Waldo Nason Is Retired, But Not Really-July 29, 1975

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The official Norwood street list says Waldo H. Nason, sixty-seven, of 37 Gay St. is retired. But do not you believe it. The peripatetic Waldo H. Nason did give up his job as an electronics engineer with Raytheon three years ago, but he has been keeping busy ever since, as an unpaid but active radio ham, politician, town meeting member, and now as a bus driver.

He took over this month as driver of the council on aging’s mini-bus for senior citizens, a job which keeps him hopping five days a week, shuttling older members of the community around town in a nine-seat Volkswagen van. Driving the ten-year-old vehicle is no problem. Waldo H. Nason handled farm equipment as a boy in New Hampshire and Waltham, and more recently he has driven his daughters’ stick-shift cars. The one problem with the job so far, he says, is that there is too much time between runs, time in which he would like to do more than sit around and drink coffee and eat doughnuts.

He hopes to work out a system whereby he can fill in the spare minutes with work—either paperwork from home or light maintenance to the old bus, which has logged more miles itself than anyone is sure of, since the odometer gave out some time ago. The job he now holds became vacant early this month when Bill Peterson, a twenty-two-year-old former marine, quit over differences with the new director of the senior citizens’ drop-in center, Margaret Oberlander. Bill Peterson had been employed under the federally subsidized Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which paid him a salary for driving the mini-bus. Waldo H. Nason, however, is an advocate of more volunteerism in civic affairs, and he is driving the bus for nothing.

I believe in what Kennedy said about doing for the government rather than the government doing for you, he remarked the other day. A Republican and a fiscal conservative, Waldo H. Nason has long been known as a regular gadfly at town meetings, scrutinizing municipal budgets more closely than many of his colleagues. When the School Committee held its annual budget hearing before town meeting last month, Waldo H. Nason was one of only three taxpayers who showed up.

He is also a member of the GOP‘s town committee, and in 1972, was an unsuccessful candidate for state representative, running against then-incumbent David C. Ahern. Last year, he actively backed the candidacy for that same office of David Boch, likewise unsuccessfully. When he is not watching the government or driving the bus, he is often busy as a radio officer in the town Civil Defense organization or using his own ham radio equipment. After his retirement from Raytheon, he even enlisted in an engineer’s job shop, hiring out his services to firms during peak business periods. In that capacity, he even spent several months back in his old department at Raytheon. I don’t have time weighing heavily on my hands, he notes. I can find more things to do usually than I have time for.

Archival Note: This article has been dynamically reconstructed from the original public record print archives of the Patriot Ledger