Lillian W. Schmidt

Bowers Fund Commissioner
In Office	1928 - 1961
School Committee
In Office	1929 - 1945
Board of Public Welfare
In Office	1931 - 1933

Lillian W. Schmidt, always "Mrs. Lillian W. Schmidt" in the town records, was active in Billerica public life from the 1920s into the 1950s. The town birth register for 1915 records a son, Alfred Walker Schmidt, born May 29 to William and Lillian Schmidt; the death register for 1920 records Alfred Schmidt's death on March 28 of that year, aged four years and ten months. Her first town appointment came in 1923, when she was named with Frederic G. Brown and John H. Cunningham to a committee to confer with the Lowell Gas Light Company about extending gas mains in Billerica.

In 1928 the annual town meeting elected her to the Bowers Fund Commission, which spends the income of the Bowers Fund for the town's poor, by 48 votes to 6 over John Frank Mullin. She was chosen again for five-year terms in 1933, 1938, 1943, 1948 (by a rising vote) and 1953 (unanimously), so that she sat on the commission for some three decades. In February 1931 she was also elected to the Board of Public Welfare by the narrowest of margins, edging out Carl F. V. Sandberg 823 votes to 817 in a recount by the registrars. When the chairman, Richard J. Conway, died in August 1931 she signed the board's report for that year as chairman, with the accounts of the town infirmary and the Lyman Haynes Memorial Fund, and the next year she signed it as a member under William J. Morris.

She was elected to the School Committee in 1929 and signed its report that year with the chairman, Dr. Maurice A. Buck; through most of the 1930s she was the committee's secretary. She was secretary of the School Buildings Committee, under Charles H. Eames, that built the $140,000 addition to the Howe High School, rededicated on October 5, 1931, and the six-room Pinehurst School. When the first Pinehurst bids came in too high, the committee "did not feel that it was wise, economical, or the purpose of the Town to erect a building cheaper than that called for in the specifications" and waited for more money from town meeting; in 1932 she made the committee's final report and it was discharged.

Her particular work on the committee was the school lunch. In 1932 the superintendent wrote that "Mrs. Schmidt of the committee has given much time not only to the organization and equipment, but to the successful operation" of the lunch room. In 1934 the high school lunch, serving nearly seven hundred pupils, was separated from the domestic science course and she was given its entire management; the superintendent credited "her personal interest and untiring efforts" for turning a small deficit into a self-sustaining service. She wrote the cafeteria's yearly reports herself, noting in 1935 that "It is one of the few school cafeterias in the state that is self-supporting."

She lost her School Committee seat in 1945 to Philip I. Collins and Edward W. Cousins, but remained in demand for school planning. In 1944 the Moderator named her to the School House Survey Committee with Superintendent Eugene C. Vining, and in 1951 she reported to town meeting for the Ditson School Building Committee. She ran for the School Committee once more in 1952 and finished second, 33 votes behind Gladys K. Dempsey. In the mid-1950s she taught braided rugs in the town's adult evening school.

Lillian W. Schmidt

Lillian W. Schmidt

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