After graduating from the University of Vermont in 1954, Ed Callahan married his wife Theresa that June. She was nine days older than him, born in the same hospital in Montpelier, Vt., and they had started dating in high school.
Callahan was in the ROTC in college, which carried with it a two-year service commitment that he spent serving on an armored personnel carrier in Nuremberg, Germany.
“I was a tank commander, so I got to stick my head up through the opening,” he said. “Things were pretty quiet. They weren’t all that rugged, so to speak.”
Theresa accompanied him to Germany, where their daughter Cathleen was born in October 1955.
“It was a busy period of time, no question,” Callahan said.
When Callahan had leave time, he and his family would travel.
“We saw quite a bit of the area, Belgium, France,” he said.
Callahan was discharged in 1956, and upon returning to the United States, he put his college studies in banking, finance and insurance to use working for banks and insurance companies in Vermont, New York and Massachusetts until he and Theresa decided to consider buying an inn.
They realized they probably couldn’t handle running an inn, but instead bought the Village Grocer in Rindge, which they owned from 1976 to 1985. Callahan had been brought up over his father’s grocery store.
“I said, ‘If he can do it, I can do it,” he said.
After selling the store, Callahan worked in real estate at Tieger Realty for 20 years – he joked that “I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up – and he and Theresa lived in Rindge for 40 years before they moved to Scott-Farrar at Peterborough in 2019. Theresa died in February 2021 at the age of 88, and Callahan turns 90 in January.
Callahan commemorated Veterans Day by attending the parade and luncheon in Jaffrey put on by the town, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post No. 5613 and John Humiston Post No. 11 American Legion, where fellow Scott-Farrar resident Sam Zachos is finance officer.
Zachos joined the New Hampshire National Guard as a senior in high school in 1949, and was discharged in June 1992 when he turned 60. He was called to active duty just one time, being sent to Fort Bragg, N.C., during the Berlin Crisis in 1961.
“After we got down there, things quieted down, so we were released after 10 months,” he said.
As part of his New Hampshire Guard duties, Zachos was called to the protests at the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, where he worked as a food service sergeant for the Guard members and police officers on the scene.
“We were feeding 800 people three big meals a day,” he said.
Zachos was also called on during the Manchester firefighters strike in 1978, working in food service and fighting fires, with training in between. Not only did he learn to slide down the pole, he learned the preparation required to respond to a fire alarm, including having clothes ready in case a call came while they were sleeping.
“You had to move fast,” he said. “You hop out of bed, put your clothes on as quick as you can and you were out of there.”
In the mid-1980s, Zachos’ service took him to Honduras.
“I wasn’t supposed to go, because there wouldn’t be any cooking,” he said, but he asked if he could go to do a different job, and wound up working with carpenters who were expanding a hospital.
From the hospital, Zachos could see the local clinic, to which people would walk a mile for treatment and then come to the hospital if necessary. He said the experience showed how fortunate people are who live in the United States.
“It really meant a lot that we could help them,” he said.
Zachos recently celebrated his 90th birthday with a party at the Jaffrey American Legion. He said Veterans Day means a lot to him, as does when people see the veterans plates on his car and thank him for his service.
“I see so much of that now,” he said.