By MAUREEN DOHERTY
NORTH READING – It started as weekly “coffee and conversation” sessions for the town’s veterans at the Senior Center, hosted by the town’s new Veterans Services Officer TJ Tedeschi on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to noon. In just a few short months, a real sense of community and friendship among the veterans has developed.
“The whole purpose of the coffee was to create community. Now these guys are getting there at 9 a.m., before I even get there!” Tedeschi said. “I walk in and there are smiles from all the staff at the Council on Aging and they’re like ‘it’s happening!’ It’s fantastic!”
There are about 500 veterans in town, and since his arrival in September, Tedeschi has made it his mission to provide outreach to as many of them as he can through programs and events that will appeal to a variety of interests and stages of the lives of the veterans.
By mid-January, he had arranged to take about a dozen veterans on the first of what he hopes will be quarterly field trips open to the town’s veterans. Their first excursion was to the American Heritage Museum in Stow, a 66,000 square foot exhibit space where the Jacques M. Littlefield Collection of tanks, armored vehicles and military artifacts has been housed and maintained by the Collings Foundation since 2013.
“This was a telltale for me because remember, we face ghosts, skeletons, demons and monsters with veterans and so some of these veterans don’t leave the town so this (field trip) was big for them,” he said.
For these veterans, most of whom served during the Vietnam era, having their service acknowledged means the world to them, he said.
“Once they were there they realized that healing was occurring and it was incredible to see. We saw that two of our sailors from the Vietnam era were on Great Lakes at the same time,” he said, explaining that Great Lakes was a boot camp in Chicago. “And they live here in town and now these guys are connected.”
The Littlefield collection, according to its website, includes more than 15 “tanks and artifacts that are the only ones on public display in North America. These include: M1A1 Abrams Tank, T-34 Tank, Kommandogerrat 40 German Rangefinder, Leichter Panzerspähwagen SdKfz 222 Armored Vehicle, Matilda MK.II Tank, Jumbo Sherman Tank, IS-2 Tank, Vickers Mk. VI A, Panzer 1 Tank, SCUD B Missile and Launcher, and Ho-Ro mobile artillery.”
The purpose of this museum is to “fully engage people in understanding our turbulent past. In this remarkable place, American history will be explored, studied and most of all, remembered. Through educational interpretation, and a chronologically arranged series of dioramas and exhibits, the American Heritage Museum brings the history of our veterans to life.”
For Tedeschi, a retired Marine, this field trip was “better than the Smithsonian. We were treated like royalty.” Their visit began with lunch in the executive board room followed by visits to various displays, weapons and vehicles on display and interacting with museum staff members whose family members had served in various wars and had personal stories to share about the exhibits.
“It was very emotional for our veterans. There was deep reflection. The camaraderie was incredible. The motivation was high and you could tell that there was an incredible amount of pride in America. They were just so happy to be part of North Reading Veteran Services. We talked about should we have t-shirts and hats made with insignia that denotes us as part of a veterans group, and they were all for it,” he said. “That is something we are going to be working on,” Tedeschi said.
The next field trip on his radar is a visit to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. “There is a museum inside the gate with a curator. When I was a Marine Officer Instructor at Norwich, I brought some of the cadets there who were going into the submarine service. This was not available to everyone, so I am working on getting that access,” he said. He believes about 30 people could attend, so he’d be getting a bus for them.
Tedeschi would also like to host a duck boat tour in Boston exclusively for town veterans. If schedules can be accommodated, he’d like to invite back the comedian who entertained the veterans at the first veterans breakfast he had hosted last November at the Moose. She was both a veteran and a former duck boat tour driver, so he sees it as a natural fit. “It would be a lot of fun,” he believes.
In between these quarterly events, he also plans to host more social events such as veterans community breakfasts affectionately nicknamed “S*** on a Shingle” from their mess hall days. Their most recent breakfast on Feb. 20 was well attended.
They’ve also started a book club through the DOD. “If you have a VA identification card you can get onto this virtual site and have full access to the virtual library,” he said. Veterans are able to download the books for free.
He has also teamed up with Senior Center Director Kim Manzelli with a goal of bridging the technical divide for veterans and seniors by having local student volunteers teach them how to use devices like iPads and get them engaged in social media. “Potentially, through my office, I’d like to put iPads in the hands of seniors in an effort to prevent senior loneliness and close the ‘tech gap’ for them. Loneliness needs to be a thing of the past in 2025,” he said.
Continuous outreach efforts
While the coffees have been effective in reaching an older generation of veterans, most of whom are retired or semi-retired, Tedeschi also knows that there is a need to provide outreach to the younger veterans as well, most of whom he says just want to blend in with the crowd. He hopes to reach some of them by organizing events such as a 5K Veterans Road Race that would also serve as a means of raising funds for local veterans services while bringing veterans together with the broader community.
Tedeschi recently joined the Reading Rotary Club and is getting involved with the Reading-North Reading Chamber of Commerce, which is hosting a WinterFest in Reading square next Thursday evening. He plans to have a Veterans information booth at that event to provide visibility for the office of veterans services for those who attend.
“My ultimate goal is I want to work to build a discretionary fund for my department and build my own building, run it like a USO and have guys come in where there’s couches and pool tables and they can decompress,” Tedeschi said.
“I can do my job and have volunteers and TVs, and they can get away from their house because some people are still at war with themselves,” he said. “I want to put ‘communication’ back in ‘community.’ I want to put people in the same room. Covid took that away from us.”
If there is someone who could achieve such a goal, even in these budgetary times, it would be Tedeschi. He has always been highly motivated and goal-oriented. “I just knew personally at 6 years old that I wanted to be a Marine and I never wavered off of it, ever. That was always my plan. I never had a Plan B. At 14, I walked down to the Post Office to join with a recruiter that drove me home. At 17, I raised my hand, at 18, I was living in Japan. And then I retired at 39, and I turned 50 in May. It’s been good. I am really doing my dream job taking care of veterans. It worked out.”