended at 110.

110, it was hot top to 110, and there was a dirt road down to 129. And then that was the end of it. There was nothing below that.

And 1955, when I think it was 1955 or 56, when 128 was opened, we'd go down through Chelmsford, Route 4, down to Bedford, and go down through Lexington to get down to Marshfield, because my family had a place down there. It was like a two-and-a-half, three-hour drive without any traffic at all. Now 128 was open, and my father was so excited about that that we actually went on it before it was open.

And it went all the way down to Route 9. That's where it ended. And then you'd have to get off and wherever you'd end up.

It was called 128. It was just a windy road. Then the next spot, it went down to Randolph.

We'd get off at Randolph, get on 139. Then it went down to 123. And then finally they finished it all the way down to Marshfield and off beyond down to the gate.

I remember when you went Route 3, you used to have to stop going down Route 3, because the railroad trash went right across Route 3. Oh, yeah, I remember that. Railroad trash went right across Route 3.

It was a 55-mile-an-hour road. You had to come to a stop. I never saw a train in my life there, but we always stopped there.

Sure. Well, I'll tell you what, let me stop it. Do you want to talk a little more after Peter goes?

Well, I guess I can. All right, let me stop it here and we'll take a little break.

Okay, we're starting up after a short break.

The date today is January 6th at 7 p.m. Well, if you know where Cottage Row is, all right, there's a big parking lot there looking towards the mill. All right, there's a parking lot there. If you were on the Princeton Boulevard side, not the Middlesex Street side, you're on the Princeton Boulevard side.

And there's a sign when you enter that has various businesses. Yes, right, there's a parking lot there. And there's a parking lot and there's a building that goes all the way over to Middlesex Street.

That was all part of the mill. And there was an alleyway that went underneath those buildings you could drive through. That alleyway comes out the one you could see over on Middlesex Street.

The archway? The archway that you're talking about.

There's another archway. There was one on the Princeton Boulevard side. That went all the way through there.

Cars could go through there, small trucks. And if you were on the big, big side of the mill, and I could push my car through there on ground level, and there was another elevator that went up into the other side of the building. That's why you're saying the two buildings.

But I think that that building on the Cottage Road side wasn't as big as the one that went the whole length of the original building. But there were still combs upstairs in that building as well. That was all part of number two mill.

That's the best way I can describe it. I can take you down and show you. You mentioned there was a connector, an overhead connector.

Yeah, there was an overhead connector you could walk through, and there was an elevator in that section, and there were a couple of elevators in the other section that took you up to the whatever floor, second floor or the third floor. The second floor had English combs. There was a lot grainier wool.

The tops were very coarse compared to the French comb. The French comb was real nice soft stuff. I have no idea what the end product was, what the difference was in the English and the French, but we did more French combing than we did English combing, but apparently there was some call for that as well.

The balls at the top were twice as heavy as the English combs. And again, I have no idea why, but they weighed a lot more than the French ones. The French were very light.

But I remember one thing when you think back about how work was. There were time clocks in there, and if you came to work, let's say you came to work for the 11 o'clock at night shift, you could not punch the time clock any sooner than 5 minutes of 11.

You couldn't come in at 10.30 and punch the time clock and hang around 11. You couldn't punch the time clock until 5 minutes before your shift started. And you couldn't punch out until 11 or 11.01. So guys would come in and they'd hang around downstairs by the time clock, you know, until it got to be like 5.11, and then they'd all punch their time clock and they'd go upstairs. And the guys that were finished, they'd shut their machine off like at quarter to 11, let's say, and they were all lined up in the stairway waiting for the thing to go to 11, and then they'd all come down and punch out.

And right at 11, a bell would ring. And when that bell rang, every machine started right back up again. Right at 11 o'clock.

There was no, well, I'll get a coffee and, you know, and talk to my friends or something for a few minutes. Right at 11 o'clock, that bell rang in the whole place, and every column started right up again. It makes sense that people came in early to be all on top of each other.

Yeah. Because they had two shifts. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'll never forget that. When that bell rang, it was just like bang. The whole building shook.

The machines would be shut down for 15 minutes when these other guys would start them. And the whole place would start shaking right at 11 o'clock when they'd start them all back up again. And they were probably only making $4 or $5 an hour at the time or something, you know.

Now, were they running on big electric motors?

Yeah.

Did they have long shafts to power the machines? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, all on big electric motors.

They didn't have a motor for each machine, right? At this time, did they have the long shafts? I don't remember.

I'm not sure. Because in the old days, they used to have water wheels or steam engines. Yeah, no.

I can't answer that. But I know that, you know, they'd have a lot of problems with machines. And it was very competitive between shifts, you know.

In those days, you know, you got to get out as much work as you could. And the foreman on that shift, you know, if a machine was down and the operator or someone else couldn't get it to go, he'd be up there, guy in a white shirt. He'd take his tie off.

He'd have grease all over him trying to get that machine back up into operation because at the end of his shift, you know, he wanted to say, well, we put out 30 bales of top, and the second shift only put out 28. And it was very, very competitive, you know. They were proud of what they were doing, these people.

They worked hard. And there probably wasn't a person in there. Well, some of them might have graduated from high school, but the majority never even got out of high school.

They're just all old-timers. This is all they did all their life. And they loved it.

They loved it. I've had enough of them now, Tim. Do you want to tell your fire story?

I can tell one fire story. I can tell you 50, but back in the days when I worked, you know, there was a lot less fire prevention theories, let's say. Number one, you can only burn out doors now, like January 1st to April 30th or something, and most of that's through the winter.

And they control it. Well, we control it somewhat, but they control it pretty good by when you can burn and when you can't burn, even in that period. But back in my days, you could burn anytime, outdoors, do anything you want.

I mean, there's no, you didn't have to, technically, you didn't have to call for a permit. Technically, you were supposed to call to see if you could burn, especially in the spring and in the bad season. They'd put something in the paper or something, and people would call up, no burning today, no burning today.

But 90% of the time, people didn't pay any attention to that. We chased grass fires and forest fires that turned into building fires constantly, constantly. We had a dump up in North Chelmsford off Swain Road, a town dump, where everybody brought anything they wanted to bring, you know, any day of the week.

But Saturdays, it was like a parade up there. It was a place where all the politicians, instead of holding their signs up over in Central Square, they used a politician to be up there in the dump holding a sign up because he'd see more people there than he would through Central Square. But that place was on fire constantly.

I mean, it was go, go, go, go, go all the time. But obviously, I know it's not like that now, and that's good because people have changed, things have changed, codes are better, electrical codes and all that stuff. But we had a lot of big, big fires in town, all kinds of them, you know.

Some of them, some of them suspicious, some of them, you know, you don't know what, you know. But in those days, you know, it was, you just expected you were going to have, especially in the wintertime, you know, you expected you were going to have some problems. There was going to be fires.

It wasn't like it was a job that you go in and say, oh boy, I'm going to, where's my bed? I'm going to go, I'm going to have a good night's sleep here tonight, you know, because that didn't happen. That didn't happen.

You were on the, you were on your toes all the time. And we had a lot of, a lot of big fires. I'm only going to tell you about two.

Only reason I'm thinking of the first one was because I'm sitting here looking at this Christmas tree. Christmas Eve, it was a blizzard. And I was, I was living, I was living where, on Twiss Road there.

And we had a system, all the call firefighters, that the people that lived close to town, on most occasions, when that horn blew, they were not chanting, but they came right across Crystal Lake where I could hear it. Clear as a bell. But like on a night, like a condition like a lousy weather or something, not necessary.

So I, there was a person who would call me the minute that horn blew. So this was Christmas Eve, like, it was a blizzard. And there was a fire down, actually it was down Tyngsboro Road, near where Peter Pickens was talking about Clark, where Grant Clark's farm was.

It was Holm Street and one of those streets near Cross Street. And I had a, I got my car down there in the snow. And, matter of fact, I got there just as the engine from the Chelmsford Center was getting, the North engine was there and the other engine was coming over.

And no one, no one was in the house at the time. But the thing I remember the most was to go in the house and look at the presents all burned, the house was all, all shattered, the tree all gone and everything. That was a real sad occasion.

I, you know, that, you see something like that, you never forget it. But the other one, and this is the last one, there will be a hundred if I don't stop. This was in January.

It was a freezing, freezing cold, bitter, bitter night. Same situation. The horn blow, there was a fire on Newfield Street.

About four houses up from Francis Miskell's. A double, two-decker, two-family house on the side, two-decker. Guy, guy up, guy sitting up in his chair, smoking a cigarette, fell asleep.

We get to the fire. This whole, this whole bedroom up on the second floor, it just engulfed in flames. The guy is out on the porch, he had a porch on the outside.

He's out on the porch, standing out on the porch. I go up the stairs with the host, first man up the stairs. And there's so much fire in the wallpaper, in the whole room, there's no oxygen.

These are the days before we wore a mask all the time. We had them, but we weren't required to wear them all the time. Nowadays, a firefighter can't go into a building like that without having his mask on.

They don't allow that, as far as I know, anywhere. But in those days, we had like one or two squad airbags on the truck, but not one for every firefighter. So this thing is just walls of flames.

So I take the hose, this is an inch and a half line, it's a big, big, pretty lot of water, and get the nozzle so it's going like this. But I'm standing out in the hall, reaching around like this with the hose. Another car firefighter, George Nixon, Nanny Nixon, comes up the stairs behind me.

He says, give me that hose. I said, George, don't go in there. Got the hose, second and a half, down he goes.

No air, down he goes. Shut the hose off, take him. There's another guy on the stairs, I said, here, take him down.

He goes down the stairs, face down, thump, thump, thump, thump, right down, thump. I shut him down, the guy pulls him down the stairs. Put the hose back on, I'm knocking the fire down, it's still going big.

Up comes the chief, the white hat. Chief, you can't go in there, give me that hose. I said, you can't go in there, I'm 21 years old, 22 years old, this guy's 65.

He's the chief, I'm a bunt. I said, don't go in there. Second and a half, boom, right out cold, right out cold.

I haul it down, there's another one coming down. Down goes him, thump, thump, thump, thump, boom, boom, boom, boom, down the stairs. I swear to God, I got 10 guys that are still alive that could verify that story.

Unbelievable. The chief wouldn't listen and paid the price. Yes, he did.

Now, was that other fellow George Dixon's father? Yes, that young Bucko Dixon's father. So young George is called Bucko?

He was called Bucko when he was a kid. He played baseball for me, he was a good baseball player. I was his coach.

When you went from Little League to Bay-Bruce League years and years ago, I was a coach of the Bay-Bruce League team. And they had a system where you were given so many points, like you could buy players, not for money, but I mean, I could pick out of the Little League pool some players. If I picked, you know, a kid that they thought was the best player, then somebody else would get the number two player, and stuff like that, just like they do nowadays.

But it was a lot simpler than that. Anyway, I don't know whether my team had the worst record or it was my year to pick first. Anyway, well, I picked Bucko.

He was a big kid and he was a great, great player in the Little League. So I picked him, and now we're going from Little League to the Bionic Playground, to a full-size field, not a Little League field. And the first game they played, all the teams played like two or three innings against the team.

It was an opening day, big deal and all that kind of stuff. And George, his father, came to me and said, now listen, George, you did good in the Little League, but this is a big step up here. I don't want him trying to pitch in this league right here.

He could get slotted here with these kids and stuff like that. I said, George, I'm coaching the team. Don't you worry about it.

And I pitched him the first game, and he pitched a no-hitter like for three or four innings, and he was thrilled, and his father, of course. God, this is wonderful. Oh, this is wonderful.

But he came right up to me. He did not want me pitching his kid at that level, because he didn't think he was ready for it. He was ready for it.

Yeah, he was a good ball player.