The above photo was taken by Glenn Russell of The Burlington Free Press and there is a nice front page article written by Dan D'Ambrosio, Burlington Free Press Staff Writer on the front page of this morning's paper also.
I am sure you old timers will recognize a familiar old gentleman that Jeff speaks about in his interview. Yup!! As a wild guess, I would say the man's name is Albert Rich.
Jeff Davis was 26 years old in 1978, and had just started his own construction business when he found himself in Fairfax, tearing up the town with backhoes to put in a sewer system.
The chairman of the town Selectboard was retired, and spent a lot of time watching Davis work. Davis remembers the selectman as grim-faced and stonily silent about the job being done.
“I wasn’t sure how he was feeling about me,” Davis said in a recent interview in his office on the top floor of The Richardson Building at 2 Church St., Burlington. “He came down one afternoon with that gruff face and said to me and an engineer from a separate firm who was policing us, ‘I want to see you over at my house at five o’clock.’”
Davis dreaded what was ahead of him, but showed up on time with the engineer and was ushered into the house, where he was introduced to the official’s wife before being taken down into the basement.
“I thought he was going to chew us out, but he gets out a bottle of whiskey and says, ‘Here boys, just wanted to have you over for a drink, you’re doing a nice job,’” Davis said.
Davis tells the story to illustrate how much he likes small-town Vermont, even though he has built his real-estate development business mostly in the state’s largest city Burlington and most populous Chittenden County.
