Conrad J. Wells Writes Fourth And Final Memory Installment

Randolph native Conrad J. Wells has published Volume Four of his autobiographical series, “A Vermont Son,” and was in town this week to leave off copies at the Cover to Cover Bookshop and at Beacon Printing.

Wells, who now lives in Navarre, Florida told The Herald that the fourth book will be the last one.

He had expected to publish a fifth volume, but instead he telescoped the 40 years from 1963 to 2003 into a single volume and is calling it quits.

Like the first three volumes, Volume Four is filled (all 283 pages) with dozens of recollections and anecdotes of a hardworking but enjoyable life. The recollections are sometimes as short as a paragraph, sometimes as long as a few pages, informally told with humor and perspective.

Most of the period Wells writes about in Volume Four took place in Massachusetts, as Wells moves from job to job in Orleans, Newton, Stoneham, Wilmington, and Northboro.

But the narrative returns to Randolph several times—including, for instance the time he started a real estate company, STIRCO, made from the names of its founders, Stan Gould, Irwin Lindquist, and Conrad Wells.

One of the features of the book that took the most time, Wells noted, is an appendix listing almost 500 central Vermont residents he had been acquainted with, most of them from Randolph, who have died, along with their year of death.

“I did decide to include the list because I’m interested in keeping the names around as long as possible,” Wells writes.

And indeed, those names—and much—are kept wonderfully alive in these four volumes of Conrad Wells’ “A Vermont Son.”