SAUGUS — 95-year-old poet, author, and Korean War veteran Tom Sheehan will be named Man of the Year at this year’s annual Founders Day event.
The event, which typically encompasses a street fair including vendors, food carts, games, art sales, and community organization booths, will take place over several blocks near Saugus Town Hall at 298 Central St. from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. This year will mark the second Founders Day in Saugus since it took a two-year hiatus during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the Founders Day Persons of the Year Committee notified Sheehan that it will name him Man of the Year, he has been working on his acceptance speech — a task that might come easy to him as he has written 58 books, several of which are about Saugus and his time growing up in town.
“I just love Saugus. It’s my favorite subject,” Sheehan said. “I don’t think it’s changed much. I can look out my back window and still see trees. Out the other window, I look out into the Iron Works, which is now a national park, and where I worked for parts of eight years.”
Halfway through his 95th year, Sheehan has hundreds of stories published online in journals around the world. Some of his books include “The Great Stand-off at Darby’s Creek,” “Jock Poems and Reflections for Proper Bostonians,” and “The Saugus Book.”
Sheehan credits his prolificity to his cemented writing routine, usually working from 12 to 2 a.m. during the last 31 years he has been retired.
“My habit all that time has been to go to bed at 9 p.m., get up at 12, or whatever time the body says, ‘Get up pal. You’ve got to go get ‘em,’ and work at the machine for two hours,” Sheehan said. “I’ve written an awful lot of good stuff in those two hours. There’s nobody around to bother me. Everybody is asleep.”
Sheehan also co-edited two other books about Saugus with the late John Burns, who served in Saugus High School’s English department for over 40 years and was previously named a Saugus Founders Day Man of the Year. When their books, “A Gathering of Memories” and “Of Time and the River,” were published, they sold over 2,000 copies and donated the revenue to Saugus High School, according to Sheehan.
“The greatest compliment I ever had was from John Burns, who looked up at me as he read one of my articles,” Sheehan said. “He looked me in the eye and said, ‘Tom, Saugus doesn’t know what it has.’ That was the highest compliment of all. He knew what [my writing] said and he knew what it meant.”
Sheehan’s latest book, “Back Home in Saugus” is dedicated to Burns and will release this year.
