One Man’s Treasure
At the corner of Weed Road in Hartland, a white house has caved in and trees are growing over an old mobile home. There are mattress springs lying on the grass, an old school bus, numerous mobile trailers and at least 20 vehicles sitting on the two-acre lot. These are Fred Coley’s deals. Decades worth.
They’ve almost cost him everything.
Coley, 80, is being taken to Superior Court for violating Hartland’s junk ordinance. His fines have accumulated to $39,000 since his first municipal ticket in 2010. The Selectboard is waiting to hear about a court date.
“I’m a reasonable person,” he said. “I know it looks like hell up there.
" I’ve got fencing; I’ve just got to get someone to help me put it up.”
The townspeople have heard it before. The last time Coleystarted to put fencing up, it gave them hope that he was making headway, but it didn’t take long before he started piling on the other side of the fence.
“It’s beyond what’s reasonable,” said Chairman Gordon Richardson of the Selectboard. “We bent over backwards to accommodate and encourage him to clean it up in a nice way, but he’s just not cooperating.”
• Coley was last taken to court over the matter in 1986, but nothing came of it. The town got a judgment against him, Town Manager Bob Stacey said, but the previous Selectboard opted not to pursue Coley’s cleanup aggressively and the judgment expired after eight years.
Residents said the situation has gotten worse.
One neighbor, who wished to be unnamed, built his house five years ago under the assumption that Coley was going to clean his mess. He said the retail value of his home will never be what it should.
“We’ve put a great deal of money into this property and it’s a shame that we wouldn’t be able to recoup money that we’ve invested…One man’s junk is another man’s treasure and (Coley) seems to treasure everything,” he said.
Another neighbor, Nancy Plimpton, said she’s tried to buy things from Coley, but he won’t part with them.
“I don’t know how he gets away with it,” she said. “He doesn’t do anything with (the cars). He just seems to collect and he won’t sell.”
They say another mobile trailer was backed into the lot as recently as two weeks ago.
“That’s just there temporarily,” Coley said. “I’m going to take my belongings out of the blue trailer and clean that out and get rid of that first. That’s not going to stay there.”
• “It’s very hard to get across a person who has this disease,” said Coley’s wife of 57 years, Joyce. “Some people smoke, some people drink alcohol and some people collect. They don’t just want one thing, they want quite a lot of things.”
The Korean War veteran’s always been a wheeler and dealer. Vehicles are his favorite, especially service trucks. He’s got a police/rescue vehicle from the ‘50s. He’ll haggle for just about anything.
“It’s kinda like gambling,” Coley said. “You win some, you lose some. I guess I’m not a fast trader. It comes from the fact that I’ve never had too much money to play with.”
Coley grew up during the Great Depression and learned to save everything because he never knew what he was going to need tomorrow.
“He’s a good person; he’d give you his shirt right off his back,” Stacey said. “He’s just got this little problem.”
• In 1992, Coley held his daughter’s hand as she died. Amber Gray perished nine days after a car accident in Claremont, N.H.
Now he might lose the rest of his children. Some of Coley’s five remaining children haven’t spoken to him since August, and Joyce isn’t sure they ever will. “It hurts my heart,” said Joyce. “It’s a very sad situation. If I could find a way to bring the bond together … maybe if we could all work together and be a family, if he could see the light.” Coley’s kids have tried to help him. They worked out an agreement with the town last summer, but when it came to cleaning, Coley refused.
“I thought about it, I was going to turn the whole thing over to my wife and let them go to it,” said Coley. “Then I thought about it, and I said, ‘That’s not all that fair of a shake. They’re threatening me.’” Coley has survived heartbreak, a war and a quadruple bypass surgery. He’s gotten by with little to nothing most of his life but he’s optimistic that this too shall pass.
“My wife always says, ‘Don’t worry, Fred. It will all work out’ … and it’s true,” he said.
The Coleys don’t have money to hire a lawyer and they can’t pay the $39,000 in fines.
“I think they’re really going overboard,” Joyce said. “I don’t think this is right about them charging us all that money. We do not have that. I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s what’s bothering me. If there could be another way.”
But the town is done being patient. They have told Coley: Clean it or we’ll clean it for you.
He isn’t ready to give in without a fight.
“I’ve paid my dues to society and these people, they want to destroy what will I’ve got and wipe me out and I’m not seeing that,” he said. “I’m not giving in too easily or too quickly...I don’t want to be completely empty-handed.”