Cheshire County

So I graduated from college, graduated from Richmond, came back home.

uh had no idea what i wanted to do and i i drove to keene new hampshire which is where uh the the y that ran my camp it was called the cheshire county ymca at the time and i i popped in to see uh the executive director uh named jeff craig and i made it seem like i just happened to be in the neighborhood even though i had driven an hour and a half just to make it look like a popped in and i popped in and said you know jeff i'm trying to figure out what to do with my career and i I'm good with kids and I can go in that direction.

I've seen what you do and that could be interesting to me.

Or I could go into business and go make some money.

I, I get so much out of my time with Don and I've had versions of Don, you know, throughout my career.

I still keep in touch with folks.

When I started at the Cheshire County Y, you know, I was 23 years old, single guy moving to what I thought was the country, uh, uh, And I immediately was invited to dinner by a number of different people, Ernie Vose and Bob and Rose Ferranti, like invited me to dinner.

And those are relationships, you know, I keep in touch with Rose to this day and check in with her from time to time.

In Keene, right?

Cheshire County? Actually, Antrim.

Antrim.

Yeah, it was Hillsborough County.

It, it's defined by Bedford, 'cause Bedford's about 45% of the district.

And, uh, so it's made up of 13 towns, uh, seven of them in Hillsborough County, six out in Cheshire County.

And like I said, Bedford is 45%.

New Boston's the second biggest town at 10%, so those two towns are, are key to winning District 9 because it's 55% of the district.

First off, from the statewide group is the Democratic Victory Candidate Committee, DVCC.

So they have a regional campaign manager and who is for... for me and us is a uh this his name is logan forsyth and he's been very helpful he covers sullivan and cheshire county so he's got a big job so he's always checking in and then the other group is um the sullivan county democrats they are also um watching and keeping track of all the candidates and encouraging us and answering questions.

And then this other group, and it is a Sullivan County group, just the candidates and a couple of former rep, And another person and Logan comes.

So we meet once a week.

I knew all of them and they were big old chunks of the state.

I'm from Cheshire County, like the Cheshire cat.

Lindsay and Chad has guessed 97,843.

Joe Dean Hinkle has thrown in his guess on YouTube, 120.

Again, it looks like Kentucky like Ohio County looks like Ohio.

Yeah.

So in New Hampshire, we have Coos County, Grafton County, Carroll County, Belknap County, Merrimack County, Sullivan County, Stratford County, Rockingham County, Hillsborough County and Cheshire County.

So I'm going to be in my glass house for a second because there's some real names of Kentucky counties.

And they were, you know, they did not want to close the Unity School.

They did not want to send their kids to Marlow, for example, which is in Cheshire County.

And I've been at several meetings, school meetings, as well as school board meetings.

And finally, I think the fact at the time, Unity was an SAU-6, along with Claremont and Croydon.

In my opinion, education is important.

It's the way we tax in New Hampshire, property wealth.

in especially in in our area property poor communities uh communities and it's also frankly the rust communities at one time in the 60s a lot of our plants they helped pay a share of those property whether it was claremont joy in claremont or uh spring and i'm using maybe vermont but in other words the property uh the blue collar communities whether it's troy and cheshire county claremont and sullivan county are struggling partly because they don't have the large factories like joy dartmouth woolen uh i believe it's coy paper that have all gone of business tambrads and they not only employed workers but they helped pay a fair share of property taxes joy didn't like it by the way they wanted to eat one of the reasons they threatened i've heard stories because they didn't like their property tax burden but that's the price of being a company in claremont right And that helped, it balanced it a little bit.

It wasn't as big a problem.