the and i'm here today again in the claflin room and have the pleasure of being with richard betts and we're to continue our interview we had a conversation part one and there was just so much information to be told and so interesting that we decided to continue that for today so richard i want to welcome you here the clapham again and looks like we're ready to ready to talk about belmont history thank you victoria it's been fun putting together some of the memories of growing up in belmont there's a section to it was under section two well and with that in mind i did want to say that the first conversation we really covered some of the some of the early history of your family even coming over from england here and settling in belmont and and also probably up through your junior high years but after we've let the dust settle for a couple of weeks and we've we've sort of thought about that conversation there was a few things we wanted to add so i thought this is the best time to do that we'll just talk about a few of the still in the in the earlier years of growing up in belmont so i know you had mentioned you know after i got home i house and you're lit the chimney and the smoke came up through the windows that was kind of exciting and it takes an old piece of got to lay it at a forty five degree angle and shoot the a launch pad a lot of that was what was the launch pad and shoot while i bet the jackknife has something to do with the cub scout stories i know you were involved in that for many years i was in troop four which is now troop three or four of the boy scouts for about ten years i tell you about five years all but the but the jap knife there were i don't know what used to call those books that was sort of a legging type boat and they laced up and they came up part way up the lake probably four five six inches and in the side of the  want to mention also we had we talked briefly about the hurricane of thirty eight and i know a lot of people remember that and remember what it was like in their neighborhood and it sort of he calls it the surprise storm or it was called the no name sparking in the in the in in the wind and that was a little bit from directing and my dad left me there with my role as make sure no cars went through which they couldn't do any way because the tree was across the road and i must admit the area that's right and it really put an end to the greenhouse business is some of these large farms you know did that's what knocked down all the greenhouses on the what was down on between school street and gross str warmer winter place into that they could not compete with with that yeah we we sort of covered up to the junior high years and then we'll talk maybe a little bit about high school and i know that this year actually was a special year for you that i celebrated your sixtieth sixtieth high school basic last reunion class really unbelievable you know i was the chairman had the same committee that we had ten years ago when we had our a member of that club but he was able to get it for us and we did a beautiful job we had about seventy people that's great we were concerned but only having it one day that the people from other states would come but we have people from california it's sort of some of the things we've been talking about absolutely with the recollections of what they would have would have gone under when they you know caddying at the country club that's right for things and there's it is a great picture of you with again of you know your chums playing football yes ou was fun to it was fun to sort of have a trip down memory lane when you talked about the high school years particularly and and what you had remembered in dancing at the totem pole or oh that's right you know cars just coming in or  nineteen forty four roughly because i had it when i was in high school except he wouldn't allow me to drive it to high school i had to walk to high school went to work and you can use your your car after high school because we're very  the war was just revving down yes and yeah the new kind is what with there weren't that many coming out and i actually sold that car two or three years later four hundred dollars more than i paid for it because  then you eventually went into the navy following soon after graduation from high school that's right so i joined the navy i signed up for it in may of one hundred forty five the year that we graduated from high school so while you were still story that embarrassed me something something terrible would tell us we are talking to this all salt look at all these  was called in those there is yes dropped on hiroshima and all of the sailors all of us ran out into the out of out of the barracks and we had the nose between them we thought the war was going to wrap the atomic bomb but most of us felt and most of the veterans that i know felt maybe it saved our lives yeah and if there was a huge loss of life of course over the and they would flash japanese ships quick quick quick quick and you want to come up with what we're going to identify today on the spot but yes one credit or they wish we were still doing that even though the it was over yeah well let's talk a little bit about the home front because i know there's been a lot of everybody has their stories of war stories whether they were in the service or here at home you know how they participated it really did impact the community at that time and  we've done some interviews with other belmont residents talking about what belmont was like during the war years so i know you probably have some yes recollections as well that we'll have to back up from my from my  school yes i guess the biggest thing was most food was rationed food food you know if something was right he asked me was rationed me more things that i probably even even recall that i wasn't remember being so upset because i use them sparingly to make them last and then when i went off rationing i'm left with about fifteen to twenty ration stamps and i'm bummed out because i didn't receive we can turn a man somewhere today i you couldn't see any lights and if we could see a light we have to go and ring the doorbell and talk of the door and tell them to pull the shades hide out and that was kind we always signed a certain section three tour i was with the air raid warden whose name escapes me set a fire station yes which would alert you that it's a blackout certain numbers would be an air raid which fortunately we we never had to have any you know this already so and then my mother took quite a potty during the war she would go up with a group of other ladies up to the atkins house or up a carpet i mean you yes and they would say they would sit there and knit with string minesweeper back on up onto the ship so they had this heavy glove put on their heads and she used to bring one of them to a home on occasion to show them to me i still remember when we didn't and so this group of belmont women will go on and also  there was a stories about him town class destroyers you probably know something about that is your yes actually one of the the destroy his were the ones that president roosevelt  and we would have horse meat and boy it was terrible tough tough was what you could only get i mean that's all you will get probably at that time so rough that he felt that the boys growing up ought to have some sort of meat to eat and you know the other meat was eithe i had lettuce and beans and corn and i was growing them and nobody ever bothered us i mean they the five it closed down yes you know anything left where the where the paper trees were trees which they came in and picked once or twice i want  that i still belong to yes several of them started their magic with that very night without misto magic ok that was a popular and i thought i had some they were kind of simple tricks but i got interested in them and jack's joke store you know bromfield street in boston buying little little little magic tricks yeah yeah and i said to the fellow you know do you happen to have and i felt a little embarrassed i said you know nobody would want you having to have anything e said you want a a twentieth century silk well that was a trick where two silks are tied together and you flip them up and the soap to disappear to pieces tied him in between the two that you had and i want for you to tell me what are the odds of me being able to put this needle through the middle of this of this book and this little box of matches shows around i have had a little circuit i did a lot of shows for people who live down down in cambridge and i went to the shady brook school and i did one show for somebody and that they passed the word and i did a lot of magic shows for i'm not going up on the stage and putting on this show and i've got to i'm not doing a a side of act which some magic acts do but i found that i could force myself now to face an audience of people there might be a certain word that i would i know by instinct when i got to what it was going to be it was tough yeah but yeah they didn't know what i was going to say it's not like you're in an actual play where you're lie every line i could change it and say something else and kind of go around that would or group of words and nobody would know the difference and i know i've met people later around  when i went into the fog of building to be assigned where i was going to be sent i was they have a form to fill out something like the one when you go to have an x ray at the hospital you feel like your life story time agree yeah and do you have asthma do you know  things that answered this recruiter terrorist yes ok yes you know i was i was sitting at a table right in front of me at all of a sudden somebody came up behind me which i didn't see of course with a big metal plate and let's talk a little bit before we move on to just the binet the final ending of sort of we've been interrupted a couple times during the taping today with the snow blower outside yes and so you had just a few little snow stories when you were a kid you remember it being a lot different than it is now and one of the things that was different was the whistle blowing that they know snow alerts that's right that's right a day like today which is a beautiful  two car garage in the back so the driveways got to be seventy feet long proximately by ten twelve feet wide and i remember working there with guy they had the the air compressor in the little alley next to the to the fire station and the firemen would just before twelve into the front windows and they're all downstairs looking through the great stories from from that era and as we you know extend the timeline a little further going on we know that you started to really working for the town i don't know maybe in your twenty's or have any meter readers left but it came to the high school and hired my school students even though we were only fifteen to go and read the electric light meet us on weekends you know our afternoons after school after school and saturday mornings to pick up the cuff the most that you couldn't get in into the house shore so a fellow would drive up into the new truck and meet us out on on our school street about two o'clock but since we only worked in the afternoon we were given two afternoons to do it which was the same thing as a day's work being young and good shape we used to run between houses because if we could finish the book and there was some that was there again and i are union guy ready spoke about it i had a letter from a catholic priest who was in class who wrote sorry he couldn't make the reunion but that's right where the dogs with the doors are open where the good looking girls where and at that reunion one of the girls came up to me and i had an idea what you were going to say when i saw her approach me with a smile she said do you remember new and read all the meters because you'd have almost a year's readings in the book you had and you just keep adding to it so you look at it and say well we have always you with about eighty kilowatts seventy five so they just  has cheated because when you're whenever you're read is what you pay for one of estimated it catches up when it's actually read of course but we never were dumb enough to keep estimating the same house all the time oh yeah so i must admit that we did not too often though so you really had a sense of getting to know the neighborhoods got to know the streets and streets the belmont i went to work for the engineering department i already know the name of every single street in belmont absolutely which is what we'll talk about probably now i mean that you've been obviously i mean a long time town employee since one nine hundred forty two weeks and you're in the service forty two said ok and how did that happen well i should have by chance by chance right like a lot of and we asked what i was going to be doing i said i don't know i don't have a job yet he said well there's a vacancy in my office for a junior engineer if you're interested so i thanked him and i'm going to keep in mind meanwhile the government called the fifty to twenty club ok twenty dollars was sort of a thank you for serving in the in the in the service and use this money into you can get it going or get get a career going after a year it was it would be used up  to see if it was still still open and it was so i was hired in september of one nine hundred forty six as a ok got to be a story the fifty to twenty club gave me twenty dollars tax free right when i asked my salary at the engineering department starting out with twenty four dollars a week take home pay was twenty dollars and forty cents we were up to eight hour days back then and a half a day saturday oh so we worked forty four hours a week yeah so for forty four hours you made i made one penny more than if i had not taken it and got my twenty dollars tax free rather than twenty dollars and forty cents and i couldn't you twenty as for not working so i get forty cents more for working twenty cents more or less never any less than a penny that's my favorite story and credible yet anyway i really am to become quite interested in the in the engineering part of it so i enrolled in not the least in the evening school of engineering meanwhile i got married then to raise a family the engineering school meant for three  three three days three nights a week by the wednesday and friday wow i finished the four year program with an associates degree and went on for two more years and get a  received a for a bachelor's degree in engineering and management and my guess one claim to fame was i graduated graduated with i want is from both programs and in six years three hours a night three nights a week i missed one night wow i was home so sick i couldn't even move at the only time i am one of the highest marks i ever received on a test or remembered was one time i went to actually move up into department as people retired or or died or left and eventually was was made the assistant turned engineer an assistant building inspector and d and they worked their way up to retired engineer as they say and it's been forty two years and one thing i came across the other night when i was looking for something to add to that during that period of time one hundred forty six to nine hundred eighty seven when i retired yeah with four full time employees only belmont and we did all of the engineering work for the streets we had no consultants with was done in house yes fourteen miles of new streets sixteen of the half miles of sanitary so it was sixteen and a half miles of storm drains thirty three miles of new sidewalks fourteen hundred one single family houses which had to be inspected and they were built three hundred seventy two family i was one hundred units of housing at be here i'm very proud of what we accomplished and for the talent show our i guess that quick start running between these houses if you go now this and one little funny thing is the highway garage complex one of the boys in the office went to the selectmen and volunteered that we would take it over and design it ourselves in house in house yes just just as the fellow myself and we designed the whole complex it was built under budget talent meeting the chairman of the building committee recommended that the complex be named for me and so there is a plaque on the wall  recently i had the pleasure of going down to the highway yard what is your mind and peter cast you know who is the director department public works yes showed me around and we took a picture of your engineers would get together i discovered we had common problems every time was about the same and we used to talk about how we saw them resolve them and one time we were talking someone was talking about a bridge that was built in their town you know named for a leading citizen  at a school with you know and i said well i've got a garage students that were in college and spent part of their time out working where you had hands on experience writing what they would learn at school and we had them for years say they don't have them any longer because since i was in two and a half dog work drafting i say that's very good because you're now finding out what you don't want to do that's just as important going on in your life and finding out what you do want to do that's right and i don't get stuck in an office and actually you still maintain somewhat of a you know sort of a side light to that career now currently i do or you retired several times i don't really you know so now i'm working for myself doing engineering block tremendous tremendous records well that's how we a good segue into this next segment which we want to talk about a little bit about your interest in history that has been a huge focus throughout and some of this just your love of the town your knowledge of it you're in i mean knowing of the roads in the details of the engineering and it's really come out in wonderful ways in print which we're going to maybe he should talk about next some of these projects you've done i suppose i should start with my comment in my class room in my high school class yearbook ok when everybody puts down their pet peeve yes my pet peeve was history  i guess that changed but it was changed i think history teaches that's great well working with the child and being able to have hands on information i would sometimes spend time going through the files looking at all the subdivision plans on the various states as they would as they were cut up and i was like yeah absolutely and a fancy names that they gave some of the sections and whatnot and i suppose i kind of started a little bit but the main thing growing up in waverly and talked about all the things that they they didn't open where we square including going through the the they say or state which was where  pleasant street come comes in right right and that kind of piqued my interest and local history i'm glad you know i'm glad took it i rejoined it yeah i've enjoyed it and i you're somebody that's lived in incredible time period in this town because you've seen the transition literally from large tracts of land that were used for farming purposes to now total subdivisions that's right so much so that even in just one one generation people don't realize what belmont really was like that's right you know in your younger days and now we see that all parcelled up into house lots and so it was an exciting time and it was a lot of growth and that you've experienced you know and because of that a lot going on i was too young belmont too young to be involved in some of the early major subdivisions done back and in the in the   fun time yes and just so much happening and so is this what prompted you to begin well i'd collecting the information or yes well i just really started collection of scrapbooks i'm cutting out every thing to do with history of the town so the only papers and newspapers of course that came out after that yeah yeah and so you still do this ritual right when you're currently you have to go to the paper and i go through the pain and cut out things that you think are significant and put them index them and i think i'm on my seventy fifth you know scrap book one hundred pages for scrap book wow but even still now you've been able to let's talk a bit about the books that you feel you've written books meaning a lot of things really and newsletters we can talk about my first book as well came about because i read in the paper that was too young to have a street name for him it was an older underwood so i said she that's a shame that they made that mistake then he said you know there's a street in this town named for my dad best road and i can imagine  someday thirty years from now someone's going to say well that's a funny name with that come from that and i said well i want people to know so i started to make a list of streets and how they were named and that went on and on and on and on and i ended up with a four hundred page book called the streets of belmont and how they were named including a chronological history on this is relevant to the town because i took every subdivision in its proper order from eighteenth eight eighteen before the town was incorporated right yeah to fifty five for us when we were square with developing right up to date which at that time was nine as one of my favorite books as far as knowledge and i went through the cemetery looking at gravestones again i was allowed to go through the belmont citizen files and in the in the library right here they have all of your guilty papers on microfilm that i read they say read but i mainly skim books yeah read front pages and skim the other pages every single newspaper that's on microfilm then so me in my involvement in a project is currently as is just going through the manuscript and typing it in reformatting it and getting it ready to reproduce it into republic which is great but what i appreciate about it so much is not just the street names you know in the nuts and bolts of that but just the the fullness of the other information that's been included all throughout you know people and about the places and about the different families and about significant history it's really an encyclopedia on the development of bell i think it is really and it's a wonderful wonderful referencing it's exciting it's going to be exciting project bri little bit about about the fires and i know you've brought some newsletters and so let's just say that you do the newsletter editor for the belmont historical society for what over thirty five years is just my thirty fifth year thirty fifth year quarterly fo and the screen in front of you talked of really you know so the farming group was really kind of my little bit of my favorite yeah and like you said what's interesting about this is that they're all seemingly current now topics yes they're under under yes but yeah so you've you've you've really done a wonderful job through throughout the years of coming up with these interesting topics in promoting the history of belmont and like you said a lot of people don't realize no it's just a little walked through the town talks about as i like to say a hundred different historical or historical sites that yeah either or  yeah and this is my copy very well worn and that's again it's a great resource yes that's a i think that's i think this is in a way my favorite because of the street names and things of that type but then again the roads are very close second yes very close i think because it really again is designed to cover every neighborhood every area and you're out belmont yes with the idea of bringing out some of the historical places of interest families exactly and then more recently you and i have had the pleasure of collaborating on the images america series that's right of belmont which which really differs from these because this is designed to do be a picture pictorial history of the town of joy so that's kind of interesting for people that don't have a lot of time or attention to read read the the manuscript this captures so at the same idea the history arou the town in in photographs and it's got a you know again a wealth of wonderful photographs captioned to to provide just you know historic sense of what belmont used to be what it is today and then this the latest volume again is what you say it could compare is the older historic sites to what's currently what's currently in towns wit you take these sites that are no longer there perhaps and you say what's been replaced you know what still standing what's gone forever what's and this is again another rock you know way to compare it's interesting showing you such an inspiration for all of us to to know and appreciate the history of belmont the town that we live in and you just your work over the years i'd love to show this the because i mean here in the in the front will get a better close above it perhaps we just it is just so enjoyable to sit down and we we could probably go on and on for but i think that's very nice way to wind up perhaps you know perhaps you know maybe in another conversation we could pick out some favorite highlights but it's it's been a great to to find out just from from the beginning the early beginnings all through the high school and now this this time of year engineering years and through you know the work of the to