Profiles in Belmont: Anne Paulsen

By Elissa Ely

If you walk past Anne Paulsen’s house on certain days, you will notice sheets hanging in the backyard, like neighbors gathering in a friendly kind of way. If a wind is blowing, some drying towel may point its direction. It’s environmental, but also practically driven: Anne has never bought a dryer.

Her parents were not conservationists or even drawn to the great outdoors, but when Anne was five and growing up in West Roxbury, her father sold the family car to support the war effort. Afterwards, they walked almost everywhere (“It was a long trip to Dorchester,” she remembers). Summer was an exception. Carless neighborhood kids would ride the five-cent subway, bus, and trolley to Revere Beach. While they swam, Anne’s mother and a friend lounged watchfully on the shore, smoking cigarettes in a daring and feminist fashion.

It was a childhood full of reading—“If my mother said we shouldn’t read something, we ran to find it”—and doing: roller-skating, biking, those long involuntary walks, and, eventually, skiing. This led to the sport she still loves, as well as the husband she met skiing in Maine (and still loves, too). It also led to living in Belmont; her husband Fred, born and raised here, was serving on the School Board. A local address was necessary.

There was less wildlife on the streets back then. The unwelcome turkeys, more unwelcome coyotes, and most unwelcome rabbits now roaming town lived in undisturbed niches. Belmont was politically conservative, but neighbors were collegial. One was a truck company dispatcher, another a college professor, and older widows were on call for babysitting. Neighbors are still collegial. Anne recently forgot to turn off the coffeemaker, and a friend ran across the street and did it for her. 

Activism began early in her Belmont life. When the Paulsens first moved to town, the head of the highway department was not a conservationist. He was “prone to asphalting over green spaces to increase parking.” Yet there were no curbs along School Street, in spite of racing children and reckless traffic. Anne and another mother lobbied the Board of Selectmen. Curbstones were installed.Still, it would be wrong to say she leapt into a political career. Like her mother, Anne started as a teacher, writing a play for third graders that opened just as its lead contracted chicken pox. And like unsung women in most communities, she became an imperative volunteer: organizing sing-alongs for children, editing a newsletter for the Fair Practice Committee (now Belmont Against Racism), joining the MWRA. She left teaching after her first child, but in 1976, now the mother of four, she ran for the Belmont School Committee. Nine years later, worried about the fiscal impacts of Proposition 2½, she was elected as the first woman to serve on the Board of Selectmen . . . immediately rendering the name a misnomer. 

By the time she ran for Massachusetts House Representative in 1992, she understood a great deal about municipal government and education, water issues, and local aid. Nonetheless, her committee assignments were transportation, human resources, and criminal justice. “In a way, even though I was 57, I set out blindly into state politics,” she says. “It was a steep learning curve about what happens when women are poor. We ask them to find a place to live, a job, day care, mental health help, and never to miss an appointment with the welfare department. These women’s lives are in turmoil.”

Over the next 14 years, she took on aspects of welfare reform. Educational and vocational training were substituted for job requirements; funding for those with mental health problems was protected. The woman who walked everywhere (and biked for many years to the State House) was in motion. “You have to keep after it all the time, to relieve some of the burden,” she explains. “There are big pictures and there are details. You need people who look at the details.”

Attentiveness extended beyond women’s issues. One Christmas Eve, Anne and a legislator colleague traveled to Walpole prison (now MIC-Cedar Junction). A legal aid attorney was worried for the safety of his client, who had vanished from view. The two women spent the night searching for the prisoner, to the sorrow of various children waiting back home for their holiday.

They found him.

In the House, she co-authored ambitious bicycling legislation. State highway crews now need to include bike riders and pedestrians in the design and construction of every new project. Meanwhile, in Belmont, she advocated for bike lanes on Concord Avenue. “People were aghast and thought the traffic would be worse,” she says calmly, “but we did it anyway, and it has survived.”

Even in retirement, she is compelled by local environmental issues (not that volunteers ever retire). Belmont struggles with increasing traffic and construction. “I’ve watched our green space diminish slowly but surely,” she says. “Inch by inch, the green space goes.” 

She cheers on attempts to preserve conservation land. Rock Meadow is one place not free from concern. Its paths are widening with foot use, “and the place is beginning to look care-worn.” Other cheering includes protecting Clay Pit Pond and supporting Mass Audubon’s Habitat’s efforts to maintain itself. In 2012, still a devout pedestrian, she co-created a Walking Map of Belmont (available on the town website at bit.ly/BCF-Walk-Map). One favorite route runs up Old Concord Road to the Highland Cemetery and Lone Tree Hill. Huffing will be involved.

Being outdoors also continues, and not only for the laundry. Anne plays tennis a few times a week, which leaves a supply of balls to throw at rabbits and gophers in her perennial garden. A broken femur on the court two years ago ended bike-riding, but not cross-country skiing at Fresh Pond. She remains in motion.

In many ways—environmentally, politically, racially, socially—we live in disheartening times. But approach someone who has never stopped trying to relieve burdens, who takes on the details, and ask why she persists. “To be a person who can think and do and not be afraid is a gift,” Anne says in her even, invaluable way. “I have nine lovely grandchildren, and I’m hopeful we’ll have a country that provides them those opportunities.” 

Three words follow: “I like life.”

Elissa Ely is a community psychiatrist.