Panelists Recall the Fun Times Growing up in Bedford

Fun is a timeless centerpiece of childhood. But what’s considered fun can change from one generation to the next.

Three Bedford High School graduates who were born during the prolific post-war “Baby Boom” era of 1945-1965 shared their memories of growing up in town during the 1950s and ’60s at a well-attended Bedford Historical Society event last Sunday.

The most vivid recollections presented during “Growing Up in Bedford During the Baby Boom” program focused on unstructured, unsupervised fun.

“All the houses along the street had adjoining back yards, and that was our play area, a pack of about 12 kids,” said Ann (Ahearn) Ringwood. They had a softball that was so beat up they called their game “mushball.” They played with kites and pogo sticks. 

“We didn’t have rules, we didn’t have organized sports,” she said. “It was a wonderful way to grow up.”

Ringwood’s childhood memories center on “one massive dead end” at the corner of Caribou Street and Woodland Road. 

“We would be out kicking a ball at 10 o’clock at night,” or in colder weather, sledding down the Masardis Street hill.

Growing up in the 1960s at the end of Fletcher Road, there were scores of children under age 13, recalled Maureen (McAuliffe) Sullivan. Four-year-olds and 12-year-olds played together and “you always had something to do. Somebody always got hit in the face, but nobody ran in the house.” 

“Our parents were just glad you came home alive,” laughed Ralph Hammond, who at age 78 sneaked in under the Baby Boomer wire.

Neighborhood kids casually walked to the stores in Bedford Center, Sullivan recounted. At the Bedford Fruit Store, which most people called Stefanelli’s, the owners would keep track of the purchases. “I was 12 before I knew we needed money,” she said.

A favorite walking destination was the high ground off Pine Hill Road that everyone called Farmer’s Field. In the winter, sledding through that territory, starting at the top by a water tower, featured negotiating a gully with a stretch of barbed-wire fence. “About once a week, somebody would hit the barbed wire. We would just put the kid on a sled and take him home,” she recalled.

Through all of these adventures, Sullivan mused, “I have no memory of there ever being an adult.” 

Hammond, who grew up amidst the farms on Davis Road, also had winter memories. The hill at Herb Clark’s farm included “an icy driveway that was wicked good for sledding” – right onto Davis Road. His parents told him to stay off the frozen Concord River, but one winter, there were frozen pools throughout the flood plain, remnants of a hurricane a few months before.

There was more formal ice skating on a rink that the town set up on the north end of Page Field, Hammond said, as the other panelists nodded. “All of a sudden, that became wetlands,” he observed. 

He also brought the group back more than seven decades to a time of horse-powered haying on Davis Road farms – “big horses with huge feet.” Eventually all the kids watched in awe when Clark Farm acquired its first tractor.

Alethea Yates, the former Historical Society president who served as moderator, steered the recollections in various directions, including experiences in school.

Hammond, a retired teacher and principal, reached back to the late fall of 1955 when the fifth grade carried their books and school supplies from Center School to the new Bedford Junior-Senior High School, still under construction. 

“They told us, ‘Don’t touch the paint – it’s still wet,’” he said. 

There were memories galore of teachers who made their impact. The assistant principal at Center School, Bessie Liljegren, did it all, said Hammond. “She had to teach gym, art, music, the sixth grade play.” 

The access road from Concord Road to the back of Bedford High was named Liljegren Way by the first class to graduate from BHS in 1958, he noted.

“My fourth-grade teacher invited the entire class to her wedding,” Sullivan recalled, noting that the teacher ended up living next door to Sullivan’s parents on Cape Cod. 

Members of the audience mentioned other teachers they remembered – John Fichera, Keith Phinney, Bill Toland.

Hammond remarked that teachers also worked as coaches and other extracurricular roles “just to get their next meal.”

Fred Ferry taught driver education – in the parking lot of St. Michael’s Church – as well as typing, Sullivan said. Those are “the two skills I use the most,” Ringwood laughed.

By the time Armand Sabourin arrived at BHS in 1968, coaches had their own identity, and he taught math and directed the football program for more than 30 years. “He was a wonderful person,” Ringwood said, recalling how “everyone was so happy for him” after the team’s first win over longtime rival Wayland.

Sullivan, who for many years was executive director of the Chamber of Commerce, recounted how she and some neighborhood friends brought breakfast to an early shift at the police station, and were rewarded with a building tour and a ride in a cruiser. A few years later, they served as hostesses for the Policemen’s Ball in the field house at the Marist Seminary. That building is now the library at Middlesex Community College.

Speaking of police, Ringwood, a retired newspaper photographer, told a story about Officer Barry Breland, who in late December directed traffic dressed as Santa Claus. “He said that was the only time people waved at him using all their fingers,” she cracked.

One constant was Bedford Farms. Sullivan remembered kids piling into a station wagon – with the tailgate down – for the drive. 

“It wasn’t until I was 13 that I found out there was something other than vanilla ice cream,” she said with a laugh. 

Folks in the audience chimed in with some of their recollections. Marilyn Chisholm reminisced about the children who formed a human chain to move the contents of the Bedford Free Public Library from 15 The Great Road to the new building on Mudge Way in 1967. She had other tidbits – prom gowns at Marshalls for a dollar each, Thunderbird air shows that residents watched from home, a culture where “you could just leave your bike anywhere.”

Myles McDonough said he wasn’t allowed to go in the Shawsheen River behind his house, but he remembers “climbing around an old tanker trunk that had flipped off Route 3.”

Mosquito control sprayer trucks would load pesticides on the same hayfield where kids would camp out, Hammond recalled. Sullivan said kids would ride their bikes through the fog emanating from the truck.

When Yates asked about memories of Bedford Santa, which began in 1946, Ringwood cracked that the kids in her neighborhood “were surprised to see Santa Claus emerge from a Plymouth station wagon.”