Gordon C. Brainerd

Died	2001-01-27
Planning Board
In Office	1951 - 1967
Town Meeting
In Office	1956 - 2000
Select Board
In Office	1971 - 1989
Fence Viewer
In Office	1989 - 1990

Gordon C. Brainerd (died 2001) was a Billerica Centre insurance agent who served the town for half a century, sixteen years on the Planning Board and eighteen on the Select Board, and who in his last years led the effort to turn the old Howe School building into a town museum. After coming to Billerica he lived first in the house at 43 Andover Road and later on Concord Road, and for many years he ran the Gordon C. Brainerd Insurance Agency at 1A Andover Road, at the Centre; he held the Chartered Life Underwriter designation. His wife, Helen M. Brainerd, was herself a Town Meeting member, a volunteer at the public library and in 1961 the president of the Billerica Public Library Association; she died about 1970. He was a member of the Billerica Republican Town Committee.

He was elected to the Planning Board in 1951, the year the town adopted the new planning law that gave the board control over subdivisions, and he became its vice-chairman when the chairman, Irving Waitz, resigned and Morris Arakelian took his place. Re-elected for five years in 1952, he was chairman in 1953 and 1954. His reports for those years describe the first years of subdivision control, a large aerial photograph of the town hung in the Selectmen's Room, a new town map, the hiring of a professional planning consultant to begin a master plan, and meetings with the Businessmen's Club to promote "orderly industrial growth to coincide with the town's increased residential population." In two steps the board persuaded town meeting to raise the minimum house lot from 7,500 square feet to 10,000 in 1953 and to 15,000 in 1954, and in 1954 it began a full revision of the zoning by-law, of which it wrote: "Too much emphasis cannot be placed on the vital need for a modern protective By-Law which will do much to guide the Town in this period of exceptional growth." He was chairman again in 1957 and in 1963, when the board approved the large Whipple Acres and Whitegate subdivisions and the Supreme Judicial Court upheld its control over the old paper-street lots of the Central Park area, a decision the report noted applied "throughout the Commonwealth." He was re-elected in 1957 and in 1962, when he defeated John T. Glavine, and served as vice-chairman under Richard D. Manning until his term ended in 1967. In the same years he was president of the Billerica Public Library Association in 1957 and 1958, when a state consultant found the library's budget was only 61 cents a head, and from 1956 he was a Town Meeting member.

In March 1971 he ran third for two seats on the Board of Selectmen, but when John P. Fitzgerald resigned that September, Brainerd was elected to the board on November 13, 1971. He was re-elected five times, and from 1976 to 1988 he was the board's secretary, serving for most of those years with Thomas H. Conway Jr. as chairman and Arthur L. Doyle; in 1972 he was also the selectmen's representative on the Northern Middlesex Area Commission. In town meeting he often explained the board's positions on money matters, from a police contract set by binding arbitration in 1979 to the lapse of funds under the town charter in 1981 and, in 1982, an experiment in passing the budget as a single motion. In 1986 the town voted $4,500,000 to convert the old Howe High School into a municipal building for the town and school offices and the police station, and in 1989 he was chairman of the Town Hall Dedication Committee. He lost his seat in the election of April 1, 1989, and the selectmen's report for that year closed with "a note of thanks to Gordon Brainerd for his 18 years of service to the Town as a member of the Board of Selectmen." That fall the Massachusetts Federation of Planning and Appeal Boards gave him its Joseph M. Magaldi Award, one of five such awards in the state that year, and Town Meeting gave him a standing ovation.

He kept serving after leaving the board: as a fence viewer, on the Ombudsman Committee, and as chairman of the committee that screened candidates for town administrator and brought Robert Mercier to the post in 1991. From 1991 he chaired the Museum Study Committee and then the Museum Committee, which met in the second floor of the Old Howe School, sought money for repairs and in 1993 had a mural of Billerica's history painted for it; he resigned on February 1, 2000. He died on January 27, 2001, and a special town meeting held a moment of silence in his memory. The Museum Committee named the Town Government Gallery of the museum after "our friend and chairperson."

Gordon C. Brainerd

Gordon C. Brainerd

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