Thomas H. Conway Jr.

Died	2007-10-18
Town Meeting
In Office	1956 - 2005
Planning Board
In Office	1959 - 1969
Select Board
In Office	1968 - 1974 1976 - 1994
Children	Thomas

Thomas H. "Hap" Conway Jr. gave Billerica close to half a century of public service: as a member of Town Meeting from 1956 to 2004, on the Planning Board in the 1960s, and for more than two decades on the Board of Selectmen. He was a Korean War veteran, and at the fall town meeting of October 2000 the Veterans' Agent presented him and other Korean War veterans with plaques.

Conway was elected to the Planning Board in 1959. He was its vice chairman under Charles J. Faria in 1961 and under Gordon C. Brainerd in 1963, a year in which the town saw "an extraordinary surge in building activity" and the board spent most of its time on subdivision control. Re-elected in 1964, he became chairman in 1967 after Joseph H. Johnson Jr. joined the board, and signed that year's report with Richard D. Manning and Vincent M. Padula. He resigned from the board on March 11, 1968, after he and John P. Fitzgerald were elected selectmen.

On the Board of Selectmen he served as secretary from 1969 to 1973 under chairman Paul F. Newman, and he was also a member of the Capital Outlay Committee. He was off the board from 1974 to 1976, when he chaired the Billerica Industrial Development Financing Authority, then returned and was chairman in 1976 and 1977. The board's 1976 report lists a new leash law, a sale of tax possession properties that netted $20,991, and an application for $2,200,000 in federal public works funds for a new library, and it printed the results of a review of the Town Treasurer's office that the selectmen had ordered. He chaired the board again in 1983 and 1984.

Conway did not run again in 1994. The selectmen's report for that year praised "Tom's experience, knowledge, humor and total dedication to this community," named the Town Hall hearing room the "Thomas H. Conway Jr. Hearing Room," and gave him the town's first "Distinguished Community Service Award" on March 5, 1994. He chaired the committee that won the town about 194 acres of former Middlesex County land for passive recreation, accepted at the 1994 fall town meeting, and the report called him "clearly the driving force for our success." He was afterward the town's Community Teamwork representative from 1995 to 2006 and served on the Fire Department management study committee and the Vietnam Veterans Park committee.

Thomas H. Conway Jr. died on October 18, 2007, and is listed among the memoriams for 2007 in the town report.

Thomas H. Conway Jr.

Thomas H. Conway Jr.

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