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Solomon Post 8819, V.F.W.

Solomon Post 8819 is the North Billerica post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, the national organization of veterans who have served in the armed forces overseas in war. It is named for the brothers Robert W. Solomon, known as Wesley, a seaman in the Naval Reserve who died in 1942, and Albert H. Solomon, an Army private first class killed in action in 1944, sons of a North Billerica family on Salem Road and two of the twenty-nine Billerica men who died in World War II. In 1951 Town Meeting named the plot of land at the corner of Salem Road and Pollard Street Solomon Brothers Square "in honor of Wesley and Albert Solomon." It is one of two Veterans of Foreign Wars posts in town, with William F. Eggo Post 2597 in Pinehurst.

No record of the post's charter was found in the town reports. It first appears in the warrant for the annual meeting of 1962, which asked $500 "to provide quarters for the V.F.W. Solomon Post 8819." That meeting voted to take no action after the motion to appropriate the money lost on a rising vote of 63 to 74, but in 1963 the town voted $200 for the post's quarters, and from 1964 the budget carried "V.F.W. Quarters (Solomon Post)" at $200 a year beside the Pinehurst post's line into the 1990s. The Polk directory of 1985 lists the post at 12 Phinney Street.

The post marched in the Memorial Day parade of 1975, for which the town paid it $35 and $93 on June 1, 1975, and it has worked with the town's veterans' agents in relief and in the observances of the year. In 1987 the veterans' agent thanked the post for its help over the holiday season, and in 1988 the post and its Ladies Auxiliary, with Saint Anne's Episcopal Church in North Billerica and the children and staff of the Locke school, gave food baskets and gift certificates to 67 families at the holidays; with the other veterans' posts it also helped the agent present medals to four of the town's former prisoners of war at the fall Town Meeting of 1988. At the town's Flag Day ceremony of June 12, 2015, the pledge of allegiance was given by the post's commander, Frank M. Busalacchi.

In 2015 State Representative Marc T. Lombardo of Billerica filed a bill in the General Court for an appropriation for the post's "environmental clean-up, mitigation and other operating costs"; it was referred to the committee on Veterans and Federal Affairs and in March 2016 sent to a study order. The post is a tax-exempt organization of veterans under section 501(c)(19) of the Internal Revenue Code, and on March 26, 2025 it hosted the town's luncheon in honor of Vietnam veterans.

Solomon Post 8819, V.F.W.

Solomon Post 8819, V.F.W.

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