I've lived here all my life. I was born on Chatham Bars Avenue, I went to school all 12 years in Chatham, and I've lived in North Chatham for about 45 years. My wife came from Montgomery, Alabama—I was in the Air Force and we got married shortly before I got discharged. We lived down there for about a year, and we lived here all the rest of our lives. She died in March 2008 after 63 years of marriage. She learned to love Cape Cod and Chatham in particular.

I started off as a service man at the Ford Agency in Chatham, then I opened my own place, which is now a Cumberland Farms. My wife and I both worked very hard and made a success of it.

If I had had any money back then, I could have bought a lot of property. I had a chance to buy two lots on Ryder's Cove for $8,800. Today those lots are worth about $300,000. My first house I bought for $4,500 with a GI loan. I sold it and moved up here to North Chatham, and I paid, I think $17,500 for it. And we've had this house ever since.

Music has been a big part of my life. My father encouraged me to learn to play the trumpet and since I was 14 years old, I just kept at it. My son and I play in a band downtown, Chatham Band. All throughout high school I played in bands. One day, two guys asked my mother and father if I could play in their dance band if they picked me up and brought me home. And, of course, my mother and father were tickled to death. We got $4 on Friday night and $5 to play on Saturday nights.

Over the years, I played with Phil Barbosa's band up in Hyannis. I played in a back-up band for Peggy Lee and Jose Feliciano. That was when these shows would come to Hyannis for the summer. When they came, Peggy Lee might bring a piano player, an arranger, and a drummer, then they'd contact the union and say, "We need six more guys." You had to be able to play the parts. That was fun—it was a tough job, but it was good. That was probably when I was playing the best.

Years ago, the town was dead in the winter and it would wake up when the summer people came. The summer people, they were the life of the town. About the same time, when things got better, a lot of guys came to town and started to build new houses—the developers. And that was a change we hadn't seen before. A lot of people had two or three acres of land in the backs of their houses and they'd pay taxes on it. The developer would check the rolls at town hall and he'd visit these people, and he'd say, why do you want to keep paying taxes on this property? Sell it to me and I'll put a couple of houses on it. That's how it got started. The guy that owned the property was tickled to death to get a few thousand dollars for his land and he didn't see any reason not to sell. And I'm not saying the developers are bad: most of the developing I've seen is good. The permit departments deserve credit for keeping everything in line. We don't have any vacant houses around, and I think the town has done well by these developers coming.

I'm 85. I'll be 86 in March. The big thing is your mind. If your mind is good, you'd like to live a long time. But if your mind gets bad, that's a little bit different. I was on Chatham's finance committee for ten years; for six, I was co-chairman. That was a time-consuming job. Then I quit and decided to take a year off. I was sitting down in Florida on Fort Myers Beach, and the phone rang. Two people from Chatham called me and wanted to know if I'd run for selectman. I said, "Gee, that's a hard question to answer when I'm sitting alongside the pool, the temperature is about 80 degrees, and I've got a gin and tonic in my hand. This looks pretty nice down here." I talked it over with my wife and we decided that I would do it. But we didn't come back to Chatham right away—the local paper would call up all my relatives, trying to find out where I stood on a few policies. When we came back, I ran for selectman and won. I was selectman for three years.

If you're going to live in Chatham, you need to have a boat and you need to have golf clubs. That's what you need. And a job.

I used to play over at the Chatham Bars Inn when I was a kid. I was a caddy. We used to get 35 cents for nine holes—35 cents for carrying that bag around! The big advantage was at night, when the customers quit for the day, we used to go back and play. I used to play every night, and I got to playing pretty good. Years later, a friend asked if I'd like to join Eastward Ho. We put our name in, and a year and a half later, they asked us again and we decided to join...It's a beautiful course. Beautiful clubhouse. When I was a kid, did I ever think I'd play at Eastward Ho? No. Never.

I play Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. The full 18 holes. But I go in a cart (laughs)...I'll tell you something: golf is something you can do all your life. You may not do it as good as you did when you were 25, but as long as you can get

out of the cart and hit the ball, you can play. You have moments when you can play good, and as you get older you don't play quite as well, but you still get the enjoyment of competition, the enjoyment of camaraderie. It's a good sport. You have to give up basketball, football, things like that, but you can still play golf.