By Jennifer Myers
Lowell Sun (Massachusetts)
TEWKSBURY, Mass. — In 1955, Evelyn Sederquist, a 32-year-old, 5-foot-tall mother of four stepped up to the plate to help her town.
Times were tough. Tewksbury was growing and facing staffing shortages to meet the emergency needs its residents.
In March of that year, Sederquist and 29 other Tewksbury women began a rigorous, eight-month training program in firefighting, first aid and emergency preparedness. They took classes at night, busy raising children and caring for their homes during the day.
They raised the funds to purchase boots, coats, hand-held spotlights and even a 1938 Ford firetruck. When the truck would not fit entirely inside the garage at Sederquist’s 14 Bay State Road home, the women picked up hammers and saws and built an extension.
The Tewksbury Women’s Auxiliary Firefighters, a volunteer unit of Civil Defense, was born.
Tom King, a member of the Tewksbury Historical Society, has been researching the group he refers to as “the forgotten women,” but has not uncovered much information.
“I can tell you who was on the Cemetery Commission in 1835, but there is hardly any information on these women who were out in the middle of the night at fires, accidents and emergencies in the cold and mud for the town of Tewksbury,” he said. “It was a unique program, the first of its kind in Massachusetts.”
King has discovered the names of 11 of the 30 women, including Helen Murphy, Lillian Clark, Ruth McDermott, Helen Wade, Virginia Abbott, Evelyn Daly, Alice Lightfoot, Mildred Carter, Lois Sherman and Hazel Grouke, but has not found any photos or additional information. He did, however, locate Capt. Evelyn Sederquist’s sons, Joseph and John.
Evelyn died three years ago, at the age of 83.
The duo, along with Joseph’s wife Susan and son Joe, attended yesterday’s Tewksbury Historical Society meeting, bringing with them their mother’s firefighting helmet, badge, Civil Defense and America Red Cross cards.
“They were really remarkable women, all of them,” said Joseph Sederquist, recalling how his mother and her crew would listen for the town fire whistle, get up and go. “There was nothing they couldn’t do. And they always brought the coffee.”
King said anyone with additional information or pictures regarding the Tewksbury Women’s Auxiliary Firefighters can call him at 978-387-1983.
In addition to King’s presentation, Mike Laliberte regaled the membership with the tale of D. Henry Scarlett, who studied Mars while living in Tewksbury from 1892 to 1936 and created an ornate and unusual treasure chest, made of historic bits of timber, which he later gifted to the town of Acton.
Scarlett built his first observatory at 1018 Livingston St., where he observed Mars at its closest proximity to Earth in 1909 and 1910. His paper on the experience was published in Popular Astronomy magazine in 1914. His second observatory was built in 1926 at 283 Main St., now the site of Vic’s Waffle House.
He spent 200 hours over four years crafting a box that can best be described as a portable museum. It is made of 189 pieces of wood, each numbered and cataloged, from such diverse locations as: George Washington’s Mt. Vernon home; the USS Maine, the ship whose sinking sparked the Spanish-American War; Faneuil Hall; Old South Church in Boston; Old North Bridge in Concord; Circus mogul P.T. Barnum’s home; and the birthplace of Billerica patriot Asa Pollard, the first man to fall in the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Inside the box are many more replicas and artifacts, including a buffalo tooth from the plains of Nebraska, a Continental $3 bill and the only known handwriting sample of Isaac Davis, captain of the Acton Minutemen and the first soldier to die at Old North Bridge in Concord on April 19, 1775, the first battle of the Revolutionary War.
The chest was gifted to Acton by Scarlett in 1905. It is kept at the Acton Memorial Library.
Laliberte said Scarlett moved to Acton in 1936, then to California in 1940 and later to Tucson, Ariz. He was living in Arizona in 1950, but after that the trail goes cold. Laliberte said he has not discovered when or how Scarlett died.
Copyright 2009 MediaNews Group, Inc.
All Rights Reserved