Article

Billerica Business Men's Club

The Billerica Business Men's Club, also written the Businessmen's Club, was an association of the town's businessmen that from the 1930s into the 1950s paid for and celebrated the athletic teams of Howe High School, sponsored the first school band in 1951, and worked with the Planning Board and the Board of Selectmen to bring industry to Billerica. The town reports never give its founding or its officers; the earliest notice found is in the report for 1936.

Its first and longest work was for school athletics. In 1936 the high school Athletic Association thanked it for financial aid, and in 1941 the principal thanked "the Business Men's Club and others of our citizens" for recognizing the teams "through banquets and presentations." From the mid-1940s the club gave an annual banquet for the football team: in 1945 the squad was "indebted to the Business Men's Club for the banquet and entertainment provided them by the Club and its supporters," in 1947 the banquet was for "our football boys and the cheer leaders, as in previous years," and in 1948 it came "with awards to Senior letter men." The athletic accounts for 1947 show a donation of $48.25 from the club. The Howe yearbook of 1952 notes that the annual football banquet was "sponsored by the Businessmen's Club of Billerica," and at the banquet of December 8, 1954 the club gave gold footballs to the senior players and gold megaphones to the senior cheerleaders, with the band also among its guests. The yearbook calendar of 1957 still lists the "Business Men's football banquet." In 1949 the principal praised the members for "their efforts to set up a proper playing field"; early in 1950 the town meeting accepted a deed of the athletic field and bleachers on the Mitchell Estates, the Memorial Athletic Field, now Lampson Memorial Field, where the high school first played football in 1951. The retired Howe principal Cyril D. Locke was an active member of the club's board in 1954.

In 1951 the club gave $250 for the purchase of musical instruments, and the principal reported "the beginnings of a school band. The Billerica Business Men's Club, which has been so active in promoting our athletic program, is now engaged in sponsoring the band." That band grew into the Billerica Memorial High School Marching Band, and from 1953 its members were guests with the football players and cheerleaders at the club's banquet.

After the Second World War the club also took up the town's growth. In 1950 the Planning Board met several times with the Businessmen's Club on zoning and mapped with it the areas that should be rezoned for business and industry; in 1951 the board worked "in close cooperation with the Better Business Committee of the Billerica Business Men's Club to expand the business industrial areas." At the Planning Board's suggestion, with Gordon C. Brainerd as its chairman, the two held a combined meeting on November 5, 1953 on "orderly industrial growth to coincide with the town's increased residential population," and in its report for 1954 the Board of Selectmen commended the Billerica Business Men's Committee on Industry for its work in acquiring industrially zoned land and in contacting industries about locating in town. The club is not found in the town reports after the mid-1950s. A later Billerica Businessmen's Association was active in 1988, when James T. Dangora spoke for it at town meeting in favor of a change to the sign by-law and the meeting gave it a seat on the study committee that took up the question; the records do not show whether it descended from the older club.

An earlier body of the same kind was the Billerica Board of Trade, organized on March 15, 1911. No record found connects it directly with the Business Men's Club. In 1911 it had 162 members, with the Rev. Charles H. Williams, minister of the North Billerica Baptist Church, as president; Sidney A. Bull, Moses C. Mitchell and Charles H. Kohlrausch as vice-presidents; Herbert F. Jacobs as secretary; and John A. Richardson as treasurer. It met on the fourth Monday of each month, alternately at the Town Hall and at Father Mathew Hall in North Billerica, and elected its officers each October. At a meeting at Gardner Parker Hall on September 23, 1912, it elected Dr. Charles E. Hosmer president, Warren H. Manning vice-president, the Rev. Lyman V. Rutledge secretary and T. Frank Lyons treasurer, and heard Dr. Hosmer on "What Billerica Needs Most"; the March 1913 issue of the town magazine BILLERICA again named Williams, by then the town's representative in the General Court, as its president.

The Board of Trade's meetings of 1912 and 1913 took up three-decker houses, the restriction of firearms, good roads, housing and tenement laws, and the town's schools, for which it named a committee to study educational aims and methods. With the Billerica Grange it sponsored a corn contest with a $1,000 prize for the largest yield from one acre. Above all it prepared for the Boston and Maine Railroad's new car shops in North Billerica: at its December 1912 meeting three members of the Lowell Board of Trade predicted some 3,000 workers and 15,000 new residents and urged housing laws, roads and schools, and in May 1913 it held a special meeting on a town stock company to develop land and build houses and named Frederic S. Clark, Joshua B. Holden Jr., Edward A. King, Bernard W. Kearney and Richardson as a committee on a co-operative association to build working-men's houses. The board is credited with much of the work of bringing the Boston and Maine shops to Billerica, and in 1914 it announced that it would carry out the recommendations of the Massachusetts Homestead Commission with the city planner Arthur C. Comey and Manning, the beginning of the Billerica Garden Suburb. By 1919 Manning was its president and Carl Lutender its secretary and treasurer, and in 1928 the town report still mentions "the Local Board of Trade." A separate Pinehurst Board of Trade was named in the town meeting articles of 1949 and 1950 to send two members to a committee on a fire station for Pinehurst.

Billerica Business Men's Club

Billerica Business Men's Club

References