WILTON – He works more than 40 hours a week as the Wilton town manager, but Peter Nielsen also has another job. He stores cars and boats for others.
The Winthrop man cleans and winterizes about 65 of them a year.
“It’s nice to have more than one iron in the fire,” Nielsen Monday. “It takes a lot of time in the spring and fall.”
Nielsen, who has been married 30 years to Mary Richards, an educational technician in a Wayne school, also loves to canoe.
On most Sunday mornings from April to December, Nielsen makes a two-hour canoe trip from the family camp on Lower Narrows Pond in Winthrop. Some of it is hiking, he said, as he stops at a store to get a coffee and chat with friends.
During the winter, he enjoys reading nonfiction books such as “1776” by David McCullough. He received a signed copy for Christmas.
Nielsen said he likes to spend time outdoors and at camp and on the lake.
It goes back to his grandfather and spending a lot of time with him in Acton.
Nielsen and Richards raised two daughters, Sarah, 26, who is expecting Nielsen’s first grandchild and applying to medical school, and Hannah, 20, a junior at the University of Maine at Farmington.
Both were given Richards as their last name when they were born because the couple had a deal.
The girls would have a surname of Richards and the boys a surname of Nielsen.
The couple bought Richards’ grandfather’s farm and for about 10 years raised their own food.
Then he got into town affairs, and for the first time in many years, the couple had a garden this summer. They grew squash, green beans, turnips and more.
“The best thing in the whole garden was one meal of lima beans,” he said.
Nielsen’s interest in town affairs is lifelong starting when he was a child when he visited the Cape Elizabeth town manager.
He served on the Winthrop Town Council from 1985 to 1990 and started to take some classes during that time. He went on to become the Clinton town manager from 1990 to the end of 1994.
He discovered he had a brain tumor that year, he said, and had it removed. It was one of those significant life milestones, he said.
He took a year off from town management to drive a tractor-trailer, something he always wanted to do.
His wife “indulged me that year. I enjoyed that a lot,” he said.
But then he returned to town management in 1996 in Wayne before he took Wilton’s management job nearly four years ago.
Though he’s a busy man, Nielsen said, he still does his wood for heating their home though it’s not as encompassing as it used to be.
He used to cut down the wood and drag it out of the woods with a pair of steers and then graduated to dragging it out with a tractor. Now he buys it in 2-foot lengths, and his efforts are concentrated mainly on splitting it and getting it under cover.
“Those are the things I like to do,” he said.
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