Hi. I’m Dan. That’s me, second from left. We’re all dressed up because it’s Easter Sunday! Our grandmother makes our clothes all by herself. Her name is Beatrice Pimentel. She and my grandfather came here from Portugal a long time ago.
We live at 93 Cambridge Street, on a big farm. It starts near Arlington Road and goes almost all the way to the old white church Simonds Park, and all the way over to Stony Brook Road, almost.
We made one of our buildings into the town’s first gas station. But now we changed it into a regular house. That’s my mother at the front door.
We have a few buildings from 81 to 91 to 95 Cambridge Street. My grandfather makes cabinets and other nice things in this building. He built it in the 1930s. That’s him near the front steps. He’s little.
The building might not look like much, but he does some really nice work from here. People come here from places I’ve never been to, like Nahant.
Here he is, my grandfather. His name is Ferdinand. He is also Burlington’s building inspector. A company called Raytheon wants to build a big laboratory near the highway, but they can’t do it unless my grandfather says okay. I think that’s funny.
My uncle Leonard does some really nice work from that old building too. He even made the red silk walls in the Raphael Room at the Gardner Museum. That’s a really pretty place.
Here he is, my uncle Leonard, graduating Lexington High School. He went there because Burlington didn’t even have a high school yet.
And here he is again, but now he’s teaching at Burlington High School. That’s him way over on the right. He teaches mechanical drawing.
But time is passing. Things are changing. We’re selling our land to new people. I wonder what will happen to 93 Cambridge Street.
Hi. I’m Ottfried Weisz, but you can call me Fred. I’m from Austria. My parents died in the Holocaust. My sister did too. I almost did too. An Italian guard made sure I got out of the concentration camps. I went to an orphanage in Italy, and then I lived with my cousin Fini. Then I came to the United States in 1955 and joined the Air Force as soon as I could. It was a job and a place to stay, all in one. So here I am.
I met a guy named Eduard Pass at Hanscom Air Force Base in Bedford. We started a business together. It was the Flying A service station in Woburn. Ed and I got really good at fixing Volkswagen and Porsche cars.
We even sold these for a while. It’s a German car called NSU Prinz.
But we decided to take a big chance and open a Porsche and Audi dealership. Major leagues! But Porsche and Audi didn’t want us at first, because Ed and I planned to split our ownership 50/50. They didn’t like a partnership like that. But after a while, they changed their minds and said okay.
Burlington didn’t want a car dealership at 93 Cambridge Street, right near houses on Arlington Road. But after a while, the selectmen changed their minds and said okay. So here we come.
A customer made that double-eagle logo while he was sitting in the service department waiting area, just doodling on scrap paper. We liked it so much, we decided to put it on every car that left the dealership. See it on the front of the car in this ad?
But now a lot of time has passed. The century is coming to a close, and I’m getting old. It’s time for me to retire.
I’m sure my partner, Ed, will carry the torch for a few years and then sell the franchise to someone new. There must be someone who wants 93 Cambridge Street.
Hi. I’m Herbert G. Chambers, but you can call me Herb.
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