church or volunteer activity in the mountain to set on front porch forum or two towns on line you can read names of people who are behind all the activities going on in their towns but mostly these are just n while i'm here today on this snowy february tenth morning to interview my good friend gail boardman galahs wife judy live here at the end of the settlement road in this beautiful stone home that gail designed and had built himself not by your own two hands i understand but some of which and i have worked together most recently on the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the town's original charter planning activities for the town of underhill which were very successful to you both thank you we had a lot of fun doing it we're not finished yet we still have to bury a time capsule somewhere we're looking might like to jump in plenty of room and it's actually a crypt this concrete crypt gale has been involved in town activities zoning board planning commission justice of the peace we're just talking about the moderator at town meeting and general volunteer whenever needed for various activities recently i learned you attended your sixtieth or sixty first anniversary of your fourth grade class reunion and i have to ask what was it like getting together with folks that you grew up with and spent time with what was it like well it was a lot of fun and there's a lot of reminiscence that goes into something like that we had one hundred percent attendance by sixty second or three and the best part about it was that we had a teacher here as well we were a small class there were three of us and we're still all hale and hearty although we have just recently lost a teacher room but it was a lot of fun brought back a lot of memories for schoolhouse number five the centers where i probably learned as much as i did in any other institution ever i credit my underhill schooling as being a top of the list number five school house didn't have any plumbing facilit so one of the activities was to take a pail and go up to the nearby farm house and bring back a pillow water twice a day for drinking purposes we had our own a pretty good number five school my wife and girls  but when they converted the school some years later into a school bus she had he tore the privy off i guess they figured that the bus drivers probably didn't really need it and it went away i tell these kinds of things to my own growing up and they laugh they say this can't be true we say this sounds like little house on the crib this sounds like you're making this up and i know it bothers me that they don't realize that not that long ago things were a lot different if we were to look at the town that i was born in on your time or actually look at the town about nine hundred fifty we hit the bottom of our population here in this community we had a bunch of little farm struggling along in one nine hundred fifty and about five hundred people well of course within my memory and subsequently since then it's all changed radically different some things for the better and probably some things which are here nostalgic here maybe not so much for the better we had a school bus from time to time the school bus was a farmed out activity and it was driven by a guy named mr jim all the bus itself was a half ton international pickup truck with a big wooden box in the back and there were you benches around the inside of this box no windows or one small window ahead into the into the cab in summer time or in decent weather the chain across the back so you wouldn't fall out but in the winter time to be sure we were well taken care of was a big door that enclosed the whole back of the truck so when you were in there in the winter time it might have been a little warmer not much no heater but it was a place for shenanigans and there probably were some if you were concerned about the shenanigans and you were one of the first two people to get on the bus you could sit in the cab where it was relatively warm evil eye and we were somewhat intimidated so more often than not we got in the back of the truck so you're actually born right here in town bear town road ye in the home actually no process started there barely made it to the old mary fletcher hospital the current mailman was the was the rescuer in that mission he managed to get my mom there just in time good thing in those years the mail in underhill was a star r our route meant that you got delivery twice a day so the mailman came around twice each day you know his his cheerful lady who it was henry cooke his name was very nice grandparents lived on the river road and my grandfather for some reason bought a small farm up on the bare town road and not long after rebut the military range came through and confiscated most of the land so there wasn't much agricultural activity left there so my father decided with his father's permission that he would get into the poultry business there and he did and it wasn't very good had everything we didn't sell and we didn't sell a lot to this day you know and eggs an egg no good new cake but not out of the frying pan so much we were kind of isolated up on bear town road up the road continued on where we live but not much further today it's the high and meadows housing development beyond where we live but it was it was fairly rural back roadster pick up and take them to burlington and i don't know why we had a model a roadster pick up but that was the family car in the beginning so here grandparents lived on the river road and eventually they apparently moved out of the house said idle for about fifteen years oh yeah my grandparents i have the house that's now the blue house two thirds of the way to the center between sculptures in the yard and yes you know everybody will recognize it it's probably the oldest house on the river oh it's a plank house and it's a wonderful house and i had a lot of happy moments there in fact i lived there several different times but  when my grandparents moved in there it was a semi retirement activity for my grandfather at that point and he got into the maple syrup business and exported local ma into the metropolitan area in fact his biggest single account was the new york central railroad in the dining cars there consumed quantities of vermont maple syrup and it was it was a pretty good deal for granted for a number of years but hundred forty seven he passed away leaving my grandmother with a house and she couldn't handle it so and uncle stepped in and bought it very successful uncle she went to live with the uncle and had enough money  own circumstance to feel somewhat independent and the house and empty for ten twelve twelve years and i had the opportunity to write so i did in the good news was that it was all full of all the family junk you know oftentimes that stuff all gets thrown away or it was quite a lot of it there and it was a watershed for me i've managed to keep any number of things from my house and it was with some regret that some years later i sold it but in the dining room here there are two doors off the dining room i stole both of them out of that house and brought them with me you mentioned the train earlier which reminds me that the train ran through under hell there's still two stations that are now converted to homes but we had our own train running through town and on the recent historical bus tour that we did through town i was surprised to hear we had a movie theater right down sort of the junction of jericho and under help yes right on the town line there on park street did you actually ever go to that movie fan or you know i grabbed it put some money into that little venture i believe it was mr hanley that owned the property i don't know whether they actually build it seems like they build it for something else some public use but it ended up being a movie theater if you get down heard about it all my life right supposedly the engine fell over and some folks ate still there and i'm sure it isn't good pictures of them getting it out in the creek fifteen above underhill is where it happened and we have we have a lot of good photographic looters put that to rest the thing that still missing is the cannon and you're right that's what you mentioned also planning you've seen significant changes in our town and i'm wondering what your impression or opinion is over are the changes favorable are they they're not i suspect there's always good and bad but and you've been involved in the process i'm sure partly out of your own interest  such a big changes technology driven like in the world i guess and one of the technology places this closer to burlington for example technology has brought a whole different kind of president its own technology and its own people the problem a lot of folks here at the same time there was a big shift in taxation in ramallah and new more progressive state government decided the burden of taxation maybe twenty years after that we on the planning commission one time counted the number of curb cuts on poker hill road which is which was at one time the main road through underhill so for right road road before week fifty anyway we counted the number of curb cuts there were one hundred twenty eight curb cuts on the other important of kookery now that may not sound like a big number but considering that many of those curb cuts are on driveways that serve multiple homes you can see there are a lot more lot more people here looking for a place in the country to live and pretty soon some sections of the county town became way less way less country and  quite residential you know where the houses are came the people in with the people came to in different years and things changed a lot number five school house so dear to my heart wouldn't last four seconds today's educational plan the fact that you could have a building that had multiple grades in one room a single teacher handling it all with no teacher's aides with no plumbing erratic heating with marginal and occasionally run out of chalk probably wouldn't work today you wonder whether technology is worth it or so some folks this commuters been called worse by some folks and bedroom community by others and i suspect that the problem with the taxes is it forces landowners particularly those maybe farmers have a litter long time too with the increased tax need to sell some of their property but yet at the same time we've seen activities to limit act to fifty for instance to say we got these dueling dichotomy pressures if it continues i don't think that act two fifty takes all kinds of heat because it's anti development  not only residential but commercially we've lost a lot of commercial activity here in vermont probably because of the time and trouble it takes to deal with the bureaucracy to get it done yeah  how did you begin with the fascination automobiles and begins in a sandbox with most of us we push him around and make little noises its machinery in general i just can't escape a fascination interest in it and then of course the desire for it so when i had to get rid of anything that's the vermont syndrome collective make do use it up so i still have a car i had in high back in the barn waiting for me i guess to take a post graduate course in a shoot or not it's a big interest and to be honest with you it's probably kept me out of reform school  kept me busy working earning money to support my habit it is interesting and i've met a lot of wonderful people and i've learned a lot i do enjoy older things right and so you're part of an organization the road yeah i'm a let's see this year i'm a sixty year member of the fremont automobile which is a statewide organization club for people like me inflicted with the old car interest wonderful people we put on the annual  car show which is quite successful and it is allowed us to raise a fair amount of money over the years we've given vermont technical college we're under one hundred thousand dollars in scholarship help and we're now offering scholarships  sixteen vermont high school tech centers us system to give them tools in the game a little money to tell them we're going to juniors and we say look the only way you're going to get into college technical college is if you push sharpen up your grades you need to get some science you need to get some math going here because today's automotive technician is not a parts replacer technical engineering these are some physics you need to have some math and we're trying to help and so i can justify my hobbies in this reading social value here i think there is i understand you were never a boy scout yourself but that you started the boy scout hundred forty s and for some reason it wasn't successful but some years later after the war lloyd woodard who lived in undervalue v m physics professor thought that he and his semi retirement would try it and he tried starting a scout troop but he wasn't successful either for some reason so some years later in the early one nine hundred sixty s the local congregational church asked if i would be interested in helping with their high school student to sunday school program and i thought to myself gee i'm not sure i'm the guy really here to do that i still have some questions of my own and i don't see myself being qualified spiritual leader in that context but i felt so guilty because the guy that asked me here was quite sincere in trying to get something going so i said no i won't do that but iowa and out of the year came a scout troop and we were lucky we got some good people and we decided that the reason the two earlier troops had not made it was because there weren't enough people in underhill eligible age to really make a scout troop so we decided we would we'd invite jericho to earth and we went to the scout people he said now you can't do that jericho should have it's own you can't have a two town scout troop why not and they said well it isn't done so we got on our high horse and called up everybody and waved our arms and did all of the things we need to do to attract attention and she they let us do it so we became under real jerricho troops seven and we had to town strip only two troops in the country i think at the time set up that way to make a long story short it's been the best experience of my life scouting program is only as good as its local volunteers in practice but the overall philosophy and the boy scout is absolutely wonderful they offer a kid a chance to be a follower and then a leader and then again a follower and then again a leader and a whole bunch areas that you can measure him self in feel good about experience a lot of things it's career education it's lifetime education it's a great thing it's still going strong and we're still the best so i can democrat you you've been involved in you have your own interests and currently are still teach at champlain college how is it that you integrate i understand also you have owned some  automobile business is your breath of activities and interests is is interesting in that hard to imagine all of this for one person one thing leads to another and i got involved in the automobile business kind of by mistake i bought a new when judy and i were forced never we bought a brand new volkswagen convertible because as we courted i was driving my hobby cars which were thirty years old and probably not the best way to start a married life so we plunged and bought a brand new v w convertible and i took it back to the dealer a couple of times because it's kept in a high speed skip and on about the third try i said to the guy who was acting as the service manager but was a coal miner at this place and i said to him you know you've had a shot at this let me make  said ok and i did what i thought was wrong and he did that and we hopped in and we drove it down the road and it was it was fast and the guy was impressed so it's and would you like to be the service told julie about this and i said gee he invited me back on monday to start so i'll just go down there and yankees change i went down and he was serious and i spent a couple of years there is a  was too demanding so they let me sell and i went well i discovered that i could but i could make more times as much money with a quarter of the work or selling stuff to people you recently told me about the color blue first selling successfully selling vaults wagons that that was a well yeah you know the people that distributed v w these were volkswagen beetles to us told us one time that fifty seven percent of all new cars were sold to women and that no matter who was standing there you know you always wanted to be sure you were dealing with a woman as well because she made all the big decisions which is probably true then they told us that the big color for women in one thousand nine hundred sixty three when this is when that was it was turquoise i said you got to be kidding and once a turquoise card and i said well women do so i said all right seventy three truckloads we'll see so they did a car showed up and they flew out of the place we sold them like hot bank called me one day and they said would you be interested in being in business for yourself and i said maybe and they said well we've got a car dealership that's in serious trouble you know the area if you would sign for the debt beyond the assets we'd give it to you so i was young and brash and i said ok and i did that and all this and i ended up with a b m w dealership yeah which worked out very well for me we had the best market penetration in the united states for a couple of years in the early one nine hundred seventy s along in the short was i was then trying to hire employees and i discovered that the local market wasn't producing people that were really up to speed so i got involved with the first industry education council in the area and that got me involved with st michael's college and we had gone back to st michael's for a master's degrees i was familiar with the school little bit although a lot of things happened we got a big seven hundred fifty thousand dollar grant from the federal government to place career education people in vermont high schools and we rented johnson state teacher's college and we put on a training program for these guys and we placed them for free for a year in vermont i schools and all of that was sort of education oriented so the state asked me if i would edit the career education plan for the state of vermont and a lot of people put a lot of work into it just needed to be dragged together and i did that and i took me back to academia and i got only interested so i got in a little deeper and i end up now at the other end of my life in the classroom still i tried to do some educational stuff all along so i'm thinking town moderator to switch gears a little bit years ago before bill wilson telling me to him is has always been an interesting event given some of the issues particularly i'm sure in the past what was that like when when you were doing that in terms of the the issues and the just and the nature of the crowd that i'm sure town home so we get down there and i was quite impressed with this work i mean i can remember one of the rossum men standing up and quoting from the constitution  sure we were doing things right and it was impressive for him so as time went on i got involved with the town and ultimately i got elected moderator and it was interesting you have to be careful you don't break the law when pretty well and i enjoyed it and then they moved the town meeting down to the jericho school because the underhill town hall did not have enough room or facility to handle the town meeting so we we moved down there and it just wasn't the same so at the conclusion of the first town meeting ever held there in which i was the moderator i said thank everybody and said that i would not be granted to do this again unless we move underhill style meeting back to underhill or block and i thought i would be carried out on the shoulders of the crowd to great applause and everybody yawn and said so what see you later see you later so can i moderate in career short the moderators biggest task is to make sure as many people as possible are satisfied with the well there's plenty to do it's just a question of aligning your attitude with what needs to be done or you know we all spend a lot of time doing being really busy doing little things so we can avoid some of the things we should be doing probably human nature and i mean example but i have i've a couple of jobs i'm a caretaker for some properties here in talis or look after i teach usually a couple of courses a semester a champlain which is interesting to me i like the kids i think the future's probably going to be in reasonably good hands  current crop of young folks then i have a lot of hobby interests i spend a lot of time with the old car group i spent some time down in the barn full of my own cars and got a recent interest in steam if i were your age i would get in even deeper i've got a big steam engine down in the barn that i would love to see if i could get a less steam pressure summer to make it work there's a whole new fashion now it's called steampunk right and it's  i'm on a couple of boards of directors here near nothing and very outstanding that pays any money but you find that the time does past her years property supposed to be doing here whether it's preserving some perspectives on the community or just having a chat about things we're interested in but i love my community like my state and my country and not to sound sappy about it yes it's important to me and one of the things that i've tried to do here over my stay here is honor my ancestors commitment to the community and to make my own contributions and to try to get my kids interested her my little daughter susan is a justice of the peace let's you susan and  my other two children are are close to this community kind of doing their things where they live so there's some pride in that and her kind of keeps them keeps the circle going well thank you doll for making the time to come  over and chat with me and you can hear small form here to the pitch underhill lookout has a great town take care of it use reasonable resources and put a lot of thought into what you do here because stuff is really easy to spoil and it's really hard to reclaim thank you it's been my honor and pleasure to spend this time with you so thank you very much for your time today thank you